Title

K E E P

H I M

L I K E

S E C R E T S

—

Jessica Gadziala

Rights

Copyright © 2025 Jessica Gadziala

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author's intellectual property. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for brief quotations used in a book review.

"This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental."

NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s exclusive rights under copyright (Copyright © 2025 Jessica Gadziala), any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited.

“Creativity should not be AI generated. As such, each word of this book was crafted with a human heart, mind, and hands.”

Title

K E E P

H I M

L I K E

S E C R E T S

CHAPTER ONE

Saff

“This better be good,” I said, slamming the door to the boss’s penthouse with more force than necessary, making it rattle the jamb as I stalked inward. “Kalinda was just about to disembowel the man who’d terrorized her as a kid.”

“Who the fuck is Kalinda?” Renzo, my boss, asked the other capos gathered around.

“And then,” I went on, “presumably, she and Link are going to fuck in the man’s blood for a solid twenty pages. And you’re keeping me from that.”

“You’re upset about a book?” Renzo asked.

“Not just any book. This has been the slowest of slow burns I’ve ever read. Six books. Six for them to get to this point. And I waited a year for this one to come out. So, yes, I’m upset about a book. So this better be worth my time.”

“This is probably the part where I’m supposed to remind you that I’m the boss and you work for me,” Renzo said, reaching up to rub the back of his neck. “But (A) I know that won’t work on you, and (B) my wife would probably side with you and remind me that she once forbade me to speak to her for a full sixteen hours while she binge-read that orc book.”