Blackridge: Blood & Platinum

Blackridge, California isn't a city.
It's an ecosystem.
Politicians own neighborhoods.
Corporations own politicians.
Street gangs own corners.
Money owns everyone else.
Dr. Zaria Alvarez built something nobody thought possible.
A twenty-nine-year-old African American and Peruvian pharmaceutical genius, she founded Alvarez Biotherapeutics with nothing more than student loans, brilliance, and impossible determination.
Seven years later...
She's America's youngest pharmaceutical billionaire.
Her company is only months away from announcing a revolutionary Alzheimer's treatment capable of slowing neurological degeneration unlike anything the world has seen.
That discovery is worth hundreds of billions.
Which makes Zaria worth killing.
She doesn't know the people smiling in her boardroom have already sold her life.
Across Blackridge...
Taylen Snow has spent nearly ten years burying the man he used to be.
Before...
He was one of California's most feared drug kingpins.
Now...
He owns Soul'D Out, a soul food restaurant where everyone-from judges to mechanics-eats beneath the same roof.
He funds a community outreach center.
He pays electric bills for strangers.
He hires former inmates.
He operates hydroponic gardens that feed neighborhoods forgotten by city government.
Nobody knows the money that started it all came soaked in blood.
Especially not the beautiful woman whose life crashes into his one rainy night.
When Zaria's luxury sedan dies in one of Blackridge's worst neighborhoods...
The men waiting for her think they're collecting a paycheck.
Instead...
They meet Taylen Snow.
A man who promised never to become that monster again.
Some promises aren't meant to survive.