Bound by Blood

He's known the truth about her for fourteen months. He told himself that holding it was patience.

Bound by Blood is about the fictions we build to manage what we want, and what happens when the people around us stop making the same fiction available.

Maya Rao runs an ER in North Ashford and a quiet, careful file of patients whose pathology doesn't match the species they're presenting as. She's been the kind of doctor who notices for years. The file has categories. The file does not have her own name in it, because Maya is human, and the parts of her that occasionally seem to know things she has no business knowing are professional intuition. She is sure of this the way a person is sure of something they've declined to look at directly for a very long time.

Cade Sterling is the pack's logistics lieutenant and one of Ronan's oldest friends. He has known what Maya is since the night he met her. He told the alpha. He didn't tell her. He has been around her life for fourteen months, and he has been calling that patience, and he has been wrong.

This is a slow-burn fated mates story shaped like a reckoning. About the cost of keeping someone safe by keeping them uninformed, about a woman who finds out she has been the data she was collecting, and about a network that has been patient too, for entirely worse reasons.

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Standalone with HEA. Third in the Nightbound Pack series.

Content notes: explicit on-page sex, fated mates / bond recognition, hidden ancestry reveal, threat from an antagonist network (off-page violence, surveillance), heat cycles and biological imperative.