Willa Dain has known for three years that Kade Mercer is her fated mate. She has never said it out loud. He is the Alpha's heir. She is the omega who mends nets and sleeps in the cold wing with the orphans.Then the Moon Rite comes, and Kade says the words in front of the entire pack. I reject you.The bond is supposed to die.The man walks away free. His wolf doesn't.On the first full moon after the rejection, something comes to the edge of her window. His eyes, his size, the old scar down his jaw. It doesn't hate her. It doesn't leave until dawn. And by morning Kade Mercer is standing in her doorway with no memory of the night, asking her what she did to him.She has no answer. But the elders do.Because the rite Kade used to cast her out wasn't written by the pack. It was written by her grandmother. And every Alpha for four hundred years has been quietly marrying, stealing, and killing her bloodline to keep it secret.They thought they had finished with the Dains. They were wrong.

The day Ronan Ash took the Alpha's seat, he rejected me in front of the whole pack. He didn't even raise his voice. He read the words off the old formula like he was filing paperwork. That was worse. My mark burned out. My palm split open on the stone floor. Then I saw his hand. Same wound. Same blood. Twice as much. I thought he cut himself to break the bond. It took me three years to learn there is no cut. There is no ritual. There is only this — Ronan Ash is my mate. He bit me, and he didn't finish. And every wound I take, he takes twice. The pack calls me Half. I'm the girl whose wolf never came. I'm the archivist nobody notices, and three years later I found the old page that explains what he is. So I'm going to make him pay. One small cut at a time. And I'm going to make him watch me do it. The only thing I still can't explain is why he lets me.

What I Forget, He Keeps Nine days after they buried her mother, Maren Voss cut her own palm open in the grove and finished the words. She is the tenth woman in her family to do it. The job is simple and old. Every month, she binds the lone wolf of the north woods back into a man. Her blood, her hand against the burn on his chest, four lines in a language nobody has ever taught her to read. If she stops, he stops being a man, and everyone still alive in the valley that night will wish they were not. The book says the binding has a price. It does not say what. Maren finds out on the walk home. She reaches for her mother's funeral and the day is not there. She was present. She signed the papers. She stood in the rain and watched the box go down, and every one of those facts is true, and none of them are inside her anymore. One binding, one memory, gone, and the wolf knows which one it will take next, and he is not going to tell her. He has been alive for two hundred years. Nine witches have stood where she is standing. He remembers each of them, all of it, every year of every life they spent keeping him human, and he can tell her which one made it as far as the bus stop before she turned around and came back up the hill. He also remembers what her mother said in March. She made him promise to hold it until Maren had already spoken the last word out loud, because she knew her daughter would never forgive her any other way. Walking down the hill, Maren has her mother's voice in her ear and her mother's handprint on a stranger's chest, and one question she cannot put down: if the binding is a mercy, why did her mother spend her last four years quietly looking for someone to replace her? The answer is under the valley, and under the water, and stamped into the wolf's ribs in a line of numbers that is not a scar. It has been buried for two hundred years, one woman at a time, and Maren is the next one asked to pay. She has eleven more months of rope. What I Forget, He Keeps is a slow-burn paranormal romance about a wolf who remembers everything, a witch who is forgetting fast, and the one memory at the bottom of it all that two centuries of dead women have been paying to keep buried.