She was sent to destroy him. She never expected him to be worth saving. Ivy Thorne has never failed a mission. Not once in twenty-five years of training, infiltration, and carefully constructed lies. The Sanctum made her what she is — a weapon wearing a woman’s face — and she has never had reason to question the hand that built her. Until now. Her assignment: become Dr. Ivy Thorne, wolf behavioral biologist, and embed herself inside the Blackwood Pack. Earn the Alpha’s trust. Document enough to make it look like research. Then, on the night of the full moon ceremony, poison the entire pack leadership and walk away clean. Simple. Clinical. Exactly the kind of mission she was built for. What The Sanctum didn’t account for was Cain Blackwood himself — a forty-year-old Alpha who has spent six years quietly trying to build a world where his pack doesn’t have to hide. A man who mediates instead of dominates, who lets elderly human women put their hands on his arm outside diners, who looks at Ivy like she is something he has been waiting for without knowing he was waiting. What she didn’t account for was the mate bond — the thing The Sanctum taught her about only as a vulnerability to exploit, never as something she could feel herself. She feels it the moment his hand touches hers. Every cell she has reorienting around a single, devastating truth her training has no protocol for. Now she is living among people she came to kill, watching them love each other with a ferocity that has no tactical explanation, and the poison is already in her bag. Her hands have never shaken before. They are shaking now.