Her Name Fueled His Revenge

Bram O'Rourke came back to Wilkes Mill with a signed note in his pocket and one purpose behind his ribs: to take from Adeline Landry everything she loved, the slow way, the way that lasts. Six years ago her name was on the statement that burned his father's wharf and put Fergus O'Rourke in the ground. Bram has spent every day since building the machine that would ruin her. He did not plan on the girl. He did not plan on the way Adeline's hands, stained blue to the wrist, never once shook while his pressure closed around her throat.

Adeline dyes indigo the old lowcountry way, growing the plant and keeping a living vat that turns cloth from green to blue only when it is lifted into open air. She learned young that the truth, like the dye, will not show its real color in the dark. She knows exactly who Bram is and what he is doing to her, and she will not perform her innocence for a man who has already decided she is guilty. She has a five-year-old to protect and a secret worth more than her own name, and she will burn before she hands either to a Landry-hating O'Rourke.

The deeper Bram grinds, the less the story holds. Her fear is never for herself. There is a photograph of her hands gone clean one spring when a dyer's hands are never clean. And the more he watches, the more he wants the one thing his revenge was built to destroy. When the truth finally turns in the light, Bram learns he has spent six years as another man's weapon, aimed at the wrong target, and that the child he threatened is his own.

Now the machine has to be dismantled by the man who built it. Bram tears up the note, hands back the deed, gives up the seat and the name and the protection, and stands in front of the woman he wronged with nothing but the truth and no right to be forgiven for it. Some men take revenge. This one had to lose everything he came for to deserve what he never meant to find.

A full-length, standalone dark mafia romance of obsession, betrayal, and revenge, told entirely from the hero's point of view, with a secret child, a wrongly-aimed vendetta, and a heroine who never once bends to a lie.