I spent four years trying to put the Caldera brothers in prison. Then someone on my own side tried to put me in a body bag, and the only people who came for me were the three men I was hunting. Now I'm handcuffed to a filing cabinet in my own evidence room with Miguel, Dante, and Rafael on the other side of the door. The building is about to flood with cops who've been told I'm dirty. My key card is dead. My partner won't answer. And the eldest Caldera just told me that as long as I'm chained to this room, he's not leaving it without me. Cuffed in the Evidence Room is an enemies to lovers why choose romance with three brothers, one very sharp detective, and a betrayal that runs all the way up her own chain of command.

Neun Jahre Ehe. Drei davon schläft sie allein. Und jetzt hat er ein Buch über eine Frau geschrieben, die nicht sie ist. Nora Vance ist seit fast einem Jahrzehnt die perfekte Frau eines Milliardärs die Galakleider, die Vorstandsdinner, das Lächeln, das sie hält, bis die Autotür zufällt. Als Adrians Memoiren an die Presse durchsickern, rechnet sie mit einem Skandal. Sie rechnet nicht damit, dass das Buch von einer anderen handelt. Eine tote erste Frau. Ein Manuskript mit zweihundert Seiten. Eine Liebesgeschichte, die Adrian drei Jahre lang heimlich geschrieben hat, während Nora zwlf Türen weiter schlief. Sie hinterlässt ihm eine Nachricht und die Adresse eines Farmhauses. Sie erwartet nicht, dass er ihr folgt. Eingeschneit in Vermont, ohne Strom, ohne Personal, ohne Ausreden führen sie endlich das Gespräch, das neun Jahre Wohlstand unmglich gemacht haben. Was Adrian gesteht, wird ihr das Herz ein zweites Mal brechen. Was er danach tut, knnte es heilen. Für Leserinnen, die einen Milliardär lieben, der in die Knie geht.

Margot Vance verließ Wickford mit neunzehn Jahren und schwor sich, nie zurückzukehren. Sie kommt zurück, um ihre Mutter zu beerdigen und das Haus zu verkaufen - nicht, um ausgerechnet auf Sam Okafor zu treffen, der mit fünfzig Jahren noch genau dort steht, wo sie ihn verlassen hat. Vor zweiundzwanzig Jahren war er der beste Freund ihres Bruders und der einzige Mensch, der sie wirklich sah. Vor zweiundzwanzig Jahren hat sie sich nicht verabschiedet. Jetzt ist der Verlauf der Obstwuchsgrenze strittig, die Oktoberstürme haben früh begonnen, und der Mann, vor dem sie geflohen ist, steht mit einem Krug Apfelwein und einer Liste von Dingen, die sie ihm schuldet, auf ihrer Veranda. Das Gewicht des Oktobers ist ein Second-Chance-Roman mit Altersunterschied über zweite Chancen, die zwei Jahrzehnte zu spät kommen - und sich als genau rechtzeitig erweisen.

Bei Kestrel Broadcasting gilt eine eiserne Regel: Wenn der neue Besitzer das Gebäude betritt, aktualisierst du deinen Lebenslauf. Tessa Vaughn tut genau das. Dann liest Nolan Rourke ihren Lebenslauf, sieht auf und übergibt ihr die Morgenshow. Er ist zweiundzwanzig Jahre älter. Er ist ihr Boss. Er hat seit 2013 in keiner Besprechung mehr gelächelt. Und er setzt seinen gesamten Sanierungsplan auf eine Frau, an die niemand im Sender geglaubt hat. Sie kann eine Nachrichtenredaktion leiten. Sie kann sinkende Quoten retten. Aber sie kann offenbar nicht aufhren, daran zu denken, wie er ihren Namen ausspricht. Die Show ist siebzehn Monate von der Absetzung entfernt. Die Anziehung ist siebzehn Tage davon entfernt, unkontrollierbar zu werden. Und der Vorstand beobachtet beides.

