Vellumgate Press

She married a stranger. He was hiding her family's enemies. Elspeth MacLeod has heard the rumors: her new husband is a brute, a warlord, a man who killed his own brother. But when she arrives at his Highland keep, she finds a scarred, silent man - and a secret she was never meant to discover. Torquil MacRae is sheltering the men who murdered Elspeth's mother. He has his reasons. But Elspeth, bound by a marriage of convenience she never wanted, refuses to look away. As she uncovers Torquil's plan for justice, she must decide: is he a monster, or the only man brave enough to give her the revenge she craves? In the Highlands, secrets are deadly. But so is love.

Priya Anand works the night desk at the Bellwood Public Library and has spent two years not admitting that her favorite person is Marcus Webb, the baker who drops off day-old pastries every Tuesday. Then the library announces a midnight gala to save the children's wing, and Priya and Marcus end up running it together, testing pumpkin spice recipes in the break room at one in the morning. It is basically a relationship without the paperwork. Priya has been burned before and refuses to name it. Marcus has been patient for two years and finally asks. She panics. She says no. She spends three days miserable. On gala night the power fails, the generator holds and Marcus shows up anyway with twelve pies. A cozy fall romance about a library, a baker and the label that took two years to earn.

BreeAnn Toler has run the Magnolia Rest for nine years and has seen every kind of trouble a motel can contain. She did not expect her sister's ex-husband to walk into the office with a leather vest and a room request. Hollis Pike is forty-nine, road captain of the Devil's Loomes, and the man her family has been not talking about since 2005. He books a week. Then two. He fixes her ice machine. He teaches her spades. He looks at her like she's not a fixed problem. But Hollis comes with a club, and the club comes with Frankie - his old lady for six years, still holding a key to his trailer, still calling his phone at two in the morning to ask where he is. Frankie has opinions about the Magnolia Rest. Frankie starts telling people what it is. BreeAnn has been divorced once. She's not doing it again. But Hollis Pike has been quiet about something for twenty years, and he's about to make it loud.

My father owes the Volkov Bratva four million dollars, and I have three weeks to work it off as the pakhan's wife. Dmitri Volkov doesn't want a wife. He wants whoever is selling his shipping manifests to the feds, and he's decided I'm the only person in Brooklyn who can read a ledger without flinching. Three weeks. One room. A man who hasn't smiled since his father died. I find the mole in four days. I find something else in his files: years of medical bills, all paid, all for my father, all by him. Now the man who never wanted a bride has to decide what he wants. And I've already decided what I'm keeping.

She left him at the altar. She just didn't leave fast enough. Nine hours before her wedding to the Copper Ridge Kings' vice president, Margo Voss walks out of the compound with the boots on her feet and nothing else. The highway floods at Mercy. A rider in an unpatched kutte pulls over. Bishop Cabrera walked away from the Kings two years ago. He should keep riding. Instead he offers a woman he doesn't know a ride south, and by the time he realizes who she is, the phone calls have already started. Two hundred miles of motels and back roads. One bed, mostly. A club that will burn Oregon to get her back. Bishop has nothing left to lose except the one thing he didn't mean to want.

Miss Catherine Lorne vanished from Marchmont Hall on a Thursday afternoon, taking nothing but a small bag and the family's secrets. Two months later her sister Anne walks into the same nursery, into the same silent house, and into the same wall of polite, immovable lies. Only Colonel Edmund Marchmont seems to want the truth - and he is the one person who will not speak it, because he loved Catherine, and she refused him the day before she disappeared. As Anne uncovers a hidden ledger, a dead tenant and a payment of eighty pounds, she and Edmund are drawn into a search that will take them out of Yorkshire and force the Earl of Marchmont to face what he did. A Regency romance of secrets, sisters, and the quiet courage it takes to say what everyone has agreed not to.

Tamsin Reyes said no to Wren Halloway four years ago at a county fair, and she was right to. He was twice her age, president of the Iron Hollow MC, and the most dangerous man she had ever met. She is twenty-four now, still untouched, and her brother has borrowed money from people who don't send letters. The only door with enough weight behind it belongs to the man she turned down - and he is not interested in her gratitude. He wants a marriage of convenience, ninety days, on paper, nothing more. It stays on paper for six weeks. Then it doesn't, and Tamsin finds out she's pregnant, and remembers the one thing Wren has ever said about children - a single sentence, said once, in the dark, that she has never been able to make herself forget. She leaves at fourteen weeks with a plan and a bankroll and a two-year-old daughter he has never seen. When he finds her, he doesn't beg. He sits down on her porch and finally says the whole sentence.

Verity Quill runs the Mourning Room, a supernatural speakeasy in a converted Victorian funeral parlor in Portland, where the drinks are strong, the drapes are heavy, and the bartender cries whenever someone nearby is about to die. It is a family curse. She has never once been able to stop it. Two patrons die in two nights, and both times Verity cried and got nothing for it. Both were cataloguing the parlor's original 1880s funeral ledgers for the historical society, and someone is using those ledgers to fake a Victorian pattern of deaths. The society's archivist, Hollis, is the first person who has ever helped her read her own curse. Together they trace the murders to a board member forging haunted provenance and selling parlors to the highest bidder - and she has just locked the doors on the society's closing gala. Some curses hurt. This one is going to save a life.

Katherine Ashwood buried a husband in Portugal and nursed in a field hospital for two more years. She has come home to Dover with a pension, two trunks, and no interest in being anyone's scandal. The hospital has no matron, and the surgeon who needs one is William Carew. He is the man who amputated her husband's leg. He has never forgotten the ward, or her - the only woman who kept it standing when the orderlies ran. William needs a matron he cannot hire without raising eyebrows. Katherine will take the post under her own name, with a written agreement. No more than that. Two years on, the hospital board moves to ruin him for something that happened at Vimeiro, and Katherine is the only witness who can stop it. A regency romance of reunion and second chances, where two people who have seen the worst of each other's work decide whether they want anything more than a post.

