Thornwood Press

Her grandmother owed a life. Katya is the payment. Katya Orlova was raised for a strange man's house. When the Novgorod bratva finally comes to collect, the debt falls on her graduate year, in winter, in a country she can barely stand. The collector is Ilya Morozov - eldest son of the bratva, three hundred years old, and about to leave her in a safehouse and forget her. On the third night, the safehouse is attacked. Eleven days of siege. One chessboard. Two people who cannot stand each other and are running out of anything else to do. When they reach Moscow, there's a council vote to dissolve the debt and set her free. Katya walks into the chamber intending to take it. She walks out married by choice. The Kuznetsov family isn't done with either of them. Neither is Ilya's own blood.

The Lark family built Sable Falls, and Perpetua Lark is the last of them. When three million dollars goes missing from the mill's pension fund, the town's two remaining powers make a treaty: the Ashen Grounds MC will swallow the loss, and Pia will marry the club's new president. Isaiah Mott is forty-four, unhurried and cold on the surface, and he wants this arrangement exactly as much as she does - which is to say not at all. They marry in a church with seven witnesses and a bad furnace. By April they are no longer pretending. By June she is carrying his child. By July the missing money has a name on it, and the name is hers - forged, but hers - and the only way to clear her family is to disappear before the baby is born. She leaves a letter on a kitchen table. She comes back two winters later with a daughter, evidence, and the courage to ask a man who has been standing still for two years to move.

Bay Hollis left her husband with a duffel bag and a job application. She didn't expect the man who runs the local charter's enforcers to notice her. Sorren Mackey doesn't take in strays. He's forty-eight, done with the world, done with women who need saving. Then Bay's ex puts a hand on her wrist in a parking lot, and Sorren breaks it in front of six witnesses. Now she's in his trailer. His spare room. His dog already loves her. The ex has men. Sorren has brothers. Bay thought she needed rescuing. She was wrong. She needed someone who'd stand beside her while she stood up.

Duskridge Academy takes lone-bloods because nobody else will. Callie Ruiz should have run the other way. Three alphas-in-waiting claim her the first week. An enforcer's son who wants her strength. A healer's heir who wants her balance. An exile's nephew who wants her freedom. Her wolf refuses to pick one-and the elders are counting down to the blood moon. Because Duskridge has a secret. Lone-bloods don't graduate here. They get harvested. When the blood moon rises, Callie has one chance to break a century-old ritual and bind a pack instead of an alpha. If it works, she starts a war. If it fails, she's the last lone-blood anyone sees.

Rowan Syl is the last sworn officer of the Veil Watch. Her orders: infiltrate the Black Mesa Riders, close their road, and if necessary, end all three brothers who run it. Kade, whose cut hides a court sigil. Doran, whose glamour is illegal even in Faerie. Vale, whose hands have healed as many as they've killed. One moonless night she rides with them and the bond takes all four. Now the Watch wants her dead, the courts want her blood, and the only men who can keep her breathing are the ones she was sent to bury. Rowan has one badge and three bikers. She knows which she's giving up.

Pia Aldridge agreed to bake her cousin's wedding cake before she knew who the best man was. Now she's standing in a hot venue kitchen with a sagging three-tier, a stick of butter in each fist, and Nate Belrose - the man she almost married - handing her a towel. Eight years ago he took a job in Seattle and never gave her a reason. Now he's in Slocomb for one weekend and he's everywhere she turns: the rehearsal dinner, the seating chart, the kitchen at one in the morning. They have four hours until the ceremony, ninety-eight degrees, and eight years of mostly-unsaid. Some cakes fall. Some don't. Some people come back to a town they never lived in, for a reason they haven't said out loud yet.

Junie Park was nineteen when Dr. Noah Whitaker walked her through the worst year of her life. She was thirty-five when she walked into his clinic and found him still there. Sixteen years, two coasts, and neither of them said a thing. Now they work side by side in a rural practice where the storm season is longer than it should be and the staff has already figured out more than they'll admit. He thinks he knows what it means that he never married. She thinks she knows what it means that she never looked him up. They are both mostly right and completely wrong. Before the Frost is an age gap doctor reunion romance about a second chance that took sixteen years to arrive and the long patience of being ready for it.

