She stitches up East London's worst nights. She has no idea one of its quietest men has been watching over her for a year.

RORY
She didn't remember me. A year before, she opened my brother's chest and held his heart till it went again, then came out to the corridor, told me I looked grey and sent me for a bacon roll. It was terrible. I ate all of it, because she told me to.

Round here my name is a reason to cross the road. So I stayed on my side, and I made sure nothing on hers came near her.

I should have stayed there. She read injuries for a living, and sooner or later she'd read one I'd left on somebody else. Then I got cut, and I asked for her by name anyway.

IMOGEN
Twenty-two stitches, and he doesn't look at the needle once. He looks at me. Then he asks if I've eaten tonight. I'm grey, apparently.

I'm thirty-six. I was married to a man who always knew what to say, and I have three rules now. No past. No future. Nobody stays the night.

He's twenty-eight, and he says yes to all three. Then he takes the biro out of my hair and goes red to the collarbones.

I count pulses for a living. I lose count of his.

Tender Violence is an open-door Irish mafia love story about a quiet man who fell first and a doctor who wasn't looking. It isn't a dark romance: the violence is rare, and it costs. Dual POV, older heroine, no cheating, HEA. Book 1 of the Callaghan Brothers.

Reviews are welcome, never required.

AI use: English is my second language. I conceived and outlined this story in Mandarin Chinese, used AI tools to help draft it in English, and then revised every chapter extensively myself.