Bark and Bleed

The ones who survive the cage are not the ones who stop wanting freedom. They are the ones who learn to carry the lock inside them.

Tamsin Eyre walked into the freezing Montana wilderness with nothing but the clothes on her back, desperate to escape the suffocating control of the Church of the Unbroken Circle and her abusive husband. But freedom comes at a brutal price. When she steps into a bear trap, her run for survival nearly ends in the snow.

She wakes up in a remote, locked cabin. Her savior is Kellan Rook, a massive, heavily scarred trapper who hasn't spoken a single word in twenty-five years. Kellan is a man carved from ice and isolation, communicating only through his careful hands and absolute authority. To protect her from the lethal cold, he sets her broken bone and slides a heavy iron bolt across the door-keeping her inside.

Tamsin traded a religious prison for a wilderness cage. But as the brutal winter rages outside, she realizes her silent captor is not the monster she expected. Kellan's