Polski

She refused to surrender. He refused to let her fight alone. Linda Kowalczyk has spent forty years building her mother's flower shop into a Bloomfield institution—arranging weddings, funerals, and everything in between. When a fencing operation moves into her neighborhood, demanding she use her delivery van to transport stolen goods, Linda does what Kowalczyk women have always done: she says no. Then they threaten her children. He's the Reaper who protects the old neighborhoods. She's about to become everything he's been praying for. Polski has spent twenty years guarding the parishes and communities his grandparents built—Polish Hill, Bloomfield, all the places Pittsburgh forgot. When he learns that a florist from his church is being terrorized by men who hide behind parish socials and church smiles, he walks into her shop expecting to handle a simple problem. What he finds is a woman with flower shears in her hand and steel in her spine. A woman who stabbed an enforcer before his brothers even got through the door. A woman worth killing for. She's been the only adult in every room for a decade. He's about to show her what it means to have backup. As the violence escalates and Linda's shop goes up in flames, she discovers that the quiet man who lights candles for his father is also the most dangerous protector she's ever known. But loving Polski means accepting his world—the brotherhood, the brutality, and the claiming that makes her his. Forty years she arranged beautiful things for everyone else. Now it's her turn.