The Blood-Surgeon's Mercy (The Whitefire Bastion #1)

Each book in this series features a different couple and a complete happily ever after.

She came to Whitefire to disappear. He won't let her.

Petra Voss has survived three field hospital collapses by making herself indispensable — then invisible. She has replaced the self with a function. When Whitefire's blood-surgeon drags her out of the freeze and into his winterhouse bond, she calls it enemy triage. He calls it something she refuses to name.

Korvath doesn't ask her to eat. He puts food in front of her and waits. He doesn't invite her to sleep. He removes the work from her hands and stands between her and the next crisis. His care looks like command because he has no softer language for the terror of watching someone refuse to live — and Petra has been refusing for a very long time.

She tells herself this is forced proximity and survival math. That the warmth is just the wardstone. That the heat between them is just shared quarters and siege stress and the inconvenient fact that he smells like a threat she desperately wants to stop fighting.

Whitefire's blight is spreading. Command wants her expertise. And Korvath — this enormous, furious, relentlessly caretaking orc who failed a triage line once and has never forgiven himself — won't let a bastion emergency be the excuse she uses to die on duty.

She came here expendable. He intends for her to leave with a future she didn't ask for.

The question is whether she'll let him make her want it.