SAVAGE PROTECTION
I spent five months in a hidden lab, forced to turn my knowledge into poison for more than one criminal family.
And then I lit a match.
Arguably not my smartest move, but I couldn’t continue harming the innocent. On my way out, I ran straight into the path of the most dangerous biker in Louisiana.
Elias “Beast” Carver.
I’ve heard the rumors about this man. He’s the Savage Reign club secretary and their sergeant-at-arms.
But among his enemies and in the streets he’s known as the silent executioner.
When he drags me onto his bike, shoves a loaded weapon into my shaking hands, and growls, “Anyone tries to take you, aim for the heart,” I do as he commands.
My formula is making a lot of bad people rich so it’s no surprise every rival crew, crooked Fed, and hired gun is hunting me down.
The Vultures scour the night, looking to drag me back. But inside a safe house, every brush of Beast’s rough fingers makes my pulse forget the danger.
He promises no one will touch me. Deep down I know he’s the monster I should fear most.
Yet when gunfire tears through the dawn’s silence, my protector cages me with his tatted-up, muscled body and snarls, “They’ll die before they ever get to touch you.”
I’m the chemist who can forge empires. He’s the Savage ready to start a war with every empire for one woman.
Do I stake my life—and my heart—on the biker who vows eternity in blood?
Or will the enemies closing in steal our chance before the smoke clears?
1
LAYLA
The rain in Louisiana smells different from the rain back home.
In New York, it’s sharp and metallic, like the city bleeds into the air and stains everything it touches. Here, it carries the thick sweetness of wet earth and warm stone. It clings to the sidewalks and the trees and the brick buildings like the whole world is trying to wash itself clean.
Except nothing ever really gets clean. Too many people have way too many secrets. Rain is not strong enough to rid people of their dirt.
Not me. And definitely not any of my friends.
I tell myself that as I sit behind a desk that isn’t mine, in an office that smells like someone else’s cologne and stale coffee while I pretend I belong here.
The truth is, I’m not sure where I belong.
My black-rimmed glasses fog faintly from the humidity every time I push them up the bridge of my nose, and my fingers aresmudged with chalk dust from the lecture I just finished. There is a light dusting of freckles across my nose that looks like it shouldn’t belong on someone who teaches at a top university. Something soft and youthful that makes people underestimate me before I even open my mouth.
I know because every student in my lecture looked at me and immediately dismissed me as too young to teach them. I get that a lot given I’m only twenty-three. But fuck them. It’s not my fault I graduated at the top of my class at eighteen and hold a PhD in chemistry.
Outside my window, the sky hangs low and heavy, a bruised gray that makes the campus look muted and underwater. Students rush past with umbrellas. Their laughter carries through the glass in broken bursts, bright and careless.
I used to envy that kind of easygoing life. Now it just feels like something happening in another world.
My phone sits on the edge of the desk beside a stack of ungraded lab reports. It hasn’t lit up with a message from Professor Michaels in nineteen days.
Nineteen days since I landed in New Orleans with a suitcase full of skirts and books and the kind of stubborn loyalty that has always been my downfall.
I stare at my phone like it might decide to behave if I glare hard enough.
