She held out her wrists before they could ask.
Zephyrine Ardel has known since she was twenty that she would be taken in the tithe. She is Briarborn, halfblooded, and exactly the kind of candidate the compact law was designed to collect. She spent seven years preparing: building intelligence, learning the laws well enough to find the seams in them, running dispatches for the Conclave, and refusing, in every practical way available to her, to be surprised. She walks out of the Briarwood on her own feet and speaks the compact provisions back at the captain before he can read them to her.
Aldric Vane has been the Iron-Bound Alpha for nine years, and he is not a man who collects tithe candidates because he wants to. He does it because the compact that protects his territory requires it, and he has spent nine years carrying that weight with the specific care of someone who knows exactly what it costs. He ordered the library prepared before she arrived. He is not sure why, except that something in the intelligence report suggested she would want books rather than comfort, and that was the kind of detail he pays attention to.
The tithe is not what it appears. The compact at the heart of his territory has been corrupted — the same council member who is using the tithe to stock a smuggling network of bond-severed wolves has been doing it for three generations under everyone’s noses. Zeph has been building the case from the inside for six years. Aldric has been building it from above for sixty days. The evidence they have separately is not enough. Together, it is.
And the rune marks at his throat, which have been doing things they are not supposed to do since she crossed his courtyard on the first night — those are a separate problem entirely.
For dark paranormal romance readers who want a dominant alpha who earns trust rather than demands it, a heroine with genuine spine, fated mates wrapped in political conspiracy, and a romance that builds from respect into something neither character saw coming — Wild Born is the one.
