Novels by PAMELA JORDAN

CaelumAt three in the morning, I was still holding a dead man's signature.I had read the receipt so many times that the loops of Edmund Pryce's name had begun to look like rope. I sat in my office at Mercy General with one lamp on, the page flat under my palm, and tried to build a version of events in which I was not a fool.I couldn't.*Backdated,* I had told Wynn. *It happens.* But I had grown up in that council office, doing homework under Pryce's desk while he stamped ledgers, and I knew his habits better than I knew my father's. Pryce never signed anything early. He used to say a signature was a promise, and promises were kept in order. He had also once slipped me a lemon drop during a four-hour budget hearing and told me not to tell the Alpha. I have been nine. It was the first secret anyone ever trusted me with.The hospital was quiet around me. Down the hall, past forty rooms I had emptied for a woman who would not look at me, one window was still lit. Room 12. I had walked

SableI made it to the third-floor stairwell before my legs gave out.The door hissed shut behind me, and I slid down the cinder block wall until I was sitting on the cold landing, the letter opener digging into my wrist. Somewhere below, an engine idled, then faded. Whoever held that camera had decided I wasn't worth chasing tonight.That was almost worse.I stayed there for a minute, counting my breaths, listening for footsteps on the stairs below. None came. Only the hum of the fluorescent tubes and the distant, patient beep of a monitor somewhere on the floor above.I did not read the paper there. *Somewhere with a lock,* Hollis had said, and I had spent five years learning to obey exactly that kind of warning. I climbed to the pediatric floor and opened the door of Room 12. Pip slept with one arm flung over her rabbit and her mouth open, a curl of dark hair stuck to her cheek. I stood there until I was sure her chest was rising and falling on its own, then straightened her blanke

SableThe text said to come alone, so I brought a knife.It was a small one, a letter opener from my desk at Vale & Associates, and it sat in my coat sleeve like a bad idea. Pip was asleep two floors above me, her rabbit tucked under her chin, with the night nurse humming in the corridor. I had told the nurse I was getting coffee and thought that I would be gone for only ten minutes.The parking structure smelled of oil and cold concrete. My heels echoed off the pillars, and every echo sounded like someone walking a half step behind me. Level one, empty. Level two, a single sedan with a dead dome light.Level three was dark except for one flickering fixture at the far end.A man stood beneath it, in a cardigan too thin for the weather. He held a leather satchel against his chest with both arms, the way you hold something that might be taken from you."Turn off your phone," he said.I did not move. "Who are you?""Please." His voice cracked on the word. "Off. Not silent. Off."I held t

SableMy daughter had just handed Caelum a crayon page that said "Daddy," and I had four seconds to decide what kind of liar I was going to be."She draws a lot of men," I said.I folded the page in half, then in half again, and slid it into my coat pocket. My hand was shaking. I kept it in my pocket so he couldn't see."Knights, woodcutters. There's a storybook at home with a green-eyed prince. She's been obsessed since spring."Caelum looked at me. He had his father's stillness, but something lived underneath it that Magnus never had, something that listened. He was listening now, and I hated how much of me wanted to be heard."The house in the picture," he said slowly. "The road with the trees.""Every castle has a road with trees.""Mama," said Pip, "that's not what you said when you took the *other* ones."I closed my eyes for exactly one second."What other ones?" Caelum asked, very quietly."Bedtime, sweetheart." I lifted Pip's feet back onto the bed and tucked the blanket arou

CaelumThe woman who had ignored me for eleven months walked through my front doors holding a sick child's hand, and for the first time in five years, my wolf lay down.I stood at the entrance of Mercy General in a suit I had changed twice, flanked by the head of pediatrics and a nurse with a wheelchair nobody had asked for. I had cleared the wing myself. Forty rooms, emptied overnight. Wynn had called it excessive. I had called it professional courtesy to the only broker on the coast who refused to be bought."She's late," I said."She's four minutes early," said Wynn, at my shoulder. "You've been standing here for an hour."I had. I had also rehearsed three openings in the car, and discarded all of them. Eleven months of unopened proposals had taught me that Isolde did not respond to charm, flattery, or money. I had no idea what she responded to, and it unsettled me more than I wanted to admit.Behind me, forty empty rooms hummed under fluorescent light, every bed made, every chart

Five Years LaterSableThe man I had spent five years hiding from had asked for me by name seven times, and I had never once said hello."Your terms are insulting," said Bram, leaning across the glass table of my conference room. He was six and a half feet of Cinder fall pack muscle, and he was trying to threaten me into negotiating at a better price. "My wolves have been buying human medical supplies for forty years.""At forty percent markup," I said, turning a page. "Because nobody ever told you that you could negotiate."His countenance changed in an instant.Isolde Vale never raised her voice. That was the first rule, and it was the one that made grown Alphas sweat. Wolves respected power but trusted paperwork, and I had become very good at handling both. Vale & Associates occupied the fourteenth floor of a Harlow Bay tower, close enough to the human world to buy from it and close enough to the territories to sell back.Nobody in that room knew I had once been the girl who ate at