Cruel Salvation (Blood & Obsessions)

He is the reason she almost died—and the only reason she's still breathing.

When Mara Voss is left bleeding in the wreckage of everything she trusted, the last face she expects to find above hers belongs to Dorian Rath, the ruthless man she's spent three years despising. He doesn't rescue people. He *collects* them. And now, whether she wants it or not, she belongs to him.

The rules are simple: stay close, stay quiet, stay alive. Mara breaks all three before the first night ends.

Dorian tells himself she's a liability. A loose end with sharp eyes and a sharper mouth, someone he harbors out of strategy, not sentiment. But strategy doesn't explain why he memorizes the sound of her breathing. It doesn't explain the rage that consumes him when someone else gets too close.

And hatred doesn't explain why Mara stops flinching every time he reaches for her.

Between them lives something neither can name—built from every argument, every loaded silence, every moment one of them almost says what they actually mean. It isn't trust. It isn't safe. But it burns hotter than anything either of them has ever run from.

The problem with being saved by your enemy is that survival starts to feel like surrender.

And surrendering to Dorian Rath might be the most dangerous thing Mara has ever *wanted*.