Howl and Hearth

"There are people who enter your life like a locked door. You know you shouldn't pick the lock. You know what's on the other side will ruin you. But your hands were already moving before your mind could catch up."

Darrow Graves is a man built of cold stone and meticulous control. For eighteen years, he has waited to exact revenge on the man who helped cover up his mother's murder. When his enemy's gambling debts become unmanageable, Darrow buys them all. The repayment plan is simple: the man's daughter, Elara Finch, must spend the brutal Vermont winter working as a maid in Darrow's isolated mountain manor, Howl and Hearth. Once the snow falls, the roads will close, trapping her inside a gilded cage of thirty-two surveillance cameras and locked doors.

He planned to break her. He planned to use her as a weapon.

What Darrow didn't plan for was Elara. Hardened by years of cleaning up her father's wreckage, she isn't intimidated by the imposing estate or the dangerous man who owns it. She looks directly into his hidden cameras. She invades his space. She refuses to be a victim, and her defiance sparks an obsession Darrow can no longer contain behind a screen. He watched her from afar for six months before she arrived; now, the distance between them is collapsing entirely.

As the winter storms seal them off from the rest of the world, the line between captor and captive blurs into a dangerous, consuming game. But Darrow's mansion holds dark secrets, and his meticulous web of lies is unraveling. When Elara discovers the horrifying truth about why she was really brought to the estate, she'll have to decide whether to flee into the frozen wilderness—or willingly surrender to the monster who made her his true north.