Seit acht Jahren arbeite ich am Notruf meines Bezirks und habe noch nie die Nummer gewählt, die meine Mutter mir für den Notfall hinterlassen hat. Dann rief ein Anrufer zwlf Nächte hintereinander meine Dienststelle an und gab Informationen über eine Leiche, die noch nicht aufgetaucht war und ich begann, Dinge aufzuschreiben. Die Leiche tauchte auf. Die Detectives befragten mich. Dann stand nachts ein Servicefahrzeug gegenüber meiner Wohnung und der Mann darin hielt ein Klemmbrett, trank schlechten Kaffee und tat so, als würde er eine Windschutzscheibe putzen, die längst sauber war. Er war ein Fahrer eines Capo namens Ivan, und er beobachtete mich, weil sein Capo wissen wollte, was ich wusste. Ich wusste nichts. Er glaubte mir nicht. Sein Capo wurde verhaftet, weil ich das Band behielt. Die Familie verbrannte Ivans Namen dafür, und ich konnte meinen nicht wieder auf eine Aussage setzen. Jetzt wohnt er zwei Stockwerke über mir und geht an dieselbe Dispatch-Leitung wie ich. Ich gab ihm die Nummer, die meine Mutter mir hinterlassen hat. Das ist alles, was ich überhaupt zu geben habe.

Nell Carver kehrte für drei Tage nach Bainbridge Island zurück. Sie blieb wegen der Logbücher. Vierzig Jahre voller Einträge. Jeder einzelne handelt von ihrer Familie. Und jeder endet gleich: Sie ging wieder zum Wasser. Ihre Großmutter schrieb sie. Oder jemand anderes. Die Handschrift auf den letzten Seiten gehrt dem stillen Leuchtturmwärter, der ihr das Abendessen brachte und die Bücher nie eines Blickes würdigte. Der letzte Eintrag ist auf übermorgen datiert. Manche Inseln bewahren ihre Geschichte in Stein. Diese hier bewahrt sie in Tinte und die Tinte ist noch feucht.

Sasha Petrovna left the Bratva six years ago with her brother's blood on a coat she still can't throw away. She runs a bakery in Buffalo and pretends wolves don't exist. Two nights before Christmas, three of them walk into her shop. Kirill Malenkov was her brother's best friend. He was also the one who pulled the trigger. Now he's standing in her kitchen saying the pakhan wants her fur, and that he's the only thing standing between her and the debt collectors. She stabs him with a bread knife. He stays. Over three snowstorm nights, Kirill offers her the only deal that keeps them both alive: a fake mate bond, one Christmas Eve, to draw the traitors out of the pack. Sasha says yes because she wants to see them hang. She doesn't say yes because of the way he still says her name. By midnight mass there will be a new pakhan, a real bond, and a ghost in the kitchen who finally gets to see her smile.

Talia thought Viktor was her soulmate. Then she found out he had a wife and child. The Enforcer of the Iron Wolves was living a double life. Heartbroken, she ran. But Viktor isn't letting her go. He'll leave his club, his brothers, his entire world to prove his love. When the club comes for her, he'll die to protect her. Can Talia trust the man who lied about everything? A gritty, angsty MC romance of cheating, betrayal, and a second chance that will break your heart and put it back together.

Five years ago Bishop let another woman carry him through my grief. I took my father's tools and drove north with the radio off. Now the Copper Vipers want to run a pipeline through my land, and Bishop is standing in my shop as if the wake was last week. I told him no. He camped in my field anyway. He fixed my dock. He hauled ice through a hailstorm. He doesn't argue. He just stands there in the rain with a folder in his hands and his hat in his hand and every rotten truth I never wanted to hear. He cheated. He left. He was wrong. But he also spent five years coming back, and this time I'm going to make him earn every step up my dock.

Milo Vance has been a vampire for two hundred and twelve years and has no plans to take over anything. Then his sire gets staked in a parking garage and the deed to a Chicago nightclub lands in his lap with a clause he can't read. The club has a tenant. Sera Delgado, werewolf enforcer, has been paying rent to a dead man for six years and is not moving out. The contract says they share the bloodline room every full moon. The contract says neither one of them can sell without the other. Someone has hired hunters to shake them loose, and the buyer is a councilman Milo has owed a favor to since 1898. Paying the favor means losing everything he inherited. Refusing it means losing Sera. A dark urban paranormal romance with fangs, rent disputes, and a moon on the calendar.

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.

