PREMISE Lena Hartwell has always done what was expected of her. Dutiful, quiet, and achingly lonely, she has spent her twenty-four years living on the boundary of the Ashveil Forest — a place locals whisper about and wise people avoid after dark. When her dying father confesses a decades-old debt to the most feared man in the region — Aldric Voss, Alpha of the Ashveil Pack — Lena discovers the price of that debt is her. Not her money. Not her land. Her hand in marriage — to his son. Zephyr Voss is everything the rumors promised and more. Tall enough to block out the sun. Eyes the color of a storm rolling over mountains — grey, shifting, dangerous. He says little. Smiles less. And looks at Lena the way a wolf looks at the only warm thing in a frozen wilderness. He doesn’t want a wife. She doesn’t want a stranger for a husband. But the moment his fingers close around hers at the ceremony — warm, certain, electric — something ancient stirs between them. A recognition that bypasses the mind entirely and speaks only to the body. To the soul. The pack calls it the Mating Pull. Zephyr calls it a complication. Lena doesn’t have a word for it yet — only the feeling of it, spreading through her like wildfire every time he’s near. Their marriage begins as a transaction. Cold rooms, careful distances, unspoken rules. But Zephyr’s control is not infinite. And Lena, for all her quietness, is not as fragile as she looks. Night by night, the distance closes. Touch by touch, the walls come down. And when the full moon rises over Ashveil — raw, swollen, blazing — neither of them will be able to pretend any longer. She was given to him as payment. He will spend the rest of his life making sure she never feels like a debt.