Pestilence's Intensity

Four men came to launder money through her shop. A grieving founder decided her fight was his.

Jenna Kowalczyk built a second life from what was left. Five years on the Jersey bare-knuckle circuit ended when she shattered her right hand, so she opened a pawn shop in Elizabeth—honest work, built on her eye for value and her tolerance for desperate people. It's not glamorous, but it's proof she survived losing the only thing she was ever great at. Then a laundering network decides her shop is the perfect laundry, and when she breaks an enforcer's nose, refusal becomes personal.

She should have stayed down. She's spent a lifetime refusing to.

She never expected the ghost who walked through her door.

He buried his brother and came back harder. She made him feel something besides the grave.

Garrett "Pestilence" Hayes helped build Creeping Death from nothing, then walked away six years ago to watch his brother suffocate inch by inch from the refineries. He buried him last spring. Now the horseman rides again, because grief needs a target or it eats you alive—and when an old fighter from the circuit turns up bruised and cornered, he finally has one. She's in danger. That makes her his reason.

But Jenna Kowalczyk doesn't need saving. She needs someone who won't flinch at damage—and Pestilence discovers that the woman who rebuilt herself from a ruined hand is the first thing since the funeral that makes him feel anything but loss.

As Stenner's network burns under Creeping Death's assault, Pestilence realizes vengeance isn't enough. He wants to claim her—in front of the brothers who welcomed him home, in front of a man who thought everything, including her, was just another transaction. And Jenna's learning that two hard people can still find something soft between them, and the founder who came back for a war is the reason she's finally not fighting alone.

In Newark's industrial heart, where refinery smoke kills as slowly as any blade and cash washes clean through borrowed storefronts, one woman will discover that surviving what breaks you was never the same as living—and one grieving, dangerous man will find that there's still something in his chest besides the grave.