Chrome and Ashes

A stripper protecting her pill-addicted little brother and a dying detective with one decent act left collide after a murder behind the club turns survival into a debt only one of them can pay. Deja Cross has spent ten years becoming the kind of woman who can hold a room without letting it touch her. Onstage she is Jade, the best dancer in the club, all precision, calculation, and chrome-lit control. At home she is the only family her seventeen-year-old brother Marcus has left, watching him slide deeper into pills she cannot confiscate without driving him toward something worse. Detective Ray Mossey has spent nearly three decades learning how easy it is for a tired man to do a bad job and still call it duty. He drinks too much, works cold cases no one expects him to solve, and carries failures he has not yet named. One of those failures is the Cross house fire, closed in haste ten years ago while Deja and Marcus were still children. When Marcus witnesses a murder tied to the club and the men behind it begin tightening around him, Deja is forced to trust the last man she wants near her family. Ray cannot undo what he failed to do in the past. He can only decide what the last useful piece of his life is worth. Chrome and Ashes is a grim contemporary noir about addiction, survival, exploitation, guilt, and the brutal cost of one final decent act.