Nashville has teeth. And they're watching.
Two years ago, Chloe Morrison witnessed something on a dark Nashville campus that changed everything. A man dying in an alley. A woman with glowing eyes who wouldn't let him. Bone cracking in ways that had nothing to do with medicine. She kept the secret. She kept her head down. She sorted vinyl records and tried to forget. She almost managed it.
Now they've found her. And the world she witnessed two years ago — the one she's been pretending doesn't exist — is no longer willing to wait. A world of ancient predators, older debts, and a hunt in the shadows underneath Nashville's neon glow.
Something in Chloe doesn't just fit their world. It belongs there.
Dark, gritty, and set in the heart of Music City, Marked in Red is the first book in the Marked in Red series — urban fantasy for readers who want their monsters genuine, their stakes lethal, and their love stories earned in blood.
Werewolves don't guard Nashville — they claim it. A century of territorial predators operating behind the glass and steel of a downtown security firm. Every member broken before they were found. Every member dangerous since.
Eric Blackwood has been collecting broken people for over a hundred years and turning them into something with teeth. Something like a family. His pack runs on loyalty, violence, and the kind of love that kills to protect what it's built.
Honky-tonks and neon on Lower Broad. The Cumberland running copper at sunset. A city loud enough to drown out the sounds that happen after midnight in the alleys behind Printer's Alley and the hollows east of town.
Chloe Morrison didn't ask for any of this. A musician with a busted relationship and a record store job, she walked into the wrong night and found a world that doesn't let you walk back out. Now she's learning that some doors, once opened, change the person who opened them.
Five forms. Painful transformations. A supernatural immune system for the physical world — territorial, possessive, and morally grey in the way that apex predators have always been. They aren't noble. They're necessary.
There are things in the Tennessee dark that even werewolves fear. Things that wear stolen faces and carry grudges measured in centuries. The Blackwood pack has survived them before. Whether they'll survive what's coming is a different question.
M.J. Lorne writes urban fantasy and paranormal romance with teeth — stories where the monsters aren't metaphors and the love interests have body counts. The Marked in Red series is the first entry in a world where Nashville's supernatural underbelly is held in check by predators who chose each other over everything else.
When not writing, M.J. can be found exploring, building systematic workflows that would make Priya proud, designing games and arguing with fictional characters who refuse to follow the outline.
The Marked in Red series is self-published via KDP.
Want an advance copy of Marked in Red before anyone else? ARC readers receive a free early copy in exchange for an honest review around release. Dark urban fantasy, a werewolf pack, and Nashville after dark — if that’s your kind of trouble, the door’s open.
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