Veil of Dust by Sarah Sterling

VEIL OF DUST

I don’t beg devils for mercy.

I look them in the eye—and make them bleed.

New Orleans isn’t a city. It’s a graveyard of secrets, dressed in jazz and fog.

I built a life behind locked doors and whispered warnings—running a bar where no one asks questions and pulling tarot cards that never lie.

I’ve stayed quiet. Careful.

But the past doesn’t stay buried.

It digs itself up—and knocks.

Tiziano Valtieri walks in with blood on his hands and a ledger full of ghosts.

A broker for a criminal network no one survives.

A man who watches like he’s already calculated how you’ll fall.

He doesn’t want me.

He needs me—to clean his money, to keep his secrets, to tether him to something that still feels real.

But survival comes with strings.

And Tiziano doesn’t tie knots—he wraps chains.

Now the walls are closing in.

My bar isn’t safe.

The swamp is shifting.

And every move I make traps me deeper in a game where power is currency, loyalty is leverage, and love?

That’s just the prettiest lie of all.

This isn’t a romance.

It’s a reckoning.

Because I know what happens to women who let their guard down.

They disappear.

They die.

Or worse—they fall for men like him.

But I didn’t crawl out of the ashes just to burn for someone else.

I’m not here to be saved.

I’m the one who survives.

And if anyone tries to break me?

They’ll learn—

Dust doesn’t settle.

It suffocates.