Spike

She folded towels. He couldn't shut up.

Kristen Walsh has spent two years keeping her grandmother's laundromat alive—fixing machines with YouTube tutorials, working eighteen-hour days, surviving on margins so thin she can see through them. When a predatory debt collector decides she owes more than money, she does what Carrick women do: she keeps her head down and holds on.

Then he sends men to make sure she can't hold on anymore.

He's the loudest man in Pittsburgh. She's about to become the only thing that shuts him up.

Spike is the Reapers' prospect who never learned when to close his mouth—too loud, too fast, too much of everything. He does his laundry at her place every Friday because his grandmother did, and he's the only person who notices when the woman behind the counter starts disappearing. When he finds a debt collector sitting in a plastic chair watching her fold towels, he discovers something worth fighting quiet for.

A woman who swung a detergent bottle into a man's face. A woman who memorized her stalker's schedule because knowing kept her alive. A woman worth shutting up for.

She's done shrinking. He's done performing.

As the violence escalates and her grandmother's legacy burns to ash, Kristen discovers that the loud kid from the neighborhood who grew up to wear a patch is also the only one who saw her when she'd gotten so small she almost wasn't there. But loving Spike means accepting his world—the brotherhood, the brutality, and the claiming that makes her his.

Two people who never left the neighborhood. Two stubborn hearts that finally found the same block.

Some places are worth fighting for. She's worth staying for.