A mistake I made when I was six years old cost my parents their lives. My brother never let me forget it. He took my place in the pack, locked a steel-and-chemical collar around my throat to keep my wolf asleep, and turned me into the lowest servant in the same halls I was born to lead. By the time I turned twenty-three, I had stopped hoping for anything else. Then Alpha Cassius arrived to sign a trade agreement with my brother, and everything changed. His eyes found me in the corner of the room where servants are supposed to disappear. Something in my scent made his wolf go still in a way the whole room noticed. He listened to my brother's lies with a patience that felt more dangerous than any shout. Before the ink dried on that contract, Alpha Cassius rewrote the terms. My brother could keep his trade deal — but only if he signed me over first. Now I am riding in a silent car toward a territory I have never seen, sitting beside a man twice my size who has said maybe ten words to me. I don't know if I have been saved or simply sold to someone new. All I know is that for the first time in years, no one is watching to see if I have earned the right to eat today.

Briar Callahan has spent her whole life training to protect the people she loves. When Alpha Marcus Reyne decides she'd make the perfect way to permanently chain her father's warriors to his rule, her family runs in the middle of the night — straight toward the one pack that might actually be strong enough to stop him: her late mother's home, Stonewood. The moment Briar crosses the border, Alpha Gideon Voss feels something he buried five years ago, the night his first mate rejected him in front of his own people: a second chance. But Gideon is already promised to another woman, in a marriage that keeps three hundred allied warriors between Stonewood and all-out war. When duty forces him to deny the bond in public, Briar disappears into the night, carrying a secret that will change both their lives. Years later, an old enemy comes looking for what he lost — and Gideon is about to learn that walking away never actually meant it was over.