The Assassin’s Gentleman

di Pete Cossaboon (Autore)

Pete Cossaboon, 2026

The Assassin's Gentleman is a dark, sensual literary noir about desire, secrecy, power, and the terrible cost of being truly seen. Alec Reed has built his life around caution. In Washington, D.C., caution is not fear. It is survival. He knows how to read silences, how to notice what powerful people leave unsaid, and how to move through rooms where secrets are managed with polished language and locked doors. He is lonely, careful, competent, and resigned to a life that is safe enough to endure. Then he meets Nico. At Lark, a loud gay bar glowing with blue light and broken neon, Nico appears like a man stepping out of an old noir film: beautiful, watchful, dangerous in ways Alec does not yet understand. Their first conversation is strange enough to be memorable. Their second meeting, at an old movie house, feels too perfectly tailored to Alec's hidden longings. Nico notices what others miss. He removes Alec's glasses before kissing him and places them back afterward with devastating care. Alec knows something is off. He knows danger when it enters a room. But he also knows what it feels like to be wanted by someone who seems to see the secret ache beneath his composure. When a high-profile government figure is shot dead, Alec notices a grainy suspect image that looks unsettlingly like the man who has just entered his life. He tells himself it means nothing. He tells himself desire has made him irrational. Then Nico appears inside Alec's locked condo, having charmed his elderly neighbor into letting him in, cooking the steaks Alec had bought for a dinner that was never supposed to happen. There are tulips on the table, jazz in the room, and a gun on the counter. From that moment forward, Alec's life begins to come apart. Nico is not merely dangerous. He is connected to something far larger and uglier than Alec first imagines: a hidden network of protected men, powerful officials, financiers, judges, celebrities, philanthropists, fixers, and private operators who have spent decades turning money and influence into immunity. Nico has been used by them, shaped by them, and weaponized by them. He has killed. He has vanished. He has survived by never returning to the same room twice. But Alec becomes the one room he goes back to. What begins as seduction becomes exposure. What begins as fear becomes obsession. Alec is horrified by what Nico has done, yet unable to reduce him to a monster. Nico, in turn, discovers that Alec is the one person he cannot treat as collateral. His attachment becomes his weakness. His weakness becomes his downfall. To protect Alec from the powerful men circling him, Nico makes himself visible, cooperates with the hidden machinery of the state, and gives up the names that begin bringing untouchable men to ruin. The cost is everything. Alec is forced out of Washington, offered silence, money, and exile in exchange for disappearing from the life he once knew. Nico is taken into a classified prison system, too dangerous to release, too useful to name, and too compromised to survive in public. Before Alec is sent away, he is granted one final visit in a clean, windowless room where there is no glamour left: no blue light, no gun, no flowers, no performance. Only two men divided by a bolted table, the truth between them, and a love neither can make innocent. Years later, in a remote apple-growing valley in South Tyrol, Alec has built a quiet life restoring an old stone farmhouse and tending a neglected orchard. The work has changed him. The seasons have weathered him. Peace has come slowly, not because he has forgotten Nico, but because memory no longer arrives only as pain.

• Autore: Pete Cossaboon
• Anno edizione: 2026
• Editore: Pete Cossaboon
• Formato: EPUB2 con DRMFREE
• Lingua: Inglese
• Compatibilità: Tutti i dispositivi (eccetto Kindle)
• Layout: Reflowable
• EAN: 9798235314214