Sable Ruel mourned her husband the way the pack expected: quietly, in the lodge kitchen, with her hands busy. What she didn't expect was the will naming a fifty-one-year-old alpha as guardian of the pack's youngest - a man she's been told her whole life not to trust. Torrin Ashgrove has led Ironwood for twenty-two winters, and his wolf is going quiet. Under pack law, an unmated alpha must step down at the spring thaw, and the rival pack across the ridge is already writing the merger terms. Sable was never allowed to shift. She intends to learn before May. What the two of them become in the snowbound months between is not the pack's business - until the thaw makes it everyone's. Some bonds are inherited. Some are claimed. Sable intends to choose hers.

Think about the last time you hesitated before a step. A wet pavement, a dim hallway, a kerb that looked a little higher than you remembered. That hesitation is information. Balance is not a talent you either have or lack. It is a skill your body rehearses every time you shift weight, turn, or catch yourself. When that rehearsal gets less practice, because of caution or illness or stiff shoes or simply fewer walks, ordinary steps start to feel less trustworthy. This workbook is built around that idea and nothing more ambitious than that. Balance is a team effort inside the body. The eyes report where the horizon is. Sensors in the inner ears notice tilt and turn. Sensors in the feet, ankles and joints report pressure and position. The brain blends those messages and asks small muscles around the ankles, hips and trunk to make constant micro-adjustments. You do not notice most of them when the system feels fresh. You notice them when it feels unsure. Tai chi slows those adjustments down until you can feel them happening. Rather than asking anyone to hop, jump or move at class pace, it asks for weight shifted deliberately, stances held briefly, and turns made slowly enough that the body has time to answer. Inside: a fall-aware setup chapter that covers the room before it covers the movement, five foundational stances taught one at a time with illustrated figures, a twenty-one-day sequence of ten-minute sessions, a chapter on what to do after day twenty-one, and a chapter for the days when practice feels hard and the honest answer is to do less rather than skip it. Every figure is described in plain language, with a note on what you should feel and what you should not. Chair-supported versions are given throughout, not tucked away at the back as an afterthought. Traditional vocabulary is used where it is useful and explained where it is not obvious, without being turned into a medical claim. What this book does not do is promise to cure anything, replace medical advice, or substitute for a clinician who knows your history. It says so in the disclaimer and it keeps saying so in the chapters. Written for older adults who want the plain version: ten minutes, a chair nearby, and a practice that gets more honest the slower it goes.

The west woods have been closed for twenty-three years. No patrols, no hunting, no wolves across that line. So when Callum Brennan's dawn patrol scents a human in the old pack ruins, he sends his enforcers home and goes to handle it himself. He finds a woman photographing a stone foundation with one standing wall, scarred by fire. She does not step back when five men come out of the trees. *"Private land?"* she says. *"Funny. The county records show this parcel as unclaimed."* Her name is Maya Connelly. She is a photographer from Portland, here for two days, chasing the only thing she has ever had of her mother: a moonstone pendant and a note that said keep her safe. She has no idea that the ruins she is standing in are where her mother died, or that the stone around her neck belonged to the man whose son is now telling her to leave. Callum is Alpha of Redwood Crest. The massacre in these trees killed his father, William, along with an uncle, two cousins, and enforcers who had served since before he was born. He has spent his whole adult life keeping that wound sealed. Now a stranger has walked straight into it carrying his father's pendant, and his wolf will not let him send her away. They strike a bargain neither of them trusts. One day. A motel room he pays for. Answers in exchange for the stone. The trouble is that Derek wants her gone. *"Derek's not my beta. He's my rival. He's been waiting for me to slip."* And across the border, Jasper Vance of Shadow Creek has been waiting far longer than that, holding something in a stone cell that Callum has no idea is still alive. What Maya inherits is not a tidy origin story. It is a journal in her mother's handwriting, a prophecy an old wolf dreamed three nights before the fire, a vault sealed with blood, and a wolf of her own that surges up unbidden in the forest and will not come when she calls it. It is also a bond she never asked for, to a man whose pack has every reason to hate her name. By the end, both packs are looking to her, the bond between them has gone quiet, and Callum has started over: asking, properly, to court her. She is training every afternoon with wolves who were raised to hate her, and she is about to leave for three months to look for something older than the vault. A shifter paranormal romance about inherited blood feuds, a sealed forest, and two people who find out too late what they are to each other, told closed-door.

In the winter of 2018 a forty-one-year-old graphic designer sat in a cramped clinic on Divisadero Street having just spent twelve hundred dollars on a functional medicine workup. The results told her to cut out gluten, dairy, sugar, eggs, soy, corn and nightshades. She did exactly that for six weeks. She bought the fourteen-dollar gluten-free bread. She swapped her morning latte for eight-dollar turmeric lattes from a cafe that played indie folk too loud. She followed every rule. She still woke up every morning with fingers swollen like sausages. *I just want one morning where I can button my shirt without wincing.* Her voice cracked on the word *one*. This book opens with that failure, and with the author's admission that he had handed out those same lists for years and watched them fail half the people who walked through his door. What replaces the list is a method. A food diary designed to find your own triggers rather than somebody else's. A three-week washout that is described honestly, including the day in the middle of it when most people want to quit and what that day actually feels like. A structured reintroduction process, one food at a time, with the timings and the record-keeping set out plainly, because a reintroduction done badly tells you nothing. Along the way: what inflammation actually feels like as opposed to what it looks like on a panel; how the gut is involved and how much of the popular account of that is oversold; label reading; the cooking methods that matter more than the ingredient swaps; and a chapter on the parts that are not food at all - sleep, stress, and the limits of what a diet can be asked to fix. The second half is practical. Fifteen-minute breakfasts. A mason-jar lunch system for people who eat at a desk. Dinners that do not require cooking twice for one household. Snacks and sweets. And a chapter on a drink most readers are overlooking. This is a book about testing rather than believing, written by somebody who stopped believing first.

