His Poor Mate

Caroline Winters has one rule for surviving her job: never be yourself on the clock. On stage she is Evelyn, confident and untouchable, engineered so no man ever gets close enough to meet the orphan underneath. Then a private client with ink-black hair and icy blue eyes books the whole night, sparks snap everywhere their skin touches, and he promises she will see him again sooner than she thinks. He keeps his word. She does not even make it home before his men drag her off the street.

Elliot is the Alpha of the Lunar Eclipse pack, and from the moment Caroline walked into the club, his wolf has been howling one word: mate. She wakes locked in a beautiful bedroom with no intention of staying, and she proves it by diving out the window. The kind stranger who drives her home afterward, a warm-eyed woman who smells of lavender and casseroles, turns out to be Elliot's mother. Nothing in this story intends to behave.

Then a vampire follows her scent to her apartment, and Elliot arrives in time to save her life but too late to stop the bite. The venom should kill her. Instead it wakes what has been asleep inside her all along: a vampire named Desiree and a witch named Hazel take up residence in her head, and the pack doctor delivers a diagnosis nobody can explain. Caroline was never only human. She is something no lab has sequenced before, and rare things attract the wrong kind of attention.

Worse is coming for Elliot. Something ancient with burning orange eyes has spent months hunting a strong mind to wear, and it takes the Alpha from inside, locking Elliot in a cell that looks exactly like his own bedroom while his body travels, bargains, and gathers allies. The last thing he hears is his own voice promising to come back for her.

To get him back, Caroline will need every one of her selves, including the fourth voice she never knew she had. The orphan from the system is Fiona Silver, lost daughter of the Queen and King of all supernaturals, and the terrifying Rogue Alpha the packs whisper about is the big brother who watched her carried off thirteen years ago. Her memories were stolen. Her wolf was locked away. Her enemy believes she is just another pawn on his board.

He is wrong. In a confrontation paid for in advance with goodbye, Fiona trades freedom, memory, and heartbeat to bind the sorcerer inside her own body and save the mate she swore she never wanted. But bargains made in orange fire rarely end clean, and when she finally opens her eyes, the first thing she says to Elliot is three words that gut him: Who are you?

A fated-mates paranormal romance with a sharp-tongued heroine, a groveling Alpha, one possessed body, zero cooperative doors, and a Great Dane who forgives faster than anyone. Come for the sparks. Stay because Caroline said she was done running, and this time she means it.