Gin Bhavsar hat sechzehn Tage, um den Namen ihres Vaters zu retten. Der einzige Mann, der die Unterlagen dafür hat, ist Ashwin Rao Milliardär, Schifffahrtserbe und der Bräutigam, den sie vor elf Jahren vor dem Altar stehen ließ. Sein Preis ist einfach. Ein neunzig Tage gültiger Verlobungsvertrag. Öffentlich. Fotografiert. Professionell. Es gibt eine Klausel auf Seite neun, die alles verändert. Gin findet sie nach Cork, nach dem Sturm, nach der Nacht, in der sie beide aufhrten, so zu tun, als wäre das Ganze nur Papierkram. Jetzt nennt sie ihn einen Dieb vor seinem eigenen Vorstand und geht mit nichts davon. Und Ashwin wird herausfinden, wie teuer es ist, der Mann zu sein, der sie zweimal gebrochen hat.

Ravyn Okonkwo hat sich nicht an Cinderhall beworben. Sie wurde zwangsrekrutiert die Außenseiterin, die jedes Jahr als Opfer in die Alpha-Prüfungen geworfen wird, damit die Zahlen stimmen. Zwlf Wochen. Eine Gewinnerin. Alle anderen gehen in einem Sarg nach Hause. Die erste Woche überlebt sie durch Betrug. In der zweiten Woche beginnen drei Mitstreiter, sie am Leben zu halten. Ein Lwe, der sie als Waffe will. Ein Schakal-Duellant, der sie als Partnerin will. Und ein Arzt, der sie aus Gründen am Leben halten will, die er nicht nennt. Dann findet Ravyn den Käfig unter der Arena. Die Prüfungen krnen keinen Anführer. Die Prüfungen füttern eine Bestie, und der Rat tut das seit der Gründung. Sie kann den Thron gewinnen. Oder sie kann den Ritus vor zwlf Rudeln niederbrennen und sich an drei Männer binden, die der Rat ihr Leben lang geächtet hat. Ein abgeschlossener Reverse-Harem-Liebesroman an einer Gestaltwandler-Akademie. Erster Band einer Reihe.

Vor vierzehn Monaten hat Nadia Okonjo ihren Milliardärs-Ehemann verlassen ohne einen einzigen Blick zurück. Sie hatte die Klausel vergessen. Tief in dem Ehevertrag, den ihre Anwälte nur überflogen haben, steht ein einziger Satz: Bevor einer der beiden die Scheidung einreichen darf, müssen sie eine ganze Saison lang unter einem Dach leben. Keine Schlupflcher. Keine Verlängerung. Jetzt packt Nadia ihre Koffer in dem Haus in Montecito aus mit einem Mann, den sie nicht ausstehen kann, einem Hund, der sie beide liebt, und neunzig Tagen, um zu beweisen, dass die Klausel sinnlos ist. Doch West ist nicht mehr der Mann, den sie verlassen hat. Er ist ruhiger. Er hrt zu. Und irgendwo zwischen der gemeinsamen Küche und einem Begräbnis, das keiner von ihnen geplant hat, beginnt Nadia zu ahnen, dass ihre Ehe vielleicht nicht so geendet ist, wie sie es in Erinnerung hat. Ein Herbst. Eine Klausel. Eine letzte Chance, es herauszufinden.

Elf Jahre lang führte Ruth Calder den Abschleppdienst, während ihr Mann den Ironwood-Charter leitete. Er starb im Büro, das Telefon noch in der Hand, und der Club kam wegen der Schlüssel, bevor das Begräbnis stattgefunden hatte - denn die elf Morgen hinter der Werkstatt stehen in ihren Büchern, seit Ruth seinen Ring trug. Bracken Doyle ist jetzt Präsident, elf Jahre jünger, ein Mann, den ihr Ehemann geformt hat. Einmal hat er sie gewarnt und es nicht so gemeint. Beim zweiten Mal hat er es ernst gemeint. Dann fing er an, ihre Trucks zu reparieren. Achtzehn Monate Abschleppaufträge, ein Brand und ein zweites Buch in einer Kühlbox später muss Ruth entscheiden, was sie mit dem Einzigen tun soll, das ihr Mann ihr hinterlassen hat und das sie wirklich wollte - seinem Charter. Ein Biker-Roman über eine Heldin in ihren Vierzigern, die niemandes Old Lady ist.

