Illustration of a red-haired woman in black and a dark-haired woman in a leather jacket in a candlelit villa courtyard at night

MATELDA: In Silence We Forgive — Official Book Page

The Matelda Series · Book One

MATELDA

In Silence We Forgive

She was hired to protect the heir to a dying dynasty.
No one told her she would fall for the war.

Begin the story on Amazon ›

★★★★☆ 4.4  ·  Enemies to lovers · Age gap · Forced proximity · Slow burn · HEA

The gates of the Salvatore villa close behind you like a held breath.
Somewhere inside, a woman with copper hair is already deciding
whether you are worth dying for.

For three years, Mia Salvatore ran from the family that made her. Then a car with cut brake lines took her father off a mountain road, and the dynasty called her home to bury him — and to inherit everything he died protecting.

Waiting for her behind the villa walls is Matelda: forty, unreadable, a stranger her father trusted with his life and never explained. She is calm where Mia is fire. Silent where Mia burns. And she has been given one instruction Mia was never meant to hear —

“Keep her alive.
Whatever it costs you.”

What neither of them expects is how quickly whatever it costs starts to mean everything.

“Be afraid,” she told me.
“Be afraid — and stay anyway.”

Matelda · Chapter Nine

Step inside the villa

Meet the House of Salvatore

Every dynasty is a story people tell to keep the fear at bay. Here are the ones who know how it really ends.

The Silence

Matelda

Marble and stillness and jasmine on the air. She answers questions with the ones she does not ask. She has kept the Salvatores’ worst secrets and her own far longer — and the closer Mia gets, the more it costs her to stay unreadable.

“I do not need you to trust me. I need you breathing.”

The Fire

Mia Salvatore

Twenty-four and furious, dragged back to a throne she never wanted, standing over a coffin with her father’s initials still damp on the handkerchief in her fist. She left this family to survive it. Now it needs her to save it — and the only person she cannot read is the one she cannot stop watching.

“I did not come home to grieve. I came home to find out who did this.”

The Sister She Lost

Sam

She and Mia grew up in the same kitchens, shared the same secrets, were closer than blood — right up until Matelda walked through the door and Mia vanished. Three years of silence. Now Sam is the one person who remembers who Mia used to be, and the only one brave enough to say it out loud.

The Ghost In Every Room

Gabriel Salvatore

The father. The Architect. The man who kept a whole region at peace by being loved instead of feared — and paid for it with a set of cut brake lines. Everything Mia inherits, every rule Matelda protects, is an echo of the letter he left behind.

“She needs you as I did. No — more than I did.”

Illustration of a red-haired woman in black and a dark-haired woman in a leather jacket in a candlelit villa courtyard at night

Before the story you are about to read

Two families built this city. Only one was ever meant to keep it.

They called them the Twin Pillars — the Salvatores and their oldest allies — the two bloodlines that turned a lawless stretch of coast into something that ran on order, on loyalty, on the quiet understanding that Gabriel Salvatore’s word was worth more than any gun. He wove old blood into new steel and made the region prosper.

But a house built on love makes a very particular kind of enemy — the ones who stood in its shadow and never forgave the light. The peace held for a generation. Then it cracked from the inside, and the same walls that protected the Salvatores became the walls they could not escape.

Read the full history of the Salvatore dynasty ›

And then the shooting starts

There is a second between the first shot and the second one where you learn exactly who will put their body between you and the dark.

For Mia, that second lasts the rest of her life.

You will fall for this one if you love…

Enemies to lovers with real teeth
A forty-year-old woman who wields silence like a blade
Age-gap tension that earns every inch
Forced proximity in a villa on lockdown
Slow burn that actually smoulders
Found-family, fractured family, all at once
A guaranteed HEA after you have suffered for it

Content notes: on-page violence, grief, references to coercion. A love story that does not look away.

A scene you will not find in the book

The night before Mia came home

Get the free bonus chapter — the family gathered in the study, one empty chair, and the decision that set everything in motion. Straight to your inbox.

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Explore the tropes

Love a trope? MATELDA has your favorites.

Sapphic mafia. A slow burn that aches. Enemies who cannot stay away. One house with nowhere to hide. Start with the trope that owns your heart.

Some houses you visit. This one keeps you.

Read MATELDA now on Amazon ›

More from the author · Jossef S. on Amazon ›

Explore the MATELDA Universe

One villa, one dynasty, one impossible love story — told across every corner of the world Mia and Matelda live in.

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