Mafia Saved Me, The

Heavily sheltered, nineteen-year-old Victoria Rodriguez is excited to explore the city of love and art with her school. Her trip to Paris becomes dangerous after she and her cousin Sofia cross paths with Adriano, the leader of Europe’s largest sex trade organization. Victoria quickly finds herself in a position she had never expected to be put in. Her decision to go to Paris comes with more baggage than she had intended. She must now try to fight and survive the abuse and the physical and mental pains that come from being kidnapped and sold into sex trafficking.
Leo Bandoni is the Don of the Bandoni Famiglia Mafia in Taormina, Sicily. He’s cold, ruthless, extremely bipolar, and has a profound hatred toward love. But behind the cold façade, there’s a man broken by his past. As a child, Leo watched his mother die in his arms, all because of an unsettled feud between his father, Estephano, and Uncle Marquez. Leo’s uncle, who’s Estephano’s twin brother, is adamant about being Don, even if it means killing his brother, who was given the family business. This hunger for power is so strong that it drives Marquez to do anything and kill anyone who gets in his way, including Leo’s mother, Stephanie Bandoni. Not only does Leo lose his mother, but he watches as his father withers from a broken heart. If this isn’t enough, Leo also watches the painful effects of being raped take over his younger sister, Cleo.
Leo quickly learns that the mafia isn’t a place for the weak, and he’s convinced himself that it’s not a place where love can exist. Especially when his cousin Adriano is set on accomplishing what his father Marquez had started, as well as taking his own revenge on Leo, who killed his father.
It is because of Leo’s family’s downfall and the chaos that is the mafia that Leo has pushed love out of his life for the past twenty-three years, but when a brown-eyed, black-haired Latina by the name of Victoria comes into his life, his morals and feelings toward love and his past are both put to the test when he begins to fall in love with Victoria, who makes him feel something he hadn’t felt in years—hope for a happy future. Leo learns from Victoria’s strength in overcoming her past that there’s more to life after a tragedy.
One danger after another, Victoria finds herself blindly thrown into a new world full of lies, secrets, and family problems. But amidst the world of the mafia, she seems to find love, hope, family, and new friends. As Leo and Victoria work to defeat Adriano and stop the past from repeating itself, they find themselves unable to part with one another, and as their love for each other grows, Leo is proven wrong—something as pure and fragile as love can coexist within the mafia.