Faye Okafor ist zurückgekehrt, um das heruntergekommene Seehaus ihrer Großmutter zu verkaufen und bis August wieder zu verschwinden. Doch das Dach hat andere Pläne. Ebenso die Handwerker: Ren, der alles langsam und gründlich repariert, und Casimir, der das Grundstück kaufen und einen Weinberg anlegen will. Und auch der stille Alpha, der ihr jeden Morgen im Morgengrauen Zedernholz auf die Veranda legt und behauptet, er sei es nicht gewesen. Als drei Tage Dauerregen die vier im Haus einschließen mit nur einer funktionierenden Steckdose , entscheidet sich Fayes erste Hitze seit zehn Jahren, ausgerechnet jetzt zu kommen. Kleinstädte reden. Kleinstädte verleihen aber auch Geld, wenn man richtig fragt und einen Plan vorlegt. Faye hat einen Plan, drei Alphas und einen Namen auf einer Urkunde, die noch nicht ihr gehrt. Sie wird eine grßere Veranda brauchen.

June Halloran has spent her whole life being the responsible one. One night off shouldn't cost her everything. She was supposed to marry the man everyone wanted her to marry. Instead she drove to the Longhorn and took home a stranger with rough hands and no idea who she was. His name was Eli. He was only in town for the summer. Then her father introduced the new foreman at Sunday dinner, and June's one night learned her name, her classroom, and her father's phone number. Now there's a baby coming, a demolition crew working across from the school, and a town that can count. June has been dependable her entire life. She's never once been brave. She's about to find out what it costs to want something out loud.

Faye Okafor came home to sell her grandmother's wreck of a lake property and leave by August. The roof has other plans. So do the contractors - Ren, who fixes things slowly and correctly, and Casimir, who wants to buy the land and put a vineyard on it. And so does the quiet alpha who keeps leaving cedar on her porch at dawn and pretending it wasn't him. Then three days of rain strand all four of them in a house with one working outlet, and Faye's first heat in a decade decides to arrive. Small towns talk. Small towns also lend money, if you ask right and bring a plan. Faye has a plan, three alphas, and a name on a deed that isn't hers yet. She is going to need a bigger porch.

Poppy Adeyemi has survived worse than Elias Vale. She's just not sure when. Elias runs his family's vineyard like a man who's been burned by everyone who ever loved him. He doesn't want a new events coordinator. He definitely doesn't want to be engaged to her by Friday. But the board has a clause: married by forty, or the vineyard goes to his cousin. And Poppy accidentally told the biggest buyer in the state that she's the fiancée. So they make a deal. Eight weeks. One harvest. No feelings. Poppy keeps the schedule running through a storm that takes out half the trellis. Elias keeps her contract in his desk drawer. Neither of them mentions the barrel room, or the name still chalked on the wall, or the kiss that wasn't for anyone. When the paperwork comes due, Elias has to choose: the vineyard he's spent his life protecting, or the woman who fixed it.

Ravyn Okonkwo didn't apply to Cinderhall. She was conscripted - the sacrificial outsider the academy slots into the Alpha Trials every year to make the numbers work. Twelve weeks. One winner. Everybody else goes home in a box. She survives week one by cheating. Week two, three competitors start keeping her alive anyway. A lion frontrunner who wants her as a weapon. A jackal duelist who wants her as a partner. And a physician who wants her alive for reasons he won't say. Then Ravyn finds the cage under the arena. The trials don't crown a leader. The trials feed a beast, and the council has been doing it since the founding. She can win the throne. Or she can burn the rite down in front of twelve packs - and bind herself to three men the council outlawed her whole life. A full-length reverse harem shifter academy romance. First in series.

Wren Okafor knows every regular at the Holler - their orders, their heartbreaks, their secrets. She keeps them in a battered notebook behind the register. What she doesn't keep is the name of the man who spent one impossible weekend with her last fall, because she never asked. Now he's back in Copper Hollow, buying the empty hardware store like he belongs here, and Wren is eight weeks pregnant with a man she barely knows. Jude Ramsey came to town to settle his late father's debts. He didn't plan to stay. He didn't plan to fall for a woman with secrets and a coffee grinder that screams. But Copper Hollow has a way of keeping people, and a blizzard has a way of telling the truth. A small-town accidental pregnancy romance about second chances, first coffees, and the family you build over the counter.

