The Libri GmbH The Vesper Contract Paperback

Every contract has a loophole. This one drinks blood.

Mara Ellery has built her career dismantling agreements written by powerful people who assume the rules belong to them. Then a midnight call brings her to the Vesper Hotel, where a fatal breach, a hidden vampire government, and one drop of her blood awaken a covenant her family buried decades ago.

The contract binds Mara to August Veyre, an immortal sovereign whose House controls the blood supply keeping thousands of vampires alive. Until the covenant is judged, Mara cannot safely stray far from him after dark-and someone is engineering attacks, shortages, and political panic to make sure that judgment never comes freely.

August is ruthless enough to have survived centuries of supernatural politics. He is also disciplined enough to understand that a magical bond is not consent.

As danger forces them together, Mara must separate strategy from attraction, protection from control, and inherited duty from what she actually wants. But the deeper she follows the covenant into her mother's hidden past, the clearer the conspiracy becomes: someone intends to turn vampire law itself into a weapon of obedience.

Breaking the contract may require destroying the very magic keeping Mara alive.

And if she succeeds, the only bond left between Mara and August will be the one neither law nor blood can compel them to choose.