Wren Kowalski has built a small, quiet life out of the wreckage of a city that isn’t kind to people who can’t afford to be careless. Twenty-two, perpetually broke, vegetarian on principle, and more attached to the rescue plants crowding her windowsill than to most people she’s met. She cries at animal shelter videos. She’s never thrown a punch in her life. Violence, to her, is something that happens to other people, in other neighborhoods, in movies she doesn’t watch.
Then a stranger bleeds out on her kitchen floor, and her ordinary life ends before she’s even had coffee.
Kian Ashworth is not the kind of man Wren has ever let near her. Shot twice, hunted by men who want to finish the job, and radiating the kind of quiet danger she’s spent her whole life avoiding on principle. He’s the heir to an organization with a body count and a reputation, and every instinct she has says to call an ambulance and shut the door.
Instead, she gets out her first aid kit.
Wren tells herself it’s just decency, the same impulse that makes her stop for injured birds on the sidewalk. But patching Kian up means he doesn’t leave, and the longer he stays in her plant-covered, dog-eared little apartment, the more he becomes something she can’t just usher back out the door once he’s healed.
Kian knows exactly what letting her get close will cost her. Every enemy he’s ever made would use her without a second thought if they found out she existed. He should disappear the moment he can walk. He doesn’t.
Wren has never so much as raised her voice at anyone. Kian has never let anyone close enough to matter. But the men hunting him aren’t going to stop just because she’s innocent, and Wren is about to learn that loving a man like Kian means choosing, over and over, whether she’s willing to become someone capable of protecting what’s hers.