The Wolf and the Winter Crown

They traded her to a monster to end a war. Neither of them counted on the bond that would not let them go.

Liora Winter-Come is her court's last coin, spent to buy peace: handed over the border to the savage alpha of the Greywood, a wolf-lord who despises everything soft and southern about her. She arrives at a half-ruined hold among a starving, hostile pack, with no friends, no power, and a husband who looks at her like a knife he has been forced to swallow.

Fenrick wanted a treaty, not a treaty-bride, and least of all his enemy's clever daughter. Then he meets her eyes, catches her scent, and something older than his contempt snaps awake in him, a fated mate-bond he refuses to name and cannot kill.

As the pack tests her and the winter bites, Liora does what she was raised to do: she reads the room. And what she reads is murder. Someone wants this marriage to fail and both of them dead, and the trail runs in two directions at once, through the clans that would see a rival fall and through the glittering southern court that sold her. The deeper she digs, the clearer it becomes that one patient hand is moving every piece on the board.

The bond between them is turning his contempt into a devotion that will raze anyone who touches her. But devotion will not be enough. To survive the blades closing in from both sides, a court lady and a wolf who hate what they feel will have to decide whether a marriage made to fail might be the one thing worth fighting for.

The Wolf and the Winter Crown is the first book in The Wildmark, a six-book wolf-shifter romantasy of fated mates, enemies-to-lovers, and a slow-burning marriage of convenience set in a cold and dangerous north. Dual POV. Closed-door (fade-before) heat. A complete series.

Readers who love protective alphas, lethal heroines, and a love forged against every order to the contrary will want to climb into the Wildmark and stay.