I ran with nothing but a stolen jacket and blood that wasn’t mine on my hands.
For eleven years the Syndicate owned my body, my cycles, my children — each one taken before I could see their face. This time I ran. Barefoot. Pregnant. And out of options.
The man who found me on a nameless mountain road has rope scars on his wrists and eyes the color of something essential, bleached away. He’s the club’s executioner. He doesn’t do warmth. He doesn’t do hope. He does doors that lock and perimeters that hold and a voice in the dark that says no one is taking this baby like it’s a law of physics.
I don’t know how to trust. He doesn’t know how to feel. We’re both broken in the same specific places — the kind the world makes when it uses you as a weapon and then discards you.
Something is still hunting me.
Can two people who have survived the worst the world can do protect something as fragile as what’s growing between them — before the past catches up?
