THE COMPACT

THE COMPACT

A Novel by Betty S. Keating

The dogs found her brother first. Two marks at his throat, a hundred yards from vampire land and just like that, a century of uneasy peace between Blackhollow's packs and bloodlines is over.

Briar Calloway doesn't need proof. She has a body, a boundary line, and a grief so raw it feels like the only true thing left in the world. But some small, treacherous part of her can't stop looking at the wound and thinking: something about this doesn't fit.

Thalia Voss has spent six years perfecting the art of vampire composure the Voss family specialty, smoothing anything bloody into something deniable. But when her own house responds to a murder with nothing but damage control, she starts to wonder if the calm she was raised on was ever strength at all, or just cowardice with better manners.

Neither of them wanted this fight. Neither of them can walk away from it not with two houses arming for war over a truth no one has actually looked for. And when Briar and Thalia find themselves on opposite sides of the same treeline, close enough to finish each other, they discover instead that they can't.

What they uncover together is worse than either house imagined: a lie built to look exactly like the truth, engineered by someone counting on generations of old hatred to do the rest of the work for them. To stop it, a shifter and a vampire will have to do the one thing a century of fear never allowed trust each other first, and ask questions second.

The Compact is a dark, fang-and-claw romance about the cost of easy answers, the courage it takes to keep questioning your own grief, and two women who chose each other before they had any right to. Perfect for readers of A Court of Thorns and Roses and Kingdom of the Wicked who want their enemies-to-lovers with real teeth.