Bruised Knuckles

He broke a man's arm for touching her. She didn't run. She stayed.

Harper Vale is an overworked ER nurse running on cold coffee and the stubborn refusal to quit. She's spent ten years stitching broken men back together in a city that chews people up and spits them into her trauma bay. She doesn't flinch at blood. She doesn't cry at death. She is numb, exhausted, and invisible—until a massive, silent man walks into her emergency room dripping blood and refuses anesthesia while she sews his face shut.

Kellan "Knox" Thorne is an undefeated bare-knuckle underground fighter. He feels nothing. No guilt. No fear. No remorse. His world is concrete floors and split knuckles and the flat, gray emptiness of a man who has never had a reason to exist beyond the next fight. Then Harper threads a needle through his skin, and the emptiness cracks wide open.

He doesn't send flowers. He doesn't ask for her number. He memorizes her schedule. He learns her routes. He becomes the shadow she can't see and the wall between her and every man who has ever looked at her wrong. The arrogant doctor who touched her shoulder? Hospitalized. The creepy neighbor who watched her too long? Gone overnight. The drunk who grabbed her arm in a bar? His arm will never work the same way again.

Harper should be terrified. She is terrified. But beneath the fear, something else is growing—something hot, dark, and dangerously close to addiction. Because Knox doesn't just protect her. He worships her with violence. He dedicates every fight, every broken bone, every drop of blood to the woman who stitched him together on a Tuesday night. And when he pulls her into his world of underground fights, blood-soaked locker rooms, and a concrete apartment above a gym, Harper discovers a truth she can't undo:

She doesn't want peace. She wants the monster.

But monsters attract predators. When a powerful crime syndicate targets Harper to force Knox into throwing a fight, the undefeated fighter faces the only opponent that could bring him to his knees—the threat of losing her. Knox will wage a one-man war against the criminal underworld. Harper will pick up a scalpel and prove that the woman who heals can also draw blood.

And when the smoke clears, only one question remains: Can two broken people build a life from the wreckage of the world they burned down together?