- Series
- The Vienna Vows — Book Four of four
- Length
- 105,465 words · 364 pages
- Formats
- EPUB, PDF
- Price
- Free
Book Four · The Vienna Vows
The Gilded Crown
You don’t erase the damage. You gild it.
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He has stood six paces to the left of that church door for twenty years. On the fifth of June he is going to walk through it.
Mila Volkova is writing on squared paper that Arkady Fyodorovich Volkov handed her himself, out of a drawer, in a room he had prepared, in a house on a hill above the Danube.
She has been in it since Tuesday. Nobody has touched her. That is the frightening part.
He does not threaten. He gives her a bench, a lamp, a booklet of gold leaf and three sixteenth-century panels made in a workshop this spring — and one sentence about her brother in Vienna, said once, quite pleasantly, and never repeated. Then he lets her work, because in fourteen months he has never had to ask her for anything twice.
Fourteen months of a man who wanted nothing, and he has been reduced to a man who wants labour. I am going to find out what did that to him, and when I do it will be the thing I use.
So she works. Beautifully, on the first day, before anybody had threatened anybody, because she has never been able to leave a bench alone.
And under the leaf, in a fill nobody will ever look at, she lays the thing that dates the whole fabrication to this spring for anyone who ever brings a blade to it.
Four hundred kilometres away, a man who has spent two decades making certain nothing could ever be taken off him is standing in his kitchen at midnight with a chained gate on a wall in Buda and no arrangement left to make.
He hands a policewoman everything. Then he goes over that wall himself, first, in the dark, up a staircase he has known since he was a boy.
I have never been able to want a thing out loud without first arranging the room it is wanted in. There is no room. There is no arrangement.
What is left after that cannot be arranged either: a grandmother’s letter, written six months early and delivered too late. A priest with a ruined voice who has been leaving a space in a doorway for twenty years. Four old men in a scrapyard. A brother’s name, said out loud, in a building, to a living person.
And a woman with fourteen sheets of paper, a galvanised bucket, and a door six paces away.
What you are getting into
- Captivity
- Rescue — and what comes after
- Grovel and absolution
- Found family
- Guaranteed HEA
- Epilogue one year on
Captivity, retrieval and reunion; an obsessive, dangerous hero who is never a danger to her; a heroine who takes an empire apart from inside a locked room with a scalpel and a jar of red bole; and a marriage that finally gets said out loud, in front of witnesses, with nothing behind it.
Heat: Intimate scenes are frequent, explicit, and on the page, between a consenting married couple.
Ending: Everything is answered. The series ends here, in a guaranteed happily ever after — a crowning, a burned contract, and an epilogue one year on.
Content warnings
On the page: The captivity and imprisonment of the heroine by the antagonist — five days in a locked room, bolted from the outside, in a private house in another country; coerced professional work extracted under a standing threat to her brother’s life; bruising to her arm sustained when she is taken; an armed rescue before dawn, with gunfire, a serious chest wound, blood, and a lasting disability; organised crime and its violence; a coercive interrogation conducted by the love interest that includes an implied threat to another man’s child; the death of a beloved elderly woman in her sleep, and the funeral, grief and reckoning that follow it; survivor’s guilt and a twenty-year refusal of absolution; confession, and an on-the-page absolution; a criminal prosecution, testimony, and an arrest; alcohol; and a pregnancy, announced in the closing pages.
Referenced or off the page: Recounted rather than shown: human trafficking, including victims under twenty and one woman who was eight months pregnant; a sibling’s death by gunfire during a police raid twenty years before the book opens; and the long cultivation of a boy of fourteen by an adult relative for criminal purposes — that grooming is not sexual, no part of it is depicted, and it is described in retrospect by the elderly woman who watched it happen.
The love interest is dangerous. He is never a danger to the heroine. There is no sexual violence in this book, and none by the love interest anywhere in this series. All characters in romantic or sexual situations are adults.
See the full warnings for every book →
That is the whole of The Vienna Vows. Four books, one marriage, and a woman who could not certify one single thing about the man and said yes anyway.
Thank you for standing in the courtyard with him. — Vera Maddox