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.

It was October 2016, and the call was from a man who had built a software prototype for scheduling home-health aides. Solid work, clean code. He had been asking for weeks for introductions to angel investors, and that afternoon he finally named the number: five hundred thousand dollars. *Once I have funding, I can hire a real team.* The question that came back was not about the deck. *What can you sell by Friday without a single hire?* Silence. Then: *Well, nothing. I need developers, I need -* *You need a customer. One. Just one. What's stopping you from calling three home-health agencies tomorrow and offering to set them up manually for two hundred a month?* He did not love that question. Three weeks later he had two paying customers, not because he had built more features but because he had stopped waiting for permission in the form of a wire transfer. That is the argument of the book, and the first chapter states it plainly: bootstrapping is not the thing you do when the funding does not come through. What follows is operational rather than inspirational. How to find the money before you build the product. How to generate cash in seventy-two hours. The profit-first offer architecture. Why lean does not mean cheap. Customers before branding. Selling as a form of helping rather than a personality you have to acquire. Pricing psychology written specifically for the owner-operator who is also the person delivering the work. Then the parts most founder books skip: a cash flow chapter that treats the bank balance as a navigation instrument, building a defensible position out of expertise rather than capital, competing against larger players without matching their spend, marketing automation on a small budget, the hiring paradox - when a bootstrapped business genuinely should add a person and when adding one is a way of avoiding a harder decision - revenue streams that do not require more of your hours, the profitability metrics that actually matter at this size, and a chapter on saying no, which is presented as an operating discipline rather than a matter of confidence. Written for owner-operators who intend to be profitable before they are impressive.

Six-thirty in the morning in the Mission District, and the fog hasn't burned off. Maya Chen fits her key into the lock of The Gilded Page, the brass worn smooth by her father's hands and now hers, and flips on the fluorescents. Old paper, stale coffee, a building that has been standing a long time and isn't apologizing for it. Under the counter are the bills she shoved there last week. She knows the figures by heart. She counts the days until foreclosure. Then the bell jingles and her cousin Jasper walks in wearing sneakers that cost more than she pays in rent, holding a cream envelope, his eyes fixed somewhere to the left of her face. The building is being sold out from under her. The buyer is Damon Reeves, who runs a development company from a corner office downtown, who watched his mother's suitcase go out the front door when he was twelve and wrote a single line in a leather journal that night: *Lesson One: Anyone can leave. Therefore, I need no one.* Maya saves his number in her phone under a name meant to make her smile later - *The Enemy* - and walks into his glass tower to fight him. The man she finds isn't the one she came for. Damon keeps a filing cabinet of scholarship letters, a fund in his mother's name paying tuition for kids from the Excelsior, hidden because his brother Sebastian has been documenting every soft thing he does and intends to take it to the board. Maya is hiding things too: the novels she writes and tells no one about, and Nora upstairs, whose early-onset Parkinson's is getting worse, whose hands tremble more and whose memory slips more often. *"I have Parkinson's. I'm not dead,"* Nora tells her. Jasper takes the job Sebastian offers. He hands over the debt, the medical bills, the manuscripts. *"He asked what leverage he had,"* he says, and picks up his coffee. So Maya has to choose between the man who bought her cousin's share of her family's building without asking, and the brother who registered a shell company called Arcturus Holdings to take everything from both of them. Damon has to decide whether the lesson he built his life on is worth keeping. Neither of them is good at trusting. There is a broken window with plywood over it, a hand-painted sign that reads STILL HERE, and a signed first edition tracked down through a man who knew a guy who owed a guy a favor. A contemporary billionaire romance set in San Francisco, closed-door, ending where it began - under the pendant lamp of a bookstore worth saving.

Woodsmoke, spilled ale, lanterns swinging in the birch trees. Isla Macrae is pushing through the Lochan Festival crowd on the shore of Loch Dour, looking for her brother, and when she finds Callum he is at the largest bonfire with a grill rack in front of him, a yellowing bruise on his jaw, and the alpha of Glenmorrow standing beside him. Isla came to take him home. She arrived weeks ago on the bus from Inverness and has been asking the wrong questions since, about the full moon, about why the village closes up shop after dark. Finlay McTavish has been counting. Scar across the bridge of his nose, silver eyes, and he already knows exactly who she is: *Your brother is Callum Macrae, son of Alistair Macrae, who drinks himself stupid at the Crooked Spindle three nights a week and has a bruise on his jaw that matches the one on Callum's.* Then he sets the terms. Stay for the festival. Eat the food. Dance if she wants. Then get on the bus and don't come back. Callum isn't coming. His father's grandfather was a shifter, the blood runs thin but it runs, and he would rather learn to be strong here than go back to Alistair's house. So Isla stays. She is soon standing at the eastern edge of the loch with her phone out, photographing Morag Sinclair accepting a leather pouch from Lachlan Kinloch, alpha of the rival pack whose scouts are already in the area. Morag wanted the mate bond Finlay never offered her. For taking it instead, Isla gets a glass vial of silverbane shattered across her shoulder and a crescent-moon scar that will not fade. What she does not yet know is why the Kinlochs want her specifically, why Mhairi the pack historian watches her the way she does, or why the starved silver wolf that comes out of the trees one night, ribs showing, one ear torn, presses a cold nose into her outstretched hand as though it knows her. It does. And when that wolf dies in the frost with a blade in her throat, Isla is left holding a name she never asked for, a village that does not want a human leading it, and silver poison working through Finlay's blood that only the Binding will draw out, with true names said aloud and palms cut, and no half-truths and no hesitation allowed. A Highland shifter romance about pack law, a traitor inside the ranks, and a woman told she doesn't belong who ends up rewriting the rule that says so. Closed-door.

