Soldier and the Flame

Naples, 1903. The city breathes through narrow alleys and the daughters of powerful men do not choose their own fates — they are chosen for them.Fiamma Esposito has spent nineteen years inside the gilded cage of her father's palazzo in the Quartieri Spagnoli, the most dangerous and beautiful neighborhood in the most dangerous and beautiful city in Italy. Don Aldo Esposito is a man of considerable power in the Camorra, Naples' ancient criminal brotherhood, and Fiamma is his greatest asset — clever, educated in secret, burning with a rebellion she has learned to keep carefully hidden. When her father announces her engagement to Don Carmine Battaglia, a brutal and calculating boss from Caserta who looks at her the way a man looks at property he has already decided to purchase, Fiamma understands that her window of escape is not merely closing. It has almost closed entirely.Luca Ferrante arrives at the Esposito household as a diplomatic soldier from a neighboring clan — quiet, watchful, dangerous in the specific way of men who notice everything and reveal almost nothing. He did not choose this world so much as fall into it, and he has been carrying, for three years in his coat pocket, an address in New York City and a sum of money he could not entirely explain the purpose of. Until now.What begins as suspicion becomes recognition. What begins as recognition becomes the kind of love that does not ask permission and does not negotiate with the world that forbids it. When Don Carmine's intentions become impossible to ignore, Fiamma and Luca face a choice that will cost them everything they have ever known — their families, their names, their place in the only world that has ever existed for them — in exchange for the terrifying, exhilarating possibility of a life that is entirely their own.From the candlelit libraries and fog-draped alleyways of Camorra-controlled Naples to the rolling deck of an emigrant ship crossing the Atlantic in a March storm, to the noise and chaos and magnificent promise of Ellis Island and the teeming streets of lower Manhattan, The Flame and the Soldier is a story about the price of freedom, the architecture of courage, and two people who discover, somewhere in the middle of an ocean, that the only cage left is the one they choose to leave behind.Dark. Forbidden. Irrevocably, sweetly romantic... written for readers who want their love stories to cost something.