I have one skill, one purpose, and no future worth speaking of. My uncle is a respected psychiatrist in the human world. He took me out of my pack at fifteen and told me it was for my own protection. That I was too strange, too dangerous, and too demonic for the world I came from. He built me a room in his asylum and called it shelter, and for ten years I absorbed the rage of powerful wolves who traveled to him in secret and left without looking back. I was useful. I was contained. I was, by every measure that mattered to the people around him, exactly where I belonged. Then he sold my contract to Alpha Garrick, and I learned that useful and expendable have always meant the same thing where I’m concerned. The Butcher of the North doesn’t need a Siphon. He needs a miracle. Five years of compounding rage already building behind his ribs like a war that never ended, a rage that killed the last woman who tried to help him. I am his last option. I am also, it turns out, the wrong one. His rage doesn’t submit to my walls. It finds the thirty-seven wolves I’ve been storing for three years and ignites them. Every session pulls us closer to a reaction neither of us will survive. The only way forward requires a power I didn’t know I had, a truth my uncle spent years burying, and a trust I have never once been given reason to practice. I was raised to believe I was too broken for the world. Nobody warned me about what happens when the world decides it isn’t finished with me yet. And nobody — least of all me — expected me to fall for the man whose darkness could kill us both.