Steady Hands: A Dark Mafia Romance

Twenty-two sutures. That’s where it started.

A bleeding stranger in a back alley behind a Vegas casino. A paramedic working graveyard shift with a dialysis bill she can’t pay. She should have called it in. She should have walked away.

She counted every stitch instead.

Luna Reyes doesn’t do reckless. She does the math — heart rate times stroke volume equals cardiac output, pressure above ninety means you keep the leg, below sixty means you’re having a different conversation. Seven years on the graveyard shift taught her that steady hands save lives and feelings get people killed.

Then Angelo Marchetti offered her five thousand a night to patch up fighters in his underground ring. And the math changed.

He watches her from behind glass the way surgeons watch a monitor during a code. She reads his pulse from across the room — sixty-two beats per minute, the resting heart rate of a man who’s decided he doesn’t need anyone. She knows that heart rate. She’s spent her whole career keeping hearts like his beating.

The night a fighter flatlines on the concrete floor, she restarts his heart with a defibrillator she built from veterinary parts and a prayer. Angelo watches from his box, unable to look away. Unable to help.

She walks into his office afterward with blood still on her hands.

Neither of them walks out the same.

But Luna’s brother is a detective. And the closer she gets to Angelo, the closer she gets to destroying everything she’s trying to save — her mother’s transplant, her clinic, the future she’s been building with hands that won’t stop shaking every time he’s in the room.

Steady Hands is a dark mafia romance with a Latina paramedic heroine, a morally gray Italian hero, underground fight rings, and heat that will ruin you for polite fiction. Standalone with HEA. No cheating. No cliffhangers. Intended for readers 18+.

Series continues with Collateral (Joaquin’s story).

For fans of Kresley Cole, Penelope Douglas, and S.T. Abby.