Battery's Damage

A kid died in her gym from product she didn't know was there. A fighter who draws people in decided her silence wasn't optional to protect.

Leah Marchetti fought her way to regional kickboxing championships before a knee injury ended her career at twenty-four. She clawed back through physical therapy and spite, and now trains clients at a gym in Jersey City—her second chance, proof that ending one fight doesn't mean ending the war. Then she finds a nineteen-year-old dead in the bathroom from a bad batch, talks to the cops anyway, and wakes up to a burned car and a note in her locker: accidents happen in gyms.

She should have stayed quiet. She's never quit a fight in her life.

She didn't expect the man everyone in the room turns to look at.

He pulls people into his orbit without trying. She was the first one who pulled back.

Vincent "Battery" Rossi turned an Elizabeth fight gym into a recruitment pool without meaning to—everyone he trained wanted what he had. He joined Creeping Death because they were the most contagious thing he'd ever seen, and now his charm is a weapon the club points at territory. When a PED operation starts poisoning the circuits he recruits from, he goes looking for the trainer who wouldn't stay silent—and discovers that the fighter who rebuilt herself from a ruined knee is the first person he can't simply charm.

But Leah Marchetti doesn't want a rescuer, and she's done being handled. She wants someone who understands that losing one fight isn't the end of the war—and Battery learns that the woman who pulls back with equal force is the one thing that makes his influence feel like more than leading people somewhere they don't understand.

As Stavros's network burns under Creeping Death's assault, Battery realizes protecting Leah isn't enough. He wants to claim her—in front of the brothers who follow him, in front of a man who thought gym muscle was the same as real violence and profited off fighters' desperation. And Leah's learning that following someone isn't the same as being led astray, and the man everyone catches is the reason she's not fighting alone anymore.

In Newark's industrial heart, where fight circuits feed on desperation and product kills as quietly as any blade, one woman will discover that surviving the end of her career was never the same as living—and one magnetic, dangerous man will find the one person worth catching for good.