Broken Whispers

Broken Whispers is the second novel in Neva Altaj's Perfectly Imperfect series, a run of interconnected dark mafia romances in which every book stands alone and every book ends happily. When the Italian and Russian crime families move to merge their worlds, the alliance is sealed the old-fashioned way: a marriage between the Bratva's most feared enforcer and the most beautiful woman in the Italian mafia.

Mikhail has watched Bianca from a distance for years, wanting her and never expecting to have her, and he braces for the moment she sees past the scars to the man his reputation was built on. Bianca agrees to the marriage to protect her sister, walking into it expecting a vicious, cold-hearted savage — and finds instead someone she has no intention of walking away from. What follows is less a war between families than a slow dismantling of the walls Mikhail has spent a lifetime building, told from both their points of view.

Altaj pairs a scarred, fiercely possessive hero with a heroine who does not speak, and the book leans on that contrast throughout: a beauty-and-the-beast arranged marriage with an age gap, forced proximity, open-door steamy scenes, no cheating, and a guaranteed HEA. Published in 2022 and later recorded for Podium Audio by Allyson Voller and Gregory Salinas, it has since appeared in German, Dutch, Italian and Portuguese editions.