I've spent my whole life learning to repair broken things. Spine, hinge, torn endpaper. I thought I was good at it. Then a fated bond snapped into place in the middle of a scholarship exam and bonded me to Wren Ashgrove - the alpha's disgraced son, the boy who hasn't shifted in three years, the one everybody at this academy has already decided to forget. Now the council wants me gone. The alpha heir wants me broken. My grandmother wants me to keep my head down and my mouth shut, the way she has for sixty years. But the charter in that vault has a page missing, and every student who's vanished from Ashgrove in the last century has their name in the ledger that goes with it. I came here to learn how to repair a spine. Turns out I'm going to have to bend the whole academy backward to do it.

Mein Weingut, meine Tochter, mein Leben. Ich habe nicht um einen Bodyguard gebeten. Die Versicherung hat mir trotzdem Emeric Callas geschickt: eine gebrochene Nase, Ein-Wort-Sätze und eine Lykan-Nase, die eine Streichholzschachtel auf hundert Meter riecht. Jemand brennt Sonoma-Anwesen nieder, meines ist als Nächstes dran, und der einzige Platz, den ich für ihn habe, ist das Gästehaus. Also pflückt er mit meiner Crew, schläft in meiner Scheune und erzählt meiner achtjährigen Tochter etwas über Vulkanerde. Und ich vergesse fast, dass ich vor neun Jahren in Ensenada eine Nacht mit einem Fremden verbracht habe und seinen Nachnamen nie erfahren habe. Fast. Emeric weiß es. Er wusste es am ersten Morgen, als er Palomas Gesicht sah. Sechs Wochen sagt er nichts, weil er ein Mann ist, der Scham für eine Persnlichkeit hält. Als er endlich den Brandstifter stoppt und seinen Truck packt, stehe ich am Tor mit meiner Tochter auf der Hüfte, und ich lasse ihn nicht gehen, bis er eine Frage beantwortet.

Fen Okada flew freight for eleven years without a single lost crate. One altered run order and she is grounded, fined, and unhireable. The black box from that run is the only thing that can clear her name, and it is somewhere in a system she cannot legally enter. So she hires a bounty hunter. Roq is not what she expected. He is enormous, quiet, and asks permission before he touches anything, including her. What he does not tell her is that he wrote the run order that ruined her, six years ago, under orders, and that the cleaner currently trying to put a knife in her is on the payroll of the man who gave those orders. Fen finds out in a waystation lockup with the box already in her hands. She finishes the job anyway. Some debts get paid in court, and some get paid one careful sentence at a time.

Emilia Voss is twenty-nine and very good with other people's money. She has just been handed the Ferran account, which her firm regards as a promotion and the DEA regards as probable cause. Tomás Ferran runs a cigar empire that is worth eleven figures and responsible for the death of exactly nine men, six of them his rivals'. He has not smiled in public in nine years. He has never lost an account. When a rival family firebombs Emilia's apartment, Tomás offers her the arrangement her firm has been preparing for months. Thirty days. A courthouse wedding. A payoff that clears her mother's bills and the rest of her life. It is a contract. They both signed it. Neither intended to keep it. Then his brother is taken, and the only person in the family who can find him is the woman the family hired to audit them. Emilia has been finding everything for months.

My vineyard, my daughter, my life. I did not ask for a bodyguard. The insurance company sent me Emeric Callas anyway: one broken nose, one-word sentences, and a lycan nose that can smell a matchbook from a hundred yards. Somebody is burning Sonoma estates, mine is next, and the only place I have to put him is the guest cottage. So he picks with my crew, sleeps in my barn, and tells my eight-year-old daughter about volcanic soil. And I almost forget that nine years ago in Ensenada I spent one night with a stranger and never got his last name. Almost. Emeric knows. He knew the first morning he saw Paloma's face. He says nothing for six weeks, because he's a man who thinks shame is a personality. When he finally stops the arsonist and packs his truck, I am standing at the gate with my daughter on my hip, and I am not letting him leave until he answers one question.

Wren Lowell was rejected in front of the entire Blackpine pack. She left that night and didn't look back. Six years later, she's back with a federal adjudicator's badge and an evidence file. Blackpine is under investigation for treaty violations, and every wolf in the pack is a suspect - including the man who refused her. Adrian Cole has been dying slowly since the night he let her go. He had a reason. He never told her. Now Wren's investigation is about to drag it out of him, and the truth won't save him - it'll just make her angrier. A raw, second-chance fated mates shifter romance about a rejected bond, a corrupt pack, and an alpha who has to earn it the second time around.