The Thornwick Castle courtyard blazes with paper lanterns, and Rosalind Ashworth is wearing borrowed amber silk that pulls across her ribs with every breath. She is nineteen. She has been rehearsing composure her whole life, and tonight she needs one thing from the Alpha King: a way into his greenhouse. Her sister Annabel is dying of moonlung. *The Heartbloom is the only cure for moonlung. And the only Heartbloom in Eldmoor grows in the royal greenhouse.* A guard arrives from the Ashworth townhouse with the healer's verdict: *you need the Heartbloom within the week.* Then King Ronan St. Clair, who wears black with silver buttons and no crown, looks past every woman waiting at the dais and says her name. *Step forward.* He offers her the throne. He tells her he seeks a queen to love. And Rosalind tastes the lie. The Ashworth veritas, the family gift that lets her taste falsehood on her tongue, will not let her seal a bond with a man who is hiding something. So she pulls her hand back and recites her lineage instead: the formal rebuke, the only way an unmated female can refuse an Alpha without breaking pack law. In front of the entire court, she humiliates the one man who can open the greenhouse. What she brings him afterwards is not a marriage. It is a deal, made among the ironwood and moonstone with stolen Heartbloom sap and thorn-blood on a cloth in her hand. *A steady supply. Enough to treat my sister until she's well. In exchange, I'll help you find your traitor.* He does not accept quickly. Rosalind moves into Silverkeep as the king's living lie-detector, and every truth she turns up makes the ground less solid. Her brother Edmund has been making arrangements with Mirabelle Vance. A grey-eyed stranger in the dark turns out to be Gareth, who knows who paid for the silver blade that killed the king's first mate. And then the worst of it: *Your sister's not sick.* Annabel is being fed silver, drop by drop, by someone who wants Rosalind obedient. By the final chapters the traitor has a name, a captain lies buried under the oaks, and Ronan has drafted papers to dissolve the monarchy rather than keep Rosalind in range of the next blade. The lords come back with a counter-offer neither of them expected: *You remain Alpha King in name. But you share all decisions with Queen Rosalind as co-ruler. Equal voice. Equal authority.* A closed-door shifter romance set in the pack courts of Eldmoor, for readers who like a heroine whose gift is also her biggest liability.

Fiona MacLeod hides her brother in a hollow log forty yards into the trees, presses her palm to his forehead, and finds him too hot again. Finn is fourteen. *He's never even kissed a girl.* The curse has taken his strength, then his sight, and it is working its way toward his voice. Fiona is a healer whose whole inventory fits in one leather bag, and she has hauled him up out of the Highlands to the one place that might still hold a cure. The MacBain spring. When riders stop her on the road and ask what a woman with a healer's bag and a dead man's boots wants with the MacBain, she tells them the truth: *My brother is cursed. I need the spring water.* What she does not know yet is that the spring is poisoned, and that the man she has come to beg from is dying too. Callum MacBain is Pack Master, and the wasting curse that killed his father is in his hands now, a tremor that spreads from wrist to fingers whenever he is tired. *The wasting curse didn't just take your strength. It took your certainty.* His elders have called a vote of confidence. If he cannot call the pack spirit down at the full moon, they will replace him. Then there is Hamish. *"Hamish MacBain," he said, not offering his hand. "I'm the Master's cousin."* He is smooth about it, and reasonable, and he is the one telling the great hall that the outsider arrived and the trouble arrived with her. A letter in slanting handwriting eventually says otherwise. Hamish has been dealing with Duncan Ross, and the curse that has been killing MacBains for thirty years was never bad luck. Morag, who has been serving MacBain masters since before Callum was born, is the one who works out why the spring answers Fiona at all. Her grandmother was Elspeth MacLeod, who served as the spring's guardian before the curse took her, and who left the water locked behind her. The blood is still there. The spring recognises it. Which leaves Fiona a choice she never came for. *I came here to save my brother,* she says, standing over the black water. *I didn't come to bind myself to a pack.* The old rite is a blood oath spoken over the spring with the moon overhead, and the guardian has to speak the words willingly. There is no version of it where she saves Finn and then walks away clean. A Scottish-set wolf shifter romance told in both leads' voices, closed-door, ending on a bond made in the spring chamber with an enemy's second oath still waiting out past the hills.