Nine years of marriage. Three of them sleeping alone. And now he's written a book about a woman who isn't me. Nora Vance has been the perfect billionaire's wife for nearly a decade - the gala gowns, the board dinners, the smile she holds until the car door shuts. So when Adrian's memoir leaks to the press, she expects scandal. She doesn't expect the book to be about someone else entirely. A dead first wife. A manuscript two hundred pages long. A love story Adrian has been writing in secret for three years while Nora slept twelve doors down. She leaves him a note and a farmhouse address. She doesn't expect him to follow. Snowbound in Vermont with no power, no staff, and no excuses, they finally have the conversation nine years of wealth made impossible. What Adrian confesses will break her heart a second time. What he does about it might heal it. For readers who love a billionaire husband brought to his knees.

Josie Calder has spent four years holding her family's ranch together with baling wire and stubbornness. Now the bank wants its money, the creek's been diverted upstream, and the man who owns the water is standing at her gate in a Range Rover that costs more than her herd. Whit Blackwood bought twelve thousand acres to disappear. He didn't count on the woman next door, her failing ranch, or the clause in his grandfather's trust that requires a wife by his seventieth birthday. He offers Josie a deal: eighteen months, her land free and clear, and his lawyers on her water rights. She marries him in the county courthouse in her father's old boots. He learns to muck a stall. The developer offers her two million to call it fraud - and Josie tears the paper up in front of the clerk. Eighteen months was never going to be enough.

Josie Calder has spent four years holding her family's ranch together with baling wire and stubbornness. Now the bank wants its money, the creek's been diverted upstream, and the man who owns the water is standing at her gate in a Range Rover that costs more than her herd. Whit Blackwood bought twelve thousand acres to disappear. He didn't count on the woman next door, her failing ranch, or the clause in his grandfather's trust that requires a wife by his seventieth birthday. He offers Josie a deal: eighteen months, her land free and clear, and his lawyers on her water rights. She marries him in the county courthouse in her father's old boots. He learns to muck a stall. The developer offers her two million to call it fraud - and Josie tears the paper up in front of the clerk. Eighteen months was never going to be enough.

Gin Bhavsar has sixteen days to save her father's name. The only man with the records to do it is Ashwin Rao - billionaire, shipping heir, and the groom she left at the altar eleven years ago. His price is simple. A ninety-day engagement contract. Public. Photographed. Professional. There is a clause on page nine that changes everything. Gin finds it after Cork, after the storm, after the night they both stopped pretending the whole thing was paperwork. Now she's calling him a thief in front of his own board and walking out with nothing. And Ashwin is about to find out how expensive it is to be the man who broke her twice.

I married August Hale for a board seat, in a dress I bought on sale. It was the most honest transaction of my life. Two years later we run a company together, share an apartment, and haven't had a real conversation since the honeymoon suite. Then an audit leaks. Someone rigged the merger that put August in the CEO chair, and I'm the only person with access to the files that could clear his name - or bury him. I start digging for his sake. What I find says the leak is closer to home than either of us wants to admit. His brother. His name on a signature dated before the meeting. His assistant's keycard in the server room. Now I have eleven days, a subpoena, an ex-boyfriend reporter who wants the story more than he ever wanted me, and a husband who has never once asked me for anything. Until now. I was the wife in the contract. I'm about to be the last honest one standing.

Fourteen months ago, Nadia Okonjo walked out on her billionaire husband and never looked back. She forgot about the clause. Buried in the prenup her lawyers skimmed is a single line: before either party may file, they must live together for one full season. No loopholes. No extensions. Now Nadia is unpacking in the Montecito house with a husband she can't stand, a dog who loves them both, and ninety days to prove the clause pointless. But West is not the man she left. He's quieter. He's listening. And somewhere between the shared kitchen and the funeral neither of them planned for, Nadia starts to suspect the marriage didn't end the way she remembers. One autumn. One clause. One last chance to find out.

Everyone at Kestrel Broadcasting knows the rule: when the new owner walks in, you update your résumé. Tessa Vaughn updates hers. Then Nolan Rourke reads it, looks up, and gives her the morning show. He's twenty-two years older. He's her boss. He hasn't smiled in a meeting since 2013. And he just bet his entire turnaround plan on a woman nobody at the network believed in. She can run a newsroom. She can fix a ratings slide. She cannot, apparently, stop thinking about the way he says her name. The show is seventeen months from cancellation. The attraction is seventeen days from unmanageable. And the board is watching both.

