The Blackwood Pact

“She came to the cliffs to buy back her family’s name. The scarred lord who holds her debt claimed her instead.”

To save her younger brother from a debtor’s prison, ruined gentlewoman Clara Vance travels to the edge of the world to beg for the deed that will clear her family’s ruin. What she finds at the Granite Hold is not a negotiation but a snare: Julian Sterling invokes the ancient Blackwood Pact and makes Clara his collateral — locked inside a sealed stone fortress until a debt she can never repay is satisfied.

Then the blizzard buries the passes, and the cold manor becomes a world of two. Behind Julian’s iron rules, Clara glimpses a man whose absolute control may be the only thing standing between her family and a far crueller fate.

She swore no man would ever hold the key to her life. She never imagined she might one day want to hand it over.

Alternating First Person (Julian & Clara) • HEA

“She picks locks for a living. The one she was caught breaking belongs to the man who now owns her.”

Master thief Genevieve Mercer breaks into a lord’s fortress to burn the ledger binding her sick sister to a fraudulent debt — and is caught by the scarred master of the house himself. Now the Blackwood Pact makes Genevieve his collateral, and the only thing between her fragile sister and the salt-pans is Genevieve’s obedience.

Alistair Thorne’s rules are absolute, but beneath the cold command is a man scarred by a fire he survived and others did not. As the storms seal the coast and the guild syndicate circles, the cage Genevieve fought may be the only safe place left — until a stack of hidden letters makes her wonder whether every locked door was only ever a transaction.

She has spent her whole life mapping the way out. For the first time, she isn’t sure she wants to find it.

Alternating First Person (Alistair & Genevieve) • HEA

“She came to end a feud with a peace treaty. The scarred lord on the other side answered with the Blackwood Pact.”

For three generations the Clays and the Blackwoods have bled each other dry over the windswept cliffs. Lydia Clay — young, university-trained, certain that modern law can succeed where rifles have failed — rides alone to the enemy’s fortress with a treaty in her portfolio and her father’s war at her back. Silas Blackwood burns her papers and invokes the pact that makes her his.

Sixteen years her senior and contemptuous of her neat clauses, Silas is everything she came to dismantle — yet in the long snowbound dark, the patriarch she meant to outmaneuver offers a surrender no treaty could ever name. Then a hidden draft in his desk reveals he has been bargaining her future behind her back, and her father’s armed riders are already on the cliff road.

Lydia believed freedom meant fighting every boundary. She is about to discover that true sovereignty is choosing where she kneels.

Alternating First Person (Silas & Lydia) • HEA