Lena Vasquez has a knife against a scout's throat in a shack in the Oregon woods, asking where his pack keeps the moonpetal. He gives her one word before he bites down on the poison hidden in his collar and dies in her chair. Moonfall. Three days is what she has. Her brother Mateo is sixteen and dying of Silver Fever on a mattress in the next room, hollowed out by it, joking about the list of things he wants to get through before he goes. The only cure is moonpetal, and moonpetal grows in a sealed grove inside Shadow Pack territory, where a rogue is killed on sight. Clara, her grandmother, tells her where the standing stones are and what it will cost. *"If you're caught, don't beg. Shadow Wolves respect silence. If you beg, they'll break you slower."* Clara also lets slip something Lena never knew: she was an elder of the Shadow Pack herself, before she left. Lena crosses the border, swims the pool under the waterfall, and finds the ground between the three stones bare. The flower was moved three weeks ago. The man who moved it walks out of the shadows behind her, not into the dark but out of it, and gives his name as Dominic Rossi, Alpha of the Shadow Pack. Then he offers her a bargain. The Right of Claim. Five trials. If she survives them, the moonpetal is hers, along with her brother's life, a place in his pack, and answers to questions she has not learned to ask yet. One condition: she stops running, stops hiding, and walks into his territory as herself. Because Lena has a scar on her forearm from a failed shift at twelve and has spent her life certain her wolf never came. Dominic has just watched her vanish into shadow without shifting at all. *"You're a Shadow Wolf, Lena. You just don't know it yet."* What she walks into is more than trials. Vance Kincaid of the Red Pack wants Shadow territory and has made deals with her father's old allies to take it. A knife that looks like Dominic's turns up in Clara's wardrobe. The elders who already suspect the rogue girl are the ones who get to decide what she is. Lena stays anyway, and not to be kept safe. *"Then don't protect me. Stand beside me instead."* A wolf shifter romance set in the Oregon mountains, about a woman who came to steal a flower and the alpha who offered her a bargain instead. The romance is closed-door.

The healer's daughter is sent to beg, because the village has worked out that her life is the cheapest thing it currently owns. Orlaith MacBride scrapes the last of the feverfew into her apron pocket and steps out of her father's cottage into a grey-purple dusk smelling of woodsmoke and somebody's recent bloodletting. The thorn border at the edge of Thornhaven hums like a harp string left too long to vibrate. She has spent her entire life learning not to touch it. Tonight they send her through it. Her father has been dying for eight hundred and ninety-seven days. She has counted every one. Every soul in Thornhaven knew it was not inevitable. Every soul except her. Tadhg Byrne has not needed anything from a mortal in a very long time. He is owed a debt by every living thing inside that border and he collects in the only currency that has ever held here: bargains, struck in blood, honoured precisely to the letter and never one syllable beyond it. He expects a frightened girl. He gets a healer who reads the terms before she signs them. What follows is a bargain neither can break. A bloodstorm that traps them in the same cave. A herb exchange conducted like a negotiation between hostile states. An apology delivered in the rain by somebody who has never previously needed to make one. A test at the Thorn Fortress, a kiss in the dust, and an oath sworn at the exact midpoint of everything, when it is much too late to pretend either of them is still merely transacting. Then the blight mark begins to answer the ground, and Orlaith understands what she has actually agreed to. *Tadhg lied to me. He hurt me. He let me believe my father's death was inevitable when-* She does not finish the sentence, because the messenger arrives first, voice ragged: *The Summer Court has broken the agreement. The human's father was taken from the cottage five minutes ago.* There is a spy in the fortress and a poisoned cup already poured. Thornhaven will want to know what she gave away. It will not want to know what he did. And a fae king's word, honoured exactly, has never once meant mercy.

She was supposed to be passing through. One roll of film, a granite outcropping, out again before the weather turned. Rue Morrison presses her eye to the viewfinder and adjusts the focus ring until the rock sharpens. Moss. Lichen. Pale November light. Nothing worth the drive, nothing worth the petrol, nothing at all - - and then something moves at the very edge of the frame, and she takes the photograph she was not supposed to take. Calder has spent years ensuring this valley appears in nobody's pictures. What lives in the roots here does not survive being looked at, and historically neither do the people doing the looking. He has a system. The system has never failed. He should frighten her off the mountain inside a day. He has managed it with people considerably more persistent than one woman with a camera and no functioning sense of self-preservation. Instead she stays. She asks questions. She is not, at any point, afraid of him. There is a silver brooch belonging to somebody dead a very long time. There is a quiet act of war conducted entirely through small courtesies, and a ceasefire so fragile that both parties keep catching themselves holding their breath. There is a pit, and a promise made at the bottom of it that neither of them intended to make out loud. And there is his uncle, who has been selling this valley by degrees for years, and who will be dealt with the way an alpha deals with a traitor the moment Kael brings back proof. Then Carrow moves Wren to the station, and the arithmetic collapses. *You don't have time,* Rue says, soft and steady, with the tracker already in her hand and the plan already made and no intention whatsoever of telling him the rest of it. *I won't let her kill you.* *She won't.* Calder sounds the war council. Every able-bodied wolf, now, no exceptions. And somewhere between the price of a vision and the night she became something other than what she arrived as, he stops counting the days until she leaves and starts counting something else entirely. He tells himself he will let her go when the road clears. He will not. Not then, not after, not ever.

Mira crumbles the last of her dried wolfsbane into the mortar and counts what is left. *Five leaves left. Maybe enough for two more nights if she stretched the dosage thin.* Behind the thin wall, her brother Razvan coughs the way their mother coughed. Same rattle, same fever that never breaks, same too-bright eyes. Her mother died two years ago, just as the church bells began to ring for mass over Raven's Hollow. Mira has spent every day since apprenticed to the village hedge-witch, learning every herb that grows in the valley, and none of it touches what is eating her brother. The one plant that helps grows deep in the forest, past the boundary ward, past the iron stakes the village drove into the soil to mark where the beast's territory begins. So she crosses. What waits on the other side is a man who walks on four paws when he chooses to, bound to the trees and unable to leave them. Iancu tells her what nobody in the village ever did: her mother made a pact with the old powers and swore her firstborn would serve the forest, then ran, married a man, and had children anyway. *"The wasting sickness is the forest calling him home."* The silver pendant Mira has worn since childhood has grown into her skin. Tear it off and she bleeds out. It is one half of a locket that was broken in two, and the other half hangs at the throat of her aunt, Domnica Vornic, who stood in the doorway measuring how much broth her dying sister drank and how long she went between breaths, and who has worn that locket every day for fifteen years. Iancu is working against a clock of his own. Seven weeks until the blood moon crests the ridge. If the pact is not broken by then, he stays in wolf flesh. In the village, Sorin Cojocaru sleeps with a wolf-tooth necklace and his dreams of killing the beast. He has spent ten years learning to hunt the thing that clawed his father open, he has decided he is going to marry Mira, and he keeps turning up on the path she is trying not to be seen on. Her friend Leta Munteanu begs her to stay out of the trees. Then the pendant is torn from Mira's neck, and the seal on the curse comes off with it. *"You have until the blood moon. Bring me the pendant, and I'll let Razvan live."* A paranormal romance set in the Carpathians, with a cursed guardian, a healer who keeps walking back into the trees, an aunt with her own altar, and a village happy enough to try a woman for witchcraft. Two narrators: Mira in third person, Iancu in first. The romance is closed-door.