Nine years ago Cal Rourke married another woman four months after Kate Brennan told him she loved him. She left Bell Harbor and never looked back. Now her father is dead, the will names Cal executor, and Kate is clearing out the house she grew up in. Sorting the tide logbooks, she finds Cal's handwriting in two years of entries she was never supposed to see. He was learning her father. He was learning the boat. He was building a life he could offer her - and then he got scared and picked the wrong door. He has letters he never mailed. He has a boat her father trusted him with. He has one summer to prove he is not the coward who let her walk. Some men grovel with flowers. Cal Rourke grovels on the water, in front of her brother, and on his knees on her father's dock.

Margot Vance left Wickford at nineteen and swore she'd never come back. She came back to bury her mother and sell the house, not to run into Sam Okafor at the funeral, fifty years old and still standing exactly where she left him. Twenty-two years ago he was her brother's best friend and the only person who ever really saw her. Twenty-two years ago she didn't say goodbye. Now the orchard boundary is in dispute, the October storms have started early, and the man she ran from is standing on her porch with a jug of cider and a list of things she owes him. The Weight of October is an age gap reunion romance about second chances that arrive two decades late and turn out to be exactly on time.

Poppy Adeyemi hat Schlimmeres überlebt als Elias Vale. Sie ist sich nur nicht sicher, wann. Elias führt das Weingut seiner Familie wie ein Mann, der von jedem, der ihn je geliebt hat, verbrannt wurde. Er will keine neue Eventkoordinatorin. Und er will definitiv nicht, dass sie bis Freitag mit ihm verlobt ist. Doch der Vorstand hat eine Klausel: Mit vierzig verheiratet oder das Weingut geht an seinen Cousin. Und Poppy hat versehentlich dem grßten Käufer des Bundesstaates erzählt, sie sei die Verlobte. Also machen sie einen Deal. Acht Wochen. Eine Ernte. Keine Gefühle. Poppy hält den Zeitplan aufrecht, während ein Sturm die Hälfte des Spaliers zerstrt. Elias bewahrt ihren Vertrag in seiner Schreibtischschublade auf. Keiner von ihnen erwähnt den Fassraum, den Namen, der noch an der Wand steht, oder den Kuss, der für niemanden bestimmt war. Als die Papiere fällig werden, muss Elias wählen: das Weingut, das er sein Leben lang beschützt hat, oder die Frau, die es repariert hat.

She was supposed to be a trespasser he frightened off the mountain inside a week. Garrett Wainwright buried his brother in October. A flat crack in the woods that did not belong there, Caleb dropping mid-stride - four-legged one heartbeat, two-legged the next - and blood going black in the moonlight while Garrett's own shift tore out of him like a bad breath. He has spent every season since keeping humans off this land and keeping his own kin from asking the questions that would require answering. Then Lydia Hargrove comes up the fire road with a map she should have burned. She is chasing an echo - a sound recorded on this mountain that no animal makes and no machine explains. She has no idea what she has walked into the middle of. She has no idea the cabin she rented is where the last outsider learned exactly what it costs to be seen here. Garrett means to scare her off. Instead he starts learning the shape of her days. What she eats. Which trail she takes. How long she sleeps. He tells himself he is keeping watch. That this is about the mountain. It stops being about the mountain somewhere around the night he realises he would tear out the throat of anyone in his own bloodline before he let them near her. There is a Rite of the Silver Veil and an apology from a broken mouth. There is a cliff where the answers die, the weight of a territory nobody wants to inherit, and a sister who has been wearing two names for longer than anyone noticed. *He needs to be bound to us in a way that can't be broken with a signature on a confidentiality agreement.* *You want to bite her.* *I want to offer.* Then the truth arrives, and it burns the way truth does here. *You killed my father. You lied to me. You're about to tell me you did it for the greater good, and I'm about to-* He is out there fighting. Everyone is out there, bleeding, while she stands in a storage room holding a knife that belonged to a dead man and does the arithmetic of a siege. He is not letting her leave this mountain. Not ever.

