Eleanor Montrose was still scrubbing blood from beneath her fingernails when the carriage wheel shattered. London’s butchered duke had promised her silence would buy survival. She fled north with a satchel of stolen herbs and a throat raw from screaming into pillows.
Callum MacKinnon doesn’t ask. He drags her from the wreckage, sets her among wolves in plaid, and locks the gate behind her. One glance at the clan crest on her letter and he decides: she heals his men, or she buries them. She refuses. He lets her run. Twice. Both times he brings her back mud–splattered, wrists bruised, eyes blazing with something hotter than fury. The third time she stops fleeing—because the rival laird offers a price for her return, and Callum’s hand slides to the hilt of his sword while he growls that she’s already claimed. By him. By the keep. And by the hunger that breaks every time he watches her stitch flesh and knows he’d kill to feel those fingers on his own skin.