Rosalind Farrow has chosen the ugliest gown she owns. The wool is the color of mud, the hem drags on purpose, and the heel of her left boot is loose because she scuffed it against the carriage step that morning. In the throne room of Vanholt, twenty women wait for a Lycan King to decide which of them he will take before noon, and Rosalind has spent all week practicing a slump. *A girl who couldn't hold herself properly was a girl no king would want.* Aldric Vanholt walks the line. He passes the candidate the whole court expects him to take, and stops in front of the girl in mud-colored wool. *I said this one.* By the time the murmuring dies, guards have her brother Tomlin by the arms. He is fifteen. Aldric offers the boy his own room, a tutor, weapons training when he is old enough, and does not pretend the offer comes without a price. *But your brother's life is in your hands. Remember that.* Her mother is dying of consumption, and the king's physician can be at that bedside tonight. Rosalind stays. What Aldric wants is not a wife. The Vanholt line is cursed, and every king in it becomes the thing his people whisper about in the woods. The only anchor is a willing bride. He watched the curse take his sister Elara; he held her hand while the wolf inside her tore its way out through her skin. What he has not told his bride is what the castle chronicles say about the women who came before her. *Every generation, the king's bride dies within a year of the wedding.* Rosalind has her own reason for being inside these walls. She once crouched in the hollow of an oak in the northern woods, hands clamped over her mouth, and watched a man open her father's chest. She has just seen that face again, here, with a name attached to it. Lord Malach Vex, silver hair, one eye clouded white, taloned fingers that never stop moving. He does not only want the throne. *Your throne. Your kingdom. Your bride.* And in the small tower that overlooks the stables, Lady Cecily is watching. Aldric's cousin, at Vanholt since she was twelve, the woman who had been preparing for the Choosing her whole life. She sends up tea. She calls herself the only friend Rosalind has in the castle. *You cannot prove anything, cousin. She is fragile.* A paranormal shifter romance set in the kingdom of Verain: a cursed king, a hostage bride, a village herbalist who knew too much, and an archery contest under a Moonfall moon. Closed-door.

Morwen Carrick goes over the chain-link fence on the second rail, drops into a crouch on the pack side, and counts until the guard dog's snuffling passes. She grew up on this compound. She knows every limp, every cough, every tell in the Stoneclaw pack, and tonight she means to take her sister out of it. She finds Saoirse in the infirmary, red hair falling across her face, pressing dried yarrow into a glass jar with hands that tremble. There is a bruise along her jaw the shape of knuckles. *He hit you.* *He's alpha. He can do what he wants.* The alpha is Lachlan, and Lachlan is Morwen's uncle. There is a boat in the cove and cash enough to get them to Portland by dawn. There is also Niamh, his enforcer, in the doorway with her claws already coming out. *Deserters get brought back, or they get put down.* The knife that drops Niamh comes out of the tree line, thrown by a man Morwen has never met: dark hair streaked with grey, the left eye milky white and blind. Callum Reid. His pack held the territory north of the Stoneclaw lands for three generations, from the old lighthouse to the granite quarry, until Lachlan took it and killed his father. Callum has spent six months tracking wolves who went missing. Wolves who left packs, wolves who could no longer shift, wolves with witch blood in their veins. He has found graves in the old mining tunnels north of the compound, and what he needs is somebody who can testify to what happens inside. What he hands her instead is worse: her sister is next on that list, because the diluted witch blood in the Carrick line makes Saoirse expendable. Morwen carries it too. It shows as a white streak in her hair. Then his hand touches hers and something goes up her arm like a live wire, and he gives it a name. *It was the mate bond.* A rare, involuntary connection that bound two shifters for life, *impossible to forge and impossible to break*. *You can ignore it. You can fight it. But you can't cut it out.* She tries anyway. What she gets is a borrowed dress from a healer's spare trunk and a hood pulled low at a pack festival, a hunter muttering *twenty head, next full moon* into a notebook, a silver net dropping out of the dark, a witch's pendant that hides her from wolves and empties her when it does, and a stone circle at dawn with Lachlan's fist in her sister's red hair. And Callum, who has spent his whole life hiding the same blood his mother died from, has to decide whether to reach for it. This is a fated-mates shifter romance of pack politics, silver and witch blood, a woman who stops running and takes the territory instead, and an ending where she faces down a hall of elders with *He is my mate. That makes him pack.* Closed-door.

