Forged in Shadow: A Steamy BWWM Interracial Multicultural Standalone Contemporary Dark Academia Forbidden Romance (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798250329378)

She came to Florence to uncover the truth. She didn't plan on the truth being him.

NAIA
I wasn't supposed to find the locked room.
I was supposed to spend six months restoring masterpieces in a crumbling Italian palazzo, prove I earned my place as the only Black woman in the fellowship, and go home to Brooklyn.
Then my mentor's most famous painting made my skin crawl.
Something underneath the surface. A wrongness nobody else could feel. And when I started pulling at the thread, I found a door that shouldn't exist, a room full of secrets, and ten paintings of me - raw, shaking, desperate - hidden behind a wall in a building that's been keeping secrets for six hundred years.
I should have reported him. I should have walked away.
I didn't.

MATTEO
I've been forging masterpieces since I was nineteen. The art world calls me a genius. My uncle calls me useful. Nobody knows the truth.
Then she touched one of my paintings and her face changed - and I knew I was done.
I should keep her away from what's hidden inside these walls. My uncle says handle it. Control her. Distract her.
Instead I'm painting her at midnight with shaking hands and no one watching. And every canvas is a confession I can't take back.
She's getting closer to everything. The forgeries. The fraud. The family. And I'm running out of rooms to hide in.

One of them restores what's broken. The other one breaks what's beautiful. In a palazzo full of lies, the most dangerous thing they can do is trust each other.

Forged in Shadow is a book in the Ivory & Obsession dark academia romance series. Standalone HEA. Gothic setting. Morally grey hero. Heroine with a backbone of steel. He falls first - and harder. Explicit steam.

Author: N. Viktoria
ISBN-13: 9798250329378
Publisher: Independently Published
Language: English
Published: 03/01/2026
Pages: 276
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.74lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.69d