Shadow's Protection

She bakes bread at 4 AM for a neighborhood that's forgotten her name. He's been watching from the shadows for months. Delia Marchetti is third-generation at Sal's Bakery—sixty-seven years of family legacy resting on her flour-dusted shoulders. When a Bay Ridge crime boss decides her bakery is perfect for laundering money, she does what Marchetti women do: she tells him to go to hell. Now his soldiers are threatening her grandmother, and the cops can't—or won't—help. She didn't expect him. Shadow hasn't felt visible in years. The Gotham Reapers' road captain moves through the city unseen, mapping escape routes and watching targets with eyes that learned to disappear in places Americans weren't supposed to be. He stopped wanting anything personal a long time ago. Then he started buying bread from a baker who never looked at him twice—and he couldn't stop coming back. When a crime family threatens Delia over her refusal to bend, Shadow doesn't ask permission to protect her. She feeds his brothers. That makes her his. Now he's dismantling a thirty-year criminal empire one lieutenant at a time, and the woman who told him to go to hell is making him want to step into the light and stay. She says Marchetti women handle their own problems. He says she's not alone anymore. His woman. His to protect. Anyone who threatens her grandmother dies in the dark. Shadow's Protection is a full-length, standalone MC romance with a possessive alpha hero, a heroine with backbone for days, and an HEA. No cheating, no cliffhanger. This is Book 3 in the Gotham Reapers series.