A key. Brass, tarnished to a muddy green, its teeth worn smooth by decades of use. Nora Blackwood has been gripping it since the ferry docked in Port Angeles. The gravel road into Mistfall is potholes and roots and a sign nailed to a tree that says PRIVATE ROAD - TURN BACK. She doesn't turn back. Her grandmother Eleanor died six months ago and left her the land, the cabin, and that key under a loose stone on the porch. Then the road curves hard right, and there is a wolf standing in it. A man walks out of the trees with the same silver-gray eyes as the animal. *"He's a wolf," the man said, stopping at her door. "And you're on pack land."* He is Callum Vance, Alpha of the Graywood Pack, and his terms are flat: the property line ends at the second oak, and if she crosses it, he will know. The brass key doesn't open the cabin door. It opens a wooden box on the mantel, and inside the box is a letter in Eleanor's hand. *The land I've left you is not a gift. It's a burden.* Eleanor made a pact with the previous alpha - Callum's father - and wants Nora to honor it. Then the warning: *The alpha's eyes cannot be trusted, no matter how much they look like* - and the ink simply stops, mid-sentence. What Eleanor really left is a notebook, and in it a formula: nightshade, ground stag horn, rowan ash, honey, and the impossible ingredient - *saliva from a willing alpha during a full moon.* A formula against a sickness that took four pack members decades ago and is rising again in the woods. When Nora tests it on her own blood, the drop doesn't mix with the dark liquid. It dissolves into it. The pack elders knew her grandmother as a seer. Now they have the seer's heir, living on the border, carrying the cure in her veins. Everyone wants a piece of that. Callum's sister Tessa has resented him since their father died, wants the alpha position, and is sending Silver Ridge details about the cure. Serena Whitfield, alpha daughter of Silver Ridge, has proposed a treaty mating that would settle Callum's politics for him. Serena's father Aldric arrives at the ceremony in a charcoal suit, wearing a rogue leader's pendant and smiling at the crowd like he owns them. And Nora's brother Leo, a journalist, has been calling the ranger station, the sheriff's office and the local newspaper about disappearances in the forest - and he is on his way to the cabin. Nora came to Mistfall to be left alone with a dead woman's house. What she inherits instead is a bond, a war, and a pack that has to decide whether a Blackwood can be trusted. A closed-door shifter romance with pack politics, a seer's inheritance and a slow-burning mate bond.

Jamie has been crossing onto MacBain land twice a week, and he cannot understand why his sister minds. *"The pack's not dangerous. Callum MacBain's got rules."* Flora MacKenzie knows the rules. She memorised every stone and stream on Lunar Isle as a girl, because her father taught her that survival meant knowing exactly where the pack's territory began. In three days the blood moon rises and the Challenge begins, and boys who go out to watch wolves tear each other apart do not always come home. Then Duncan MacBain knocks on her door, smiling, asking after her brother. Flora is the island's healer - hemlock poultices, feverfew and willow bark, recipes written in Gaelic so faded the ink has gone brown. Callum MacBain is the alpha of the pack her family has paid a tithe to in land and labor for three generations, and he has spent seventeen years carrying the weight of what he did to that family. What he finally offers her is not an apology. It is a blood debt. *"One favor. No limits. You name it, and I'll do it. If you keep Jamie away from the pack until the blood moon passes."* Flora takes the bargain, and names her price: the truth about her father. The truth is worse than the silence was. A wild wolf in a silver collar came for her family's farm. Callum ended what the wolf started and called it mercy, then let Flora hate him for it. He also killed his own brother Conall over it - and Conall was not the one who paid for the collar. Duncan was. Duncan let his cousin bury the wrong man and stepped into the gap it opened, one place short of the alpha's seat. It takes a ledger, a scrap of parchment, an old healer named Mairi Ross, and a hard stomach to prove any of that in front of the pack. It also takes noticing that someone inside Flora's own cottage keeps switching nightshade into the comfrey paste. And there is the thing Flora has never asked about: the moon-shaped birthmark hidden beneath her dress, the word in an old tongue she speaks in her sleep, the reason the island's oldest women look at her chest and go quiet. This is a werewolf shifter romance set on a windswept island a channel crossing from the mainland, about a healer who refuses to be anyone's tithe and an alpha who has run out of ways to pay. Closed-door.

Seventeen pence sit in a stack on the nightstand. Enough for stale bread and weak tea at the stall on Crispin Street, not enough for Dr. Marsh's bitterwort syrup. In the next room Catherine's sister Eloise is coughing the wet, tearing cough their mother made three winters ago, in the bed Eloise sleeps in now. Catherine pulls on her shawl to go beg the doctor for credit at first light, and stops. A black vine has grown across the inside of the front door overnight. The thorns are the colour of dried blood, and a scrap of parchment has been impaled on one of them. *To the Heir of Rosalind Lowell: The Ash Court calls its due.* The man waiting in the grey London dawn wears green velvet with a silver thorn pinned at his collar, and he already knows exactly what is wrong with her sister. *You can either honor it, or watch your sister die.* He is Edmund Wincroft, half-fae prince of a court where the king is dying, the seasons are turning wrong and the gates are collapsing. Catherine's mother was a Winter Court spy who defected, fell in love with the king of the Ash Court, and swore a blood oath binding her firstborn. Catherine is that oath. *The debt doesn't die, Catherine. It just waits.* She is given fifteen minutes to say goodbye to Eloise. What she carries into a court of immortals is the one skill she has. *I'm a seamstress,* she tells Edmund. *You learn to read people when you're fitting them for dresses.* By her first masque she has read Lady Margaret Vane, who intends to marry him, and the bruise under the powder on Margaret's cheek that says Margaret has been meeting somebody in secret. She has read Julian Ashford too, the scarred courtier who calls himself the king's shadow and his memory, and who says he has been studying this curse for three hundred years. Julian is the one who names the price out loud, because Edmund will not. The curse breaks only if Catherine stops being human, freely and by her own choice, while her sister goes on dying in a London tenement. *I vow to stand beside Edmund Wincroft, Ash Court prince, and break this curse, on my blood and my honor.* A fae-court romantasy that runs from a Crispin Street tenement to the Door of Thorns, with a dying king's bargain, a traitor working inside the walls, and a seamstress who finishes the book wearing a crown. Closed-door.

