Take Me (CD Reiss) Books in Order

The Take Me books sit in C.D. Reiss's Manhattan mafia world, where marriage is part weapon, part contract, and never something simple. The series opens with Take Me, when Sarah is kidnapped on her wedding day by Dario Lucari, a mafia king with a long memory and a score to settle with her father. That setup gives the trilogy its first spark, but the real engine is what happens when captivity turns into a battle of will.

Nobody in this trilogy gets to stay innocent for long.

Dario is ruthless, strategic, and used to making other people move where he wants them. Sarah enters his life as leverage, but the books get better because she refuses to stay that. As the story moves through Make Me and Break Me, she learns the rules of his world, the history behind his violence, and the cost of belonging to a man who has enemies everywhere. The power between them keeps shifting, and that tension is most of the fun.

This is dark mafia romance, so the stakes are always bigger than the couple. Rival families, old grudges, and the rituals of a violent underworld keep pressing in on the marriage. Sarah has to decide whether survival means escape, surrender, or becoming something harder than she was before. Dario, meanwhile, keeps discovering that love is not nearly as controllable as fear.

The tone is possessive, tense, and claustrophobic in a deliberate way. Reiss leans into forced proximity, revenge, and the question of what trust can possibly look like inside a relationship that begins with coercion. She also gives Sarah room to change. By the end of the trilogy, the emotional shape of the story is not just about whether she loves Dario, but who she becomes while trying to survive him and the world around him.

It gets messier, hotter, and more dangerous as it goes.

If you like mafia romance with sharp edges, high emotional pressure, and a heroine who grows harder to underestimate with every book, this series is a strong place to start.