Lena tilts the bowl and feeds the last of the frostfire stew to her brother. The yellow tint under Torben's skin has spread since yesterday, up from his collarbones, now creeping past his jaw. Bone-rot. There is one more serving in the pot and it is his, the way it is always his. Fallow Creek huddles under a sky the color of old iron. Thirty years of winter, and Lena has never smelled spring. Beyond the frozen river the Frostwood begins, black trees on white ground, and beyond it the ice spires of the Obsidian Palace catch the noon light like broken glass. Marta Graywood will not part with yarrow root. So Lena picks the lock on Marta's chest with a bent nail and a strip of leather, takes the map of the fae border folded inside it, and walks into the Frostwood alone with her father's dull hunting knife. A patrol finds her before she finds anything. At its head is a fae with ice-white hair and grey eyes. *I can smell the iron in your blood.* Rook Drystone is a commander in the Winter Queen's service. Fifteen winters ago he carried out an order that took a healer named Elara Marsten out of Fallow Creek, and he felt nothing while he did it, because by then he had nothing left to feel with. He had traded his heart to Venn Brightcloak after Lyra died. *He carved out my heart with a vow-knife, locked it in the Old Heart vault,* and gave him hollow strength in exchange. The mortal in his cell is Elara Marsten's daughter. Something in him cracks. What Lena wants is the Heartsbane, the healing relic she believes will cure Torben. What Rook tells her is worse than a locked door. *The Heartsbane isn't a weapon, Lena. It's a key.* It sits in the Old Heart behind a blood ward only Venn can open, and Venn has spent fifteen winters making sure no one can use it. So they travel together, and the Frostwood takes its cut: a wyvern out of the canopy, a tributary whose ice is thin where Rook cannot see it, a pool of black water, three miles of unmapped cave. Lena keeps a frostflower in her pocket that glowed when she touched it, and fire keeps rising in her hands that no mortal should have. Rook keeps discovering that he can feel the cold, the fear, and her. The Queen's heart is the true key, and breaking it breaks the winter. Someone has to carry that, and neither of them can stand what it costs the other. Romantasy: a mortal thief, a hollowed-out fae commander, and a thaw with a price attached. Closed-door.

Nora Lindstrom is arranging room keys in their numbered slots when the front door of the Lindstrom Inn swings open and a man walks in who does not belong. Not the boots. Not the jacket. The watch: silver and black, heavy on his wrist, the kind that costs more than her truck. *Mark Hartfield. Hartfield Insurance. We're doing a routine check on your property policy.* The licence in his wallet matches his face. Nothing else about him does. He photographs the roof leak, the furnace, the hairline cracks along the east foundation wall, then asks for three years of ledgers and incident reports and reads the guest book like a man reading a contract. His name is Garrett Shaw. Senior Acquisitions, Shaw Hospitality Group, and his own briefcase says so. Worse than the lie: Nora's father Edwin has been talking to Shaw Hospitality for three months without telling her, and six months ago he signed a letter of intent with a ninety-day exclusive negotiation clause in it. Nora is twenty-two years into a promise she made her mother on a scrubbed October porch, a promise she did not understand at ten years old and has never once mentioned since. The autumn bookings are down. The water heater is from 1998. And the only people offering money are the ones who want the stable turned into parking for wedding guests. So she asks for time. *Give me ninety days to review the offer.* Garrett gives it to her, starting that day, and warns her not to play games. Neither of them has accounted for Dex Thomason, who wants an ordinance passed, who took a five thousand dollar consulting check from Harold Vance, and who stands up at the town council meeting holding a document with Nora's signature on it that Nora never wrote. Or for Emma Porter, eight years old, gone from a trail above the Pine Crest Cabins in a light jacket after the temperature drops, and the two people who go up the mountain to find her. Or for Daniel. Garrett's older brother, who signed off on a structure his father wanted signed off on, took the blame for what it did, and drove into a bridge abutment three weeks later. What Nora and Garrett build over one Colorado autumn gets tested by a lawsuit alleging that her father negotiated in bad faith, and by the question of whether a man raised to close deals can stop. Then, at Christmas, in the attic, Nora opens her mother's traveling trunk and finds a bundle of letters tied with kitchen twine, addressed in her mother's hand, with a Shaw return address on the back. This is small-town contemporary romance: one inn, one promise, and a buyer who arrived under another man's name. It is the first of the Silver Creek Trilogy, it closes on a revelation rather than a tidy bow, and it is closed-door throughout.