Tom Price is four years old and his face is going from blue to gray. Morwen Caldwell kneels beside him with a pouch of feverfew and tells his mother he will be all right, because that is what you tell a mother. She learned years ago that certainty was a medicine all its own. Then, through the open casement, on the wind coming off Black Hill, she hears her sister calling her name. By the time Morwen reaches the ring of standing stones the old people called the Fairy Circle, Ivy is already inside it. A pale, long-fingered hand comes through the shimmering air and closes on her wrist, and then the ring is empty. Nobody walks into the Court of Thorn and Dusk for nothing. The fae who took Ivy wears *a collar of thorns that touched his jaw*, and when Morwen comes after her sister he offers terms instead of an apology: *You're bound to my household until the year is complete, or until your sister is freed.* Rhys, the smith whose wife Elinor went through that same ring eight years ago, tells her she has just signed her life away. Morwen says she has bought three days. She goes through the hill as a healer, and her patient is Cethin Ashford. The Thorn Knight. The queen's son, collared by his own mother's magic, unable to die and unable to hold on to himself. *I've been alive for three hundred years, and I remember maybe fifty of them.* Above them both sits Queen Cyra, on a throne of interwoven thorn and bone, wearing a crown of living thorns that bite into her scalp. Beside her stands Eluned, who says *I keep a watch on everything* and who has her own view about which of the old blood should be sitting on that throne. And somewhere behind Cethin's silence is Emrys, the brother who was seventeen, arrested over forbidden texts from the queen's library, who spoke of a key and did not live to use it. There is also the thing Cethin has not told her, and when he finally does, it lands like a shove to the chest. *I know where Ivy is because I took her.* What follows is a mortal woman with dirt under her fingernails moving through a court that has never had a use for mortals: an iron nail pressed into her palm by a village woman, a bracelet of black thorns that will not come off, a man who says she is the first person in a hundred years who made him want to remember tomorrow, and a crown nobody knows how to remove without killing the wearer. Crown of Flame is a fae-court fantasy romance about sisters, bargains and curses, closed-door, ending in a garden in Ashbourne with an iron ring and a sky that is neither dawn nor dusk.

Sorcha carries fire in her hands and a sister she would burn the realm to protect. Roderick is the prince sent to secure a bargain she has already refused once, in public, to his father's face. King Aldric Ignis does not look up from the treaty scroll when he is told it cannot be done. The afternoon sun catches the silver threading his copper beard and the Flame-brand on his temple, and he keeps reading, because in his long experience people reconsider. The Emberheart Accord is not an alliance. It is a receipt. What neither crown accounts for is what happens when the two people being traded begin keeping their own counsel - a thorn that draws blood the first time it is touched, a dinner where the ashes are entirely the point, a chamber below the tower that no architect will admit to designing, and a willow that has been weeping over something specific for a great many years. Marren stands, and the chair scrapes back, and his single eye moves across the council until the room goes silent - not from respect, which he has never required, but from fear, which he finds more reliable. Sorcha has seen that look before. She knows what follows it. There is stolen flame-dust and a fire-eater's whisper that costs more to hear than to ignore. There is a confession from a traitor that arrives far too late to be useful and far too early to be survivable. There is a cage, and a fire inside it, and a Festival of Embers that the whole realm attends and nobody enjoys. *I was afraid,* he says. *Afraid.* She laughs, and it tastes like ash. *You were afraid I might think you a traitor. So instead you let me walk into every trap blind. Let me trust Kip. Let me believe my sister's death was my fault. Let me almost burn on a pyre, knowing you had-* Her voice cracks. She does not finish it. She does not have to. She gives him a wisp of her flame sealed in glass with a drop of her blood. *In case you need light,* she says. *Or a way to burn a path.* He kisses her, quick and hard, and promises to meet her on the roof. One of them is going to break the Accord. The other will have to decide what that costs - and the price already named is one that neither house can pay without ending.

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.

Six. Six days is all Caspian is given, and by the end of them he can read the temperature of Mirabelle's skin across a room without looking up. Cold means she is frightened. Colder means something has gone wrong that she has decided not to mention. He learns this the way a man learns a language under occupation - quickly, and because the alternative is worse. It starts at a breakfast table beneath a frost-gilded chandelier. *You cannot be serious, Father.* Lord Winterbourne's gaze barely lifts from the morning post. A slice of toast pauses halfway to his mouth. He does not answer her, because not answering is the answer, and because in this house the arrangements are made before anyone is informed of them. The bargain is struck in ice, which is how these things are done here. It is binding in the way that actually matters - not legally, but practically. There is nowhere in this house, and nothing left in this season, for either of them to go. So they learn each other by inches. A door she swore she would never open, opened anyway, because the alternative was standing in the corridor. A ghost in the garden that the staff walk around and nobody will name aloud. Two steps from freezing, and then a heat that arrives before the storm instead of after it, which is not how weather works and not how either of them expected this to go. He notices her hands first. Then that she thanks the servants. Then that she has been managing this entire household's grief single-handed since a funeral nobody in it will discuss. *I choose you, Mirabelle. Whatever comes after.* Her fingers are cold in his when he says it. Frost-kissed. Afraid. Because choosing is easy in a conservatory in the dark, and this house has broken people for less - and because the only family Mirabelle has left is the same family that sold her, and she has not yet worked out how to want something without it being taken as leverage. Six days made a bargain. What comes after will have to be built by two people who have never once been allowed to decide anything for themselves.