The truce between the Leinster pack and the surrounding towns was renewed in 1911 by a marriage. It's due again, and I applied by accident. They gave me a stone house on a hill, three rooms, a kitchen with a cold tap, and a husband who sleeps four hours and doesn't cast a reflection in the east window. I'm a botanist. I observe. I took notes. For three months, the notes were empty. In the fourth, I found the greenhouse - full of a flowering hybrid I published a decade ago, growing in a climate it has no business surviving. He planted it from a cutting I gave a stranger at a conference, before I knew the pack existed. When the renewal council arrived, they hadn't come to confirm the marriage. They had come to read me a second condition. I read the dissolution clause aloud, with my hand on his arm, and refused to sign. A forced marriage lycan romance about a truce and the woman who declined to be one of its terms.

Maggie Sorensen's aunt left her a bakery, a mortgage she can't pay, and a debt to a man who has just died of poisoned tea. Marcus Blackwood owns half of Portland and every reason to want his grandfather gone. The district attorney is circling. His lawyers have a fix - marry someone credible and quick, and let the alibi do the rest. Maggie needs the bakery's building and can't refuse the deed he's offering. The wedding is at four p.m. The bride is reading the police file by six. The police missed the tea service. The tox screen missed the timing. The housekeeper, who has been with the family for forty years, missed nothing at all - and Maggie is about to ask her the wrong question at the right time. She married him for an alibi. Now she has to prove he isn't a killer - or prove who is.

Der Friedensvertrag zwischen dem Leinster-Rudel und den umliegenden Städten wurde 1911 durch eine Heirat besiegelt. Jetzt ist es wieder so weit und ich habe mich aus Versehen beworben. Sie gaben mir ein Steinhaus auf einem Hügel, drei Zimmer, eine Küche mit Kaltwasserhahn und einen Ehemann, der vier Stunden schläft und sich im Ostfenster nicht spiegelt. Ich bin Botanikerin. Ich beobachte. Ich habe Notizen gemacht. Drei Monate lang blieben die Seiten leer. Im vierten fand ich das Gewächshaus voller blühender Hybriden, die ich vor zehn Jahren verffentlicht habe, in einem Klima, in dem sie unmglich überleben dürften. Er hat sie aus einem Steckling gezogen, den ich vor Jahren auf einer Tagung einem Fremden gab, lange bevor ich wusste, dass es das Rudel gibt. Als der Rat zur Erneuerung anreiste, kam er nicht, um die Ehe zu bestätigen. Er kam, um mir eine zweite Bedingung zu verlesen. Ich las die Auflsungsklausel laut vor, die Hand auf seinem Arm, und weigerte mich zu unterschreiben. Ein Lykaner-Liebesroman über einen Friedensvertrag und die Frau, die sich weigerte, einer seiner Bedingungen zu sein.

Chiara Bruno marries into the family that took her grove, and is shown the trees on her wedding night like they were part of the dowry. Her husband is dying. His nephew runs the estate and wants her gone. But Chiara grew up on soil, and she knows a year of bad pressings when she tastes one. One harvest is all she asks for. She rewrites the contract with the Palermo buyer, gets the family's oil into Milan, and makes an enemy of the nephew who used to sign the checks. Then the press burns at night, and Chiara does not send men. She sends paper. Blood and olive grow from the same ground, and she intends to be the one who decides which.

The chairman of the Black Hollow Creek centennial committee is dead in the livestock pavilion, and the murder weapon is a branding iron from Josie Vance's own store. Her brother is in county lockup, the sheriff isn't looking too hard at anyone else, and the Vescari family owns most of the land, most of the judges, and most of the secrets. Marco Vescari is the family's lawyer, a man who left Black Hollow Creek at eighteen and came back to keep his uncle out of prison. He walks into Josie's feed store and offers to help. Together they uncover forty years of forged deeds, one dead clerk, and a sheriff who's been taking money to look the other way. Josie solves the case with town gossip and a hidden land grant. Marco solves it by turning in his own blood. In Black Hollow Creek, justice and family are the same word. This time they mean it.

Chiara Bruno heiratet in die Familie ein, die ihr Olivenhain genommen hat. Am Hochzeitsabend werden ihr die Bäume gezeigt, als wären sie Teil der Mitgift. Ihr Mann liegt im Sterben. Sein Neffe führt das Gut und will sie loswerden. Doch Chiara ist mit der Erde aufgewachsen und erkennt eine schlechte Ernte, wenn sie sie schmeckt. Sie bittet um eine einzige Ernte. Sie schreibt den Vertrag mit dem Käufer aus Palermo neu, bringt das Öl der Familie nach Mailand und macht sich den Neffen zum Feind, der früher die Schecks unterschrieben hat. Dann brennt die Presse bei Nacht, und Chiara schickt keine Männer. Sie schickt Papier. Blut und Olive wachsen aus demselben Boden, und sie will diejenige sein, die entscheidet, welche Frucht geerntet wird.