The guard on the cot is called Corin. Rosamund Harrow has known him since childhood, and he is dying in front of her, teeth chattering, skin the colour of spoiled milk, marsh-viper venom climbing his arm in thin luminous lines that branch outward like a map of poison. Her antidote fails. So she does the thing she has spent fifteen years learning to hide. She places her bare hand flat against the wound, fingers spread, and opens. The green light comes from deep in her bones, and the venom drains out of him and into her, where it will burn for hours before she sweats it out through her palms and the soles of her feet. Corin lives. And from the doorway, a voice she did not hear arrive says: *That was beautiful.* Lenore Whitethorn makes no sound on stone floors. The Spymistress has a silver monocle, one pale grey eye, and one dark as pitch, and she has been watching Rosamund for years. She also has a conscription notice with Rosamund's brother's name on it. Aldric is a scribe apprentice with ink-stained fingers who has never held a sword, and the mortality rate for new conscripts is one in three. Lenore will have the notice rescinded, permanently. The price is Alistair Vane. The Warden of the Venom Court has crossed the canal for the Festival, auburn-haired, an iron ring in his left ear, the son of a woman the council convicted. He is making inquiries. He wants a healer with experience treating rare toxins, someone with green hands, as the rumour phrases it. Rosamund's instructions are simple: take whatever position he offers, place a listening locket where he keeps his correspondence, report every letter he writes. What she does not expect is the distillery. Copper vats, glass alembics, and a court that refines poison in order to counter it. Or the Warden looking at her across it and saying that her spymistress and his poisoner might be the same person. Or an assassin, and the question of who paid for him. When Rosamund finally tells Alistair the truth, he does not have her punished. He rides out at first light with three horses, no escort, rations for a week and a map of the Thornwall approach, and leaves behind a letter on cream vellum sealed in black wax: *You were sent to destroy me. But you chose to save me. That is the only truth that matters.* A fantasy romance of court poison, coerced loyalty and two people raised to be each other's enemy, ending in a cottage with mismatched coffee cups and a knock at the door; closed-door.

The iron gauntlets clank every time Cora shifts her weight. There are twelve of them in the line tonight, wrists in ceremonial cuffs, standing at the boundary of the clearing while the mated couples renew their vows under the full moon. *"Twelve incomplete souls, as Lorna liked to call them."* Cora is twenty-six. She has heard the same speech every year since she turned eighteen and the mating moon passed her by. Eight years of standing in this line. Tonight a child in the crowd throws a rock and splits Marta's temple open. Cora steps in front of her friend and takes the next one on the cheekbone. No one apologises, because the mateless getting pelted during the Moon-Tide is practically tradition. By the end of the night Marta Hartley is on her knees in the dirt with the charge of inciting dissent read out over her, and Gideon Hale is hauling her toward the concrete box behind the meeting hall. And in the tree line, where a hooded man with amber eyes stood watching Cora and then stepped back into the dark, there is a silver coin stamped with a raven in flight. The man is Rafe. He has been living out of the Council's reach with a folded bundle of letters in his coat, written in his sister's hand. Mira was declared fated to a man who already had a mate. Mira died at twenty-three in a hunting accident that left no witnesses and no blood. Rafe also has a list. Suspected false mates, seven names, the seventh circled with a question mark. What he does not have is anybody inside the pack. Cora wants the one thing he knows how to do. *"You teach me the echo bond ritual, and I'll help you burn the Council to the ground."* An echo bond is not fate. It is chosen, it is sealed with a witness's blood, it is weaker than the real thing, and nobody either of them has heard of has ever tried to break one. Then Lorna sets her terms: tell her where Rafe is hiding, or the whole pack watches Marta die at dawn. A shifter romance about a woman her pack has spent eight years calling incomplete, a stranger carrying a dead sister's letters, and a bond that two people build on purpose instead of waiting to be given one. The romance is closed-door.

