The Godfather meets West Side Story in this twisty, darkly romantic thriller from New York Times bestselling author Christina Dodd. A dangerous blast sends a girl into hiding to escape a deadly family feud…
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Christina Dodd’s Girl Anonymous, which is out March 11th 2025.
As a child, Maarja Daire saw her mother ignite an explosion that killed vengeful mob boss Benoit Arundel—and herself—to save Maarja’s life. Maarja’s been on the run ever since…fleeing from intimacy, from love, from consequences.
Now an adult, Maarja hides in plain sight as a fine arts mover, transporting priceless belongings. Work for a new client brings her to the mansion where the fateful blast from her childhood occurred. There she meets Dante, the ruthless, scarred and brooding Arundel family boss. He watches her with dark intent…but does he remember her? Will he use her to take revenge for his father’s death? A chance turn of events earns her his trust, when she courageously leaps into flames to rescue his mother. And what happens between them in the darkness sets their worlds on fire, as Maarja recklessly abandons her lifelong caution and self-imposed isolation.
Dante calls the urgency between them Fate. Maarja denies him, struggles against his domination and fights the slow erosion of her resistance. When he vows to end the ancient feud, his hidden enemies seize the opportunity to destroy him and the woman he will do anything to protect. Bound together by destruction, passion and destiny, Dante and Maarja must navigate uncharted depths of betrayal and loss, to create a new beginning…before the flames of the vendetta consume them.
One
San Francisco, California
This morning
In the fourth floor library of the Arundel mansion
“Interesting piece, isn’t it?”
Maarja Daire of Saint Rees Fine Arts Movers didn’t start at the sound of the man’s voice. When handling a painting by one of the Three Kingdom masters, or an antique statue raised from the depths of the Aegean Sea, or this miniature pitcher of fragile red glass, one did not physically startle.
Yet she realized how deeply she’d fallen into her vision of the past, for how else had this man managed to position himself close enough behind her without her hearing his approach? This man, of all people?
She swiveled to face him. “You are…?” She did know who he was: scarred, unsmiling, pulling darkness around him like the black Armani jacket he wore with his blue jeans and worn white running shoes.
“I’m Dante Arundel. We spoke on the phone.”
“Yes.” His voice was distinctive: slightly accented, deep, and so soft she should have had to strain to hear him, yet so resonant she heard every word inside her head, as if a specter of the past communicated through a bond so ancient she had thought—hoped—it was broken. “You’re Mrs. Arundel’s son?”
“I am. Pronounce your first name for me.”
She blinked at him, drawing on her acting skills to subdue the primal chill that warned of imminent danger. “I introduced myself on the phone.”
“I like to be sure.”
Strangers frequently asked how to pronounce her name. But he hadn’t asked, he had demanded. Based on nothing more than that, she diagnosed him as an obnoxious bastard, intent on throwing her off-balance. Ridiculous on her part, but when a woman worked in this field, obnoxious bastards proliferated like the weeds in her garden.
The question was, why did he want her off-balance? Was he like this with every woman he encountered?
Or did he recognize her? “My name is Mar-ja.”
“It’s Estonian for Mary.”
“Yes.” She smiled again, pleasantly, and thought, If you know that, you could have found the pronunciation online.
He smiled, too, the sharp, toothy smile of a circling shark. “Is your family Estonian?”
“My mother liked the name.” Not an answer, but a mind-your-own-business nudge.
She didn’t think he’d take the hint, but he followed with, “I appreciate the care you use to move my mother’s possessions.”
She gazed down at the tiny pitcher she cradled in one palm. “That’s my job.”
“You’ve worked for her before.”
Annoying man; he knew very well she had. “Saint Rees Fine Arts Movers is the best fine arts movers in Northern California, and your mother demands the best for her possessions.”
“You’re the best at Saint Rees Fine Arts Movers?”
“Yes.” The job had landed in her lap in the summer after her high school junior year, and Saint Rees had quickly recognized her spookily accurate talent for antiquities.