Dorrie Kane moves to Elm Grove to reopen her late aunt's bindery and is three days in when the village librarian is found dead under a collapsed bookcase with a 1978 edition of a local history tucked under his arm. The police call it an accident. Dorrie has repaired a thousand spines and knows exactly how a shelf fails when it has been helped. With two apprentices - a teenage ghost-story blogger and a retired postmistress with better intelligence than the constabulary - Dorrie follows the damaged book through the reading-room committee, every one of whom subscribed to that edition and every one of whom has a reason the old mill-pond deed should stay quiet. Between rebinding commissions and the village fête, Dorrie finds four razored pages hidden inside a hollowed spine on her own shelf - and a murderer who cannot bear to hear them read aloud. First in a warm, craft-loving cozy mystery series set in a village where nothing is ever quite repaired.

I was the club's medic. I patched Kade Warren's cuts, warmed his bed, and loved him in secret. Then I found out I was pregnant, calculated the odds of raising a child in the Black Spoke MC, and ran. Seven years and twelve states later, a highway accident brings me back to his territory - with our daughter in the passenger seat. Kade sees her green eyes and knows. He wants us. The club wants me gone. And the one thing I promised myself I'd never do - trust a biker with my life - is the only thing that can save us now. This time, I'm not running. I'm riding.

Elena Ferrari's father owed a debt he couldn't cover in cash. So he paid in daughter. Matteo Rinaldi signed the papers in a warehouse with two witnesses and a gun on the table. He didn't want a wife. He wanted the Ferrari shipping lanes and the leverage of a hostage who would behave. He gave her a locked wing, a guard at the door, and nine days to understand the rules. She used all nine. By the end of them she had the house mapped, the cook on her side, and a file that could burn her father's empire to the foundation. She didn't run with it. She laid it on Matteo's desk and named her price: a real marriage, with real terms, and a seat at the table where the decisions get made. He should have said no. He said yes. A captive arranged marriage romance set in the cold rooms and colder loyalties of a crime family, for readers who like their devotion earned in blood.

Frosthold Academy takes disgraced heirs. Ines Varady isn't an heir-she's a forgery. When a binding spell misfires, she's tethered to three men who should have ruined her: the ice-fae whose family owns her debt, a shadow envoy pretending to be neutral, and a groundskeeper's son with hidden power. The tether shares everything. Magic. Pain. And every secret the dean buried under the lake. Someone wants Ines dead before midwinter. Her three bindings have other plans. She came to Frosthold to survive one semester. She's leaving with three tethers and a list.

Eva Mironova tattoos the people other tattooists won't. One of them pays cash, never speaks, and has been sitting for the same back piece for three years. She has never asked his name. Then a pakhan's son is shot in a parked car and every witness turns up dead. Eva is the only person who can say where Viktor Rybakov was that night. Saying so will kill her. Not saying so will kill him. So Viktor does the one thing no one in the family planned for. He marries her. Not for love. Not for a green card. For an alibi a court can check. What neither of them plans for is everything after - the cousins watching, the Chechens circling, and a tattoo artist who starts drawing a future she wasn't supposed to want.

Nadia Ferraro begrub ihren Vater an einem Dienstag. Am Freitag war sie verheiratet. Vitale Ruscetti verhandelt nicht. Er nimmt. Zwei Schmuggelrouten, eine Hochzeit, eine Frau, die ihn bestiehlt, seit sie sich kennen. Er weiß es. Seit der dritten Woche. Was er nicht versteht: Warum er das Hauptbuch geschlossen hält. Nadia hat zwei Jahre lang Geld abgezweigt, einen Bruder in Schulden und ein Geheimnis, das unter ihren Rippen wächst und sie beide umbringen wird, wenn ihr Onkel zuerst davon erfährt. Das Vernünftige wäre zu fliehen. Doch die Ruscetti-Art ist zu bleiben und die Ehe tragfähig zu machen. Als ihre eigene Familie die Routen, das Kind und sie fordert, muss Vitale entscheiden, ob der Vertrag die Ehe ist oder die Frau darin. Er wählt die Frau. Es kostet ihn seinen Namen. Eine erzwungene Ehe, ein geheimes Baby Mafia-Romance für Leserinnen, die ihre Ehemänner gefährlich und ihre Enden verdient mgen.

