He was made into a weapon by other men's hands.
She is the heir of the house that made him.
And the only way to free him is to give back the one thing they took.
Solana Reyes has spent her life keeping her father's records in a walled house in the desert. She knows the rules of the Verano, the way the orchard is counted, the way the hounds are dosed. She has never once asked why a house that calls itself a family keeps a ledger full of numbers instead of names.
Then a girl runs, and the house sends its best hunter after her. And the hunter is not a man. He is a wolf they caught three years ago and leashed with a poison that lives in Solana's own hand.
Rook was a hunter of the Cinderpack before the men took him. Now he is a hound: bound, branded V-07, and made to hunt his own kind for a house that calls it keeping. He remembers nothing he is allowed to remember — until a physician's daughter starts giving him half a dose and asking questions she is not supposed to ask.
She is the enemy who holds the leash. He is the weapon she was raised to use. And between them something older than either of them has already begun to pull: the fated bond the house has spent two hundred years trying to breed out of its blood.
To free him, Solana will have to give up everything the house gave her — her name, her place, her father's records — and do the one thing no one in her family has ever done: let the wolf choose for himself.
But the Verano does not lose what it owns. And the house has been making people for a hundred years, and the woman who runs it has one last use for the girl who was made to be the perfect heir.
Sunbane is a slow-burn, high-tension fated-mates shifter romance about the ones who were made into tools, the people who held their leashes, and a love built on the hardest choice of all — being given back your own life. A standalone with a guaranteed happily-ever-after, set in the same world as Bitterbane and Wolfbloom.
No cliffhanger. No cheating. Just a girl raised to keep a leash, and the wolf she set free.