Eight straight hours with a loupe pressed into her brow, and the red ring it leaves is not worth checking in a mirror. That is the indignity this story starts from: a woman doing exquisite work in a shop she is about to lose. Francesca sets down the tweezers and rolls her shoulders until the joints pop. The diamond sits in its prongs like a good dog, patient and expensive and not entirely hers to keep. She has set the halo just right, six smaller stones radiating around the centre, each one catching the fluorescent light. The client wants it by Friday. The client is paying enough to keep the lights on through winter. The shop smells of metal shavings and the lemon polish her father used on every display case, religiously, as though the cases mattered more than the things inside them. Rain streaks the front window and turns the street into a smear of brake lights and neon. Then a man arrives to explain that a debt is due and that his employer does not extend credit to anyone, and the name he gives lands cold in her chest. She saw Alessandro De Luca once, at a funeral three years ago. Tall, dark-haired, with a scar running where a scar should not survive. What follows: a debt she never signed, a gilded cage, a workshop full of lies, a bitter vintage, the weight of trust handed to the wrong person, a scar's confession, a first stone thrown in public, and one meal eaten without a war breaking out over it. *He lied to me. Used me. Kept me like a tool in his basement.* He gave her a gun, a key and a chance to fight back. He kissed her in the dark and promised her the shop back and told her the truth about one thing out of four. Will the promise made in that workshop hold when the people who actually own the debt come to collect? Or does Francesca take the key, take the gun, and say goodbye to the only person who ever treated her hands as an asset rather than a bill?

Giulia Fierro is doing prep at Fiore Bianco when the back door clicks. The owner locks it himself at eight. She checked it again when she came in, because habits like that are the only reason she is still alive. A man steps through in a dark suit with wet shoulders and a gun tucked behind his hip, and tells her he is not here for her. Out in the dining room, Sofia Moretti sits alone at a table for two, an untouched glass of red wine at her elbow. The don's sister comes in twice a week and always orders the same thing: linguine with clams, no cream, extra garlic. Giulia tells the man about the back hallway that comes out behind the dry cleaner's. Then she counts to three, grabs the fire extinguisher off the wall and pulls the pin. That is how a line cook who left her own surname behind ends up standing between a Moretti and a Salvini gun. Matteo Moretti is trying to hold a family together while his soldiers turn up in an alley off Canal Street and in the East River with their hands bound. His lieutenant Lorenzo Bianchi is always helpful, always early, always offering to lead, and always wearing a Patek Philippe identical to one in a photograph Giulia's father carried in his wallet. Her father was a runner. He carried messages. On the back of a photograph dated June 2019, in his own handwriting: *One more job. Then we're out.* He died the week after. Giulia had a plan of her own. Two more years of saving, a space in Queens, her own kitchen, never look back at this neighbourhood or the people who own it. What she gets instead is a compound, a brass ring with the wrong family's crest on it, a housekeeper who knows about a camera hidden behind a hanging copper pot, and a ransom note that will walk Matteo into a warehouse arranged for him by his own lieutenant. A mafia romance about kitchens, loyalty and inherited debts, ending with a restaurant that has to be real, and an offer of one year of peace written on heavy cream paper: *Show me you are worthy of the name Moretti.* Closed-door.

A telegram arrived in the summer that said his brother's aircraft had gone down, and everything Julian Croft has done since has been an argument with that piece of paper. Three hours until dawn and he is still in the briefing room, tracing a river with his fingertip. The map lies across the oak table like a corpse laid out for identification: a city divided into districts, each marked with the last known locations of safe houses, dead drops, and the men who stopped transmitting. He memorised the street names two days ago. He memorised the addresses that matter, and the routes a man might take between them if he wanted to stay alive. He also memorised the photograph in his breast pocket. Thomas grinning, one arm slung round Julian's shoulders, a beach in the summer of thirty-eight. Before the war. Before the telegram. Before the coded message from a contact placing his brother in a camp, waiting for somebody to come and get him out. Somebody. Him. Then the door opens without a knock. What follows: a trap he helped build, a wound another man is carrying without mentioning it, a marriage of spies, a gilded cage, secrets kept for the right reasons and the wrong ones, a dance of liars, a thread pulled until it comes away in the hand, and a debt that outlives the person owed. *He died believing his son was a pervert and a traitor.* Julian's vision blurs. He blinks and forces it back and asks them to write the thing down anyway. Dominic cups his jaw, feels the stubble rough against his palm, and kisses him back with everything he has: months of grief, years of everything neither of them said. They will get out of the city. They will get the brother out too, or they will not. And even then, in a war that has made liars out of every honest person in it, forgiveness is not promised to anybody in this book.