Reese Calder is twenty-eight and the youngest project lead Kestrel Design has ever hired. Her boss is the legendary Callum Voss, who has drawn the skyline of three cities and has never once been wrong in a review. Until now. When Reese walks into his office after midnight and finds him struggling to hold a pencil steady, Callum offers her a deal: run his biggest commission quietly, and he'll make her a partner by spring. Tell no one. Not her mentor. Not the board. What begins as a secret becomes a habit, then a risk neither of them can price out. When the project is sabotaged from inside, Callum does the one thing he's never done - takes the fall. An age-gap office romance about two architects who can design anything except a way out.

Elias Voss was meant to die at Vantage with the rest of his squad. Instead the Kharzhan pulled him out of the pen and handed him to the Nhar - the warlord who has been dropping Earth's ships into the sea one by one. The Nhar doesn't want a prisoner. He wants a mate, the end of a breeding program two generations long, and Elias is the last compatible human standing. Elias has no way out, a body turning into something he didn't agree to, and a Kharzhan council that would rather glass Earth than sign a peace. The only person who has ever told him the truth is the warlord he was raised to hate. When a rival general moves to take the fleet, Elias finds out exactly what the Nhar will burn to keep him. A dark MM sci-fi romance with an alien warlord who does not apologize and a human who refuses to be saved.

My father owed a number he could not pay, so on a Tuesday morning I stood in a law office in Newark and signed my name next to Ruslan Agapov's. Two witnesses, one notary, no flowers. He got the freight company. I got the trucks, the invoices, and the accounts, and the first thing I did as a married woman was tell my new husband I would not be changing my name. He did not argue. He moved into the office down the hall. He ran his audits across my desk. And then I found a payment in the books with a signature I recognized, and I made the mistake every woman in my position makes: I decided I could handle it myself. I met the thief in a diner and cut a deal he had no intention of honoring. Now I'm in the back of a truck in Elizabeth, my husband is on his way with a stack of papers and a lighter, and I have to figure out which of us is going to walk out of this with the company.

Mein Vater schuldete eine Summe, die er nicht bezahlen konnte, also stand ich an einem Dienstagmorgen in einer Anwaltskanzlei in Newark und setzte meine Unterschrift neben die von Ruslan Agapov. Zwei Zeugen, ein Notar, keine Blumen. Er bekam die Frachtgesellschaft. Ich bekam die Lastwagen, die Rechnungen und die Konten, und das Erste, was ich als verheiratete Frau tat, war meinem neuen Ehemann zu sagen, dass ich meinen Namen nicht ändern würde. Er widersprach nicht. Er zog in das Büro am Ende des Flurs. Er führte seine Prüfungen an meinem Schreibtisch durch. Und dann fand ich eine Zahlung in den Büchern mit einer Unterschrift, die ich kannte, und ich machte den Fehler, den jede Frau in meiner Position macht: Ich beschloss, es selbst zu regeln. Ich traf den Dieb in einem Diner und handelte einen Deal aus, den er nicht die Absicht hatte einzuhalten. Jetzt sitze ich auf der Ladefläche eines Lastwagens in Elizabeth, mein Ehemann ist mit einem Stapel Papiere und einem Feuerzeug auf dem Weg, und ich muss herausfinden, wer von uns mit der Firma hier rausgeht.

Nadia Ferraro buried her father on a Tuesday. By Friday she was married. Vitale Ruscetti doesn't negotiate. He acquires. Two smuggling routes, one wedding, one wife who has been stealing from him since before they met. He knows. He's known since the third week. What he can't figure out is why he keeps the ledger closed. Nadia has two years of skimmed money, a brother in debt, and a secret growing under her ribs that will get them both killed if her uncle gets to it first. The smart move is to run. The Ruscetti move is to stay and make the marriage load-bearing. When her own family comes for the routes, the child, and her, Vitale has to decide whether the contract is the marriage or the woman inside it. He picks the woman. It costs him the name. A forced marriage, secret baby mafia romance for readers who like their husbands dangerous and their endings earned.

Every twenty years the desert world of Anhar takes one bride from Earth. Amara Boateng volunteers because she is a hydrologist, and the river is the only thing anyone talks about. She expects a ceremony. She does not expect Khasir, an Anhari water-shaper who has spent three years dodging the tribute lottery, and whose bond ignites the moment she steps off the transport. He wants her to go home. He is too late. Under the temple, in tunnels no one shows brides, Amara finds the truth about the tribute, the river, and four hundred years of theft. She came to map an aquifer. She is leaving with a planet's confession and one very cold alien in tow.