Vipers Bloom

Callie arrived in Glasgow not in search of love, but as a refugee from a life in Sunderland that had hollowed itself out around her. Carrying a grief that settled into her very bones, she moved to protect her ten-year-old son, Leo. A "football-mad" boy who already mirrors his father's dangerous height and long-limbed build, Leo is a living reminder of a man who was as tall as he was lethal. At only five feet tall, Callie is easily dismissed people mistake her light brown hair and "Mackem wit" for weakness. They fail to see the discipline of a "loaded weapon" or the symbolic ink she carries: Across her back, a cherry blossom tree bloomed in ink. Its petals drifted down her arms in soft defiance, while two vipers coiled along her ribs, their heads poised beneath her collarbones and their tails ending at the base of her spine. Beauty, she'd learned, was most dangerous when it learned how to bite.
She worked nights at The Obsidian, a velvet-dark lounge owned by the MacRay brothers. Alasdaír and Lachlan were six-foot-seven titans of Glasgow's criminal underworld, men who ruled through blood, silence, and fear.
Lachlan fell faster. Harder. He loved the way she didn't shrink from him, the way her smile cut sharper than any blade. He offered protection she never asked for, loyalty that bordered on worship. When she told him she could handle herself, he grinned like a man already lost.
"I know," he said. "That's why I want you."
They both loved her not gently, not safely, but with the kind of devotion that made men reckless and empires bleed. They competed in quiet ways, in brutal ones, each convinced he understood her better than the other.