She sang through the wall. He stopped holding sixty pounds of speaker like he forgot what arms are for.
When a booking enforcer corners singer Elise Torvik at a bar and blacklists her from every stage on the Iron Range, she loses more than gigs—she loses the momentum she’s spent ten years building toward a Minneapolis showcase that could change everything.
Her van. Her gear. Her career. All of it torched by a man who thinks her talent is inventory he owns.
She just didn’t plan on a prospect with dozer hands stepping between her and the enforcer like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Sam "Roughcut" Pelletier has spent two years prospecting for the North Star Savages and two years before that burying the guilt of a man who died on his watch.
He holds everything gently now—babies, screen doors, bar glasses—because he knows what happens when heavy things move without care.
But when he watches a woman with steel-string calluses stand her ground against a man twice her size without flinching, something in him locks into place.
She’s his. And the empire that’s trying to silence her is about to learn what that costs.
But protecting Elise means dragging his club into war against a booking network that controls every venue north of Duluth—an enemy with enforcers, Duluth muscle, and a decade of fear keeping an entire music scene in a cage.
An enemy who doesn’t know that the prospect they dismissed as soft once watched a hillside bury a man alive and has been learning the difference between losing control and choosing to use what he has.
In the brutal north of Minnesota’s Iron Range, careers are built one fifty-dollar Thursday night at a time and defended with blood.
And Roughcut will break every man who threatens what’s his—with the same hands that hold her like she’s made of glass.
