THE GILDED HEART: Claimed by the Werewolf King
I booked the island to sleep with a stranger.
One week, someone beautiful, nothing that follows me home. After five years alone I'd decided my body was mine to spend.
I never made it to the second night.
I wake in mud, under stars in the wrong places, six hundred years before I was born. Eleven days later I'm standing on an auction block in a medieval market, barefoot and bleeding, refusing to look at the floor while a stranger checks my teeth.
That's when the crowd goes quiet.
He's the biggest thing I've ever seen — black and gold, a wolf pelt across one shoulder, more money on his hands than this valley will see in a lifetime. He doesn't bid.
He kills the man who does.
"Don't thank me," he says. "I didn't save you. I claimed you."
Lucien St. Claire is an alpha wolf shifter and the immortal lord of a mountain kingdom where gold is so worthless they line the gutters with it. He's arrogant, possessive, filthy-mouthed — and immovable about one thing. He won't touch me while I'm wearing his collar.
Fine. I'll take it off myself.
That's how it starts. It isn't how it ends.
Two centuries later, in a city of canals and masks, we're the couple everyone wants at their table and nobody dares cross. His name on the banks. Mine on my own door.
We had eight good years before it came apart.
Now I'm thirty-five, legally dead, standing in a century I don't recognise and ten years late.
And somewhere in this city, a billionaire CEO has been quietly buying the world since 2020 — because if he owned enough of it, he'd eventually find what he lost.
He's had six years to get ready for me.
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Chapter: CHAPTER FIVE - The ScarHe had a gold cup in a tent.That was the thing Eva's brain got stuck on, in the way that a brain will pick one stupid thing to hold when it cannot hold any of the rest. The tent was enormous, and it was a tent, it moved when the wind hit it, and there was a table in it, and on the table there was a cup of solid gold with garnets around the lip, sitting next to a wooden bowl and some cheese, like a mug.They had ridden two hours in the dark. The wolf pelt had kept her alive. She had not been able to feel her feet for some time.He came in behind her and the flap dropped and the noise of the camp went muffled, and Eva turned to put her back to a table, because she had been putting her back to furniture since she was eleven and it wasn't a decision anymore.He was even bigger indoors. Her head came to the middle of his chest."Hands," he said.She didn't move.He waited. He had — she would learn this about him over the next eighteen months, and she would never entirely get used to it —
Last Updated: 2026-09-28
Chapter: CHAPTER FOUR - The True SeamThe storm came in on the ninth day, and the Belgian said yes on the ninth day, and Eva would spend a very long time afterwards wondering whether those two things were a coincidence.The message came through Ines at four in the afternoon, printed out, because Monsieur Adriaan was seventy-six and communicated by fax to a machine in the hotel office like a man transmitting from 1988.Miss Cross may examine the object. She may not use solvents. She may not use heat. If she breaks it I will be philosophical, as I have been assured for twenty years that it cannot be mended and I have stopped believing in it. Tell her the library is hers. Tell her the butterflies were my wife's.Eva read it twice, said a short word, and went to get her tools.She travelled with them. She had always travelled with them, the way other people travel with a book they never open — a soft roll of grey canvas, a little over a kilo, and inside it the scalpels and the swabs and the dental picks and the three sable br
Last Updated: 2026-09-28
Chapter: CHAPTER THREE - The AureliaThe island took eleven hours and a nine-seater plane with a pilot who ate a sandwich during descent, and when the door opened the heat came in like something with opinions.Astera Cay was thirty miles of volcanic green sticking out of water so improbably blue it looked filtered. One hotel. The Aurelia — an old white sugar house built into the cliff with a stepped garden falling away below it, bougainvillea eating the balconies, and a bar that had been carved out of the rock so that the sea got in at high tide and sighed under the floor.Twenty-one guests. Eva counted. The point of Astera Cay was that it was very hard to get to and very expensive to stay at, and she had spent a sum of money she did not want to think about because she had wanted, specifically, to be somewhere where no one could arrive by accident.The first attempt was a catastrophe.His name was Brad, he sold orthopaedic devices in Scottsdale, and he was extremely sunburned. Eva had decided over breakfast that she was
Last Updated: 2026-09-28
Chapter: CHAPTER TWO - Voice Memo, Gate 14Eleven days earlier. Which is to say: five hundred and seventy-one years later."Okay," said Eva. "Okay. Hi. This is — Dr. Raman, this is the homework. You said out loud, so. Out loud."She had the hood of her sweatshirt up and her back to the window at Gate 14, and the phone held close to her mouth, and she was talking in the flat mutter of a woman who has learned to have private conversations in public places. Beside her a toddler was systematically dismantling a bag of pretzels. Out on the apron, a baggage train went by with a man riding on the back of it like it was a parade float."So it's ten days to my birthday and I'm at the airport and I'm doing it. I booked it. I'm going. Astera Cay. Ten days, and my birthday's on the tenth, and I have — okay, I'm going to say the actual plan out loud because you said the whole point is that I stop saying it in code."She checked, reflexively, over her shoulder. Nobody. She'd been doing that for six years and had more or less stopped noticin
Last Updated: 2026-09-28
Chapter: CHAPTER ONE - The Block at SarnholdEleven days into the wrong century, Eva Cross had learned three things about being sold.The first was that it was boring. Nobody told you that. She had imagined — in the four hours between falling out of her own life and the moment the chain closed around her wrists — that being taken by slavers would be a fast, loud, cinematic horror. It wasn't. It was eleven days of walking, and sleeping in a wagon that smelled of wet wool and other people's fear, and being fed a grey mash twice a day by a boy who wouldn't look at her. Terror, it turned out, had a shelf life. After about seventy hours it curdled into something flatter and more useful.The second thing was that the cold here was a different animal than the cold at home. It didn't bite. It settled. It moved into the marrow of her and made itself comfortable, and by the eleventh morning she had stopped shivering, which she was fairly certain was bad.The third thing was the one that mattered.Keep your eyes up.She had learned that a
Last Updated: 2026-09-28
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