Crown of Ash

Six years ago the law let a monster walk. Two men watched him smile on his way out the door. One of them left. The other built something the law never could.

Marcus Whitfield was the prosecutor who built the case. When it collapsed in a Detroit courthouse corridor, he walked out of the system and into the dark… and built Lakefront there. A crew with no badges and no backup. Six years of doing what the courts couldn’t. Six years of carrying every decision alone, because that is what command means to a man like him.

Andre Jefferson stayed inside. DPD Sergeant. Cross-precinct task force. He chose the slow way, the legal way, the way that costp;ieces of himself a little at a time. He never stopped working the same case from the other side of the city. He never stopped wanting the man he walked away from.

Now the name that broke them is back on the board. Aleksander Drakov. The trafficker who beat them once and has been untouchable ever since, insulated by lawyers, bought politicians, and a network that runs from Canada to the Keys.

Marcus picks up the phone… Andre answers on the first ring.

They have one shot at the man who broke them, and taking it means standing in the same room for the first time in six years. It means Marcus finding out what Andre buried to protect him. It means Andre learning what Marcus has been quietly doing for his family all this time, in silence, with no card and no name. It means both of them admitting the want, the need, never left.

Drakov has been waiting for this too. He knows exactly where to cut.

When he does, the whole Detroit underground answers. Lakefront. The Merritt household. The Lords of Darkness. The Crimson Company. Every crew the series has built, in one city, for one war.

The law will take what the law can take. The rest gets burried in the iron of detroit riverside dirt.
No badges. No backup. One city worth bleeding for.
Crown of Ash is the fifth and final book in the Iron and Blood series, a dark MM romantic suspense saga set in the Detroit Gothic ‘Verse. Best read in order.

Tropes and content: second chance romance • exes to lovers • forced proximity • vigilante and cop • enemies of the same enemy • found family • morally gray heroes • touch-starved • slow burn that pays off • protective alpha (both of them) • who did this to you • ensemble finale with crossover cameos • HEA with scars

Genre: Dark MM romance / romantic suspense / vigilante crime thriller

Heat: Explicit, on-page, MM. Switch dynamic.

Content warnings: Human trafficking (off-page, no depiction of victims’ abuse), violence, references to grief and loss of a sibling to addiction, on-page character death (antagonist, off-page), profanity, explicit sexual content. 18+.