Rook's Gamble

She reads the river like a language. He reads people like a chessboard. When a smuggler tries to drown her livelihood, the youngest Marauder proves that the most dangerous piece on the board is the one you never see coming.

Delta Osborn built her fishing guide business from nothing — eight years of charters, tournament circuits, and being the only woman on a stretch of Mississippi that doesn't make room for her. When a river smuggler decides her dock sits on his territory, she tells his enforcers exactly what they can do with their rifles.

Bad idea.

When her tournament boat sinks to the bottom of her slip and armed men start running her stretch after dark, the man standing between her and the river isn't law enforcement. He's Rook, the Memphis Marauders' youngest patch, and he's been calculating angles on this fishing guide since the moment she picked up a rifle and dropped a boat engine at forty yards in the dark.

Rook thinks six moves ahead and speaks only when he's certain. But the morning he watches a woman fight beside him without flinching, the strategy goes quiet and something more dangerous takes over. Vance Quinlan has run his corridor for twenty years. He's about to discover that the kid with the chess tattoo doesn't play defense — he plays traps.

In Memphis, the river carries secrets and the Marauders carry their own.

Some men are built from patience. Some are built from violence. The best ones know which move comes first.