Ironbound Vows

Thorne Blackwood, heir to the Blackwood wolf pack, is forced by the ironbound Blood Edict to publicly reject and ritually humiliate his fated mate — Caspian Vael, vampire archduke — during a moonless Ascension rite. He expects fury. Instead, he finds only glacial, wounded understanding in Caspian's silver eyes. When mauled bodies laced with both venom and claw marks begin appearing along the pack-vampire border, they are thrust into a reluctant alliance to find the killer before war erupts. Their investigation peels back layers of arranged evidence, doctored histories, and silenced witnesses, leading to a horrifying truth: a hidden cabal of pack elders and vampire ancients did not merely predict their doomed bond — they engineered it. The rejection was never about enforcing law. It was a sacrificial spell designed to harvest the agony of a severed mate-pull and awaken a slumbering god of hunger. Now tangled in a bond that pulses with raw, agonizing need every time they draw near, Thorne and Caspian must dismantle the conspiracy from within hostile pack chambers and serpentine vampire courts. Reclaiming their bond is the only way to disarm the ritual — yet accepting it would brand them the ultimate traitors and ignite the interspecies war they are fighting to stop. As the god stirs beneath the borderlands, they face an impossible choice: deny the bond and let both species be consumed by the hunger they fed it, or claim each other publicly and become the spark that burns the old world down.