Bloodbloom

Kali Martins has never lost a fight in her life.

By day, she runs a small flower shop wedged between a laundromat and a bakery that's been closed longer than she can remember - a quiet, gentle life built out of peonies and ranunculus and early mornings. By night, she's the undefeated fighter at Manny's gym, throwing grown men twice her size onto the mat without breaking a sweat. Trained since childhood by a father who taught her that love is something you earn through discipline, Kali has spent her whole life being flawless - because flawless is the only way she's ever known how to be loved.

What no one sees is the girl underneath the twelve-fight win streak: a hopeless romantic who grew up on Disney princesses and secretly aches to be the one who gets swept off her feet, protected, spoiled - babied, just once, by someone who isn't asking her to prove anything first.

Then Ares Rodriguez walks into her life.

A mercenary with a reputation that precedes him in every underground circle from here to the border, Ares is the first man who can match Kali blow for blow - and the first one who makes her kneel. But where she expects arrogance, she finds something else: a man secure enough in his own strength that he doesn't need to diminish hers. He doesn't want her softer. He wants her safe enough to be soft, when she chooses to be.

Their pull toward each other collides head-on with the world Ares comes from. A former colleague resurfaces - her father a high-ranking military official pushing an arranged marriage that could make or break the protection Ares's unit depends on. And buried deeper in Ares's past is a blood debt: an underworld family who never forgave him, and who now see Kali not as a person, but as a weakness to be exploited.

As the two worlds - Kali's quiet, flower-lined mornings and Ares's blood-soaked nights - crash together, Kali will have to decide how much of herself she's willing to risk for a love she never let herself want. And when the cost of tha