She refused to sell. He refused to let them take her.
Tessa Moran has spent three years fighting alone. Running the boxing gym her father built in Jersey City, she's trained Golden Gloves champions, kept neighborhood kids off corners, and never backed down from anything—including the Irish crime boss who wants her building for his next gambling operation.
When Declan Shaughnessy's enforcers split her lip and burn her gym to ashes, Tessa refuses to break. She's been taking hits her whole life. She knows how to get back up.
She's never met anyone like Scourge.
He stopped running the day she needed him. Now he'll burn down anyone who touches her.
Connor "Scourge" Mahoney joined Creeping Death MC to outrun the ghosts of Afghanistan—and he's been moving ever since. When he walks into a gym he's trained at for two years and finds its owner bloodied by Shaughnessy's muscle, something snaps. She's in his territory. That makes her his to protect.
But Tessa Moran isn't looking for a protector. She's looking for a partner.
As Shaughnessy's organization crumbles under Creeping Death's assault, Scourge discovers that protecting Tessa was never the point. He wants to claim her—in front of his brothers, in front of the whole damn city. And Tessa's learning that the woman who fights alone isn't strong.
She's just lonely.
In Jersey City's industrial shadow, where container cranes tower against the sky and violence is the only answer predators understand, one woman will find her place in a world of leather and chrome—and one dangerous man will finally learn to be still.