“You’re not modest,” Dante said.
“I know my worth.” She’d had to pass inspection with Mrs. Rees, the power behind the throne, and a deal was struck. She’d worked for Saint Rees Fine Arts Movers in the summers while attending college, and they contributed financing toward her studies. After five years, she still had her instinctive perceptions about authenticity, a new art degree that gave her cred with the clients, and she loved her wildly lucrative job so much she’d brought her foster sister Alex onto the team.
“You’re in charge?” Dante was like a dog gnawing a bone.
“Yes.” She was done with his unwarranted interrogation. “And yes, this is an interesting piece. One of the earliest works from the Italian island of Murano, stopper missing, assumed broken, its contents sealed with wax.”
“That’s a lot to know by casual observation.”
“I don’t observe casually.” She observed with her vision, of course, but also through the past that whispered as it sank into her skin and shrieked in her nightmares. He didn’t observe casually, either, for his knowing gaze flicked between her face and the pitcher cupped in her hand. “In my family, there’s some discussion about whether or not the Bouteille de Flamme is genuine.”
She nestled it into the tissue paper, then surrounded it with enough bubble wrap to fill the box. “It’s genuine.”
“You know this because…?”
She taped the box closed and her fingers lingered as she placed it in her staging area. “When one often handles antiquities, one develops a sense about them.”
“Does one?”
“Yes. One does.” She grinned at him and thought, I’m still skinny, but I’m way taller and twenty-three years ago for Christmas I got my two front teeth…recognize me now?
He didn’t say anything. Or rather—he didn’t admit anything.
Good. Mrs. Arundel didn’t say anything. She didn’t admit anything. Maybe, hopefully, neither one of them knew anything. Maarja had put great effort into being nondescript. She liked to think she’d succeeded, and if she hadn’t quite…she could distract Dante. “Almost everything in this library is genuine.” At his quick critical glance around, she realized probably she shouldn’t have said it quite like that.
“What’s not genuine?” He shot words at her like bullets.
Nope, definitely shouldn’t have said that. She gazed around the airy, gracious, classically decorated library with its first editions sheltered in locked glass cases, its artfully lit old master paintings, BCE vase fragments and statues. “The Chinese scroll.”
“Damn it,” he said without heat. His face had not so much been formed; instead his sharp cheekbones and thin nose looked as if they’d been carved from some cruel and ancient stone. The artist that carved that crook in his nose and the long scar that slashed his forehead and cheek had been intent on warning all who viewed him that he was a survivor, a man to be feared.
“You acquired it?”
“I bought it,” he corrected. “From a highly respected auction house.”
“Mistakes are made.”
“Not when you sell to me.” Behind his brown eyes, so dark they were almost black, she caught glimpses of gold, as if molten lava emotions moved beneath his surface. It would be nice to think so; that would make him almost human.
Perhaps better to backpedal. “I might be wrong.”
“Are you?”
“No.” Surely he wasn’t the type to kill the messenger.
“I’ll have it reappraised. At the same time, I’ll have my appraisers reappraised.”
Her gaze dropped to his hands. Broad-palmed, long-fingered, big-boned. They could form a fist that would take a man down with a single punch. More than that, he sported the ridged calluses of a dedicated self-defense practitioner. The only thing that kept a person working at the sport was a respect for its real-life potential. She knew; she had a few calluses herself.
Dante looked toward the door and called, “Nate.”
The biggest man she’d ever seen stepped into the room. In his dark suit, white shirt, and nondescript tie, he looked like one of the Aryan villains in an old Bond movie, exaggerated in his bulk, his height, his stolid lack of expression. She would bet he had calluses all over his body.
“Did you hear what Maarja said?” Dante asked.
Nate nodded, a stiff movement that barely stirred his muscled neck.
“Check on it, will you?”
Nate put his hand to his earpiece and stepped back into the elevator foyer. She heard a low rumble that might have been an approaching earthquake but was probably his voice.
She hoped Dante Arundel’s appraisers survived; cheating him, or even not giving his purchases the care he required, would be a risky business, as she was sure they knew.
She moved farther into the room, into the corner where five large paintings and three eighteen-inch-tall statues waited to be boxed. She ran the tape measure on them; the dimensions matched up with those Dante Arundel had sent. She checked them again, because one didn’t make mistakes when handling priceless art, and sent Alex a text instructing her on the sizes of the packaging for the larger pieces. She got a thumbs-up text and 5 minutes.
Arms folded, Dante watched as she started the process over again with a Shakespeare Second Folio and a framed Picasso sketch.
She wondered if he intended to shake her composure with his silence and his judgmental gaze, and she wanted to tell him to knock it off. She’d had far more imposing scrutiny from far more imposing watch groups.
She didn’t say a word. It was his stuff, or rather his mother’s, and if he wanted to observe, he could. Probably he hadn’t identified her; in her loose white coveralls with her name stitched on, her white running shoes and her short dark red hair covered in a blue bandanna, she was a far cry from the little girl wearing her Sunday dress and jumping over the black tiles onto the white tiles, using the parquet floor as if it were a giant hopscotch.
She pushed her glasses down her nose to read the tape measure and jot them down, and when she was done, again checked them against the measurements Dante Arundel had sent.
He unfolded his arms and plucked her glasses off her nose, a presumptuous move that left her startled and blinking. He held them up to the window and squinted through them. “Why do you wear these? There’s no correction.”
“Blue-light protection.”
He glanced at her tape measure and her pen and paper. “From what? You’re low-tech.”
“Blue light on my phone. My tablet.” She nodded at her devices. “I’m back and forth all day. It’s easier to wear them than to not have them when I need them.”
“The glass is so lightly tinted, I can hardly see it.”
“My eye doctor prescribed them. One assumes he knows what he’s doing.” A lie; she’d bought them online, but she itched to slam Dante Arundel down.
“Hm.” He placed the black frames on the side table and viewed her face as if he were appraising a piece of art, with sharp interest but no emotion. “Your eyes are an unusual color. Violet?”
“Just blue.” She heard the elevator door ding and hoped to hell it was Alex.
It was. Alex walked through the library door pushing the luggage cart piled with the boxes, paper, and bubble wrap. She kept glancing behind with an alert, wary expression; none of the company’s movers related well to burly men in dark suits who loitered in foyers, but Alex more than most.
She saw Dante, appraised him in a single glance, and said, “Ah.”
He stepped forward. “I’m Dante Arundel.”
Alex shook hands with him. “A pleasure.” Obviously, it was not.
Together she and Maarja began the arduous process of packing the larger paintings and highly breakable pieces of art.
“The truck is in the drive? Unguarded?” Dante let it be known he was critical.
Alex’s gaze sliced toward Maarja. She seldom spoke to the clients; tact was a skill she’d not chosen to learn, and the extremely wealthy expected to be treated with the delicacy of their art objects.
However, few of their wealthy clients irritated and presumed quite like Dante, and Maarja had to consciously regulate her tone to answer him. “A van. We have a van. Serene is with it. She’ll be fussing with the contents, making herself appear busy to any eyes that might be observing, but in fact she’s our lookout and security.”
“She’s armed?” Dante asked.
“We’re all armed, but while we’re in a safe environment—your estate—Alex and I concentrate on packing and transporting to the truck, so while we’re aware of our surroundings, we’re focused on the objects.”
“Three women think they can safeguard treasures worth millions?”
He really needed to watch his attitude.
Not that he would. He was one of those guys, but Maarja wavered between wanting to punch him right between the eyes or ask him, Do you know who I am?
Excerpted from GIRL ANONYMOUS by Christina Dodd. Copyright © 2025 by Christina Dodd. Published by Canary Street Press, an imprint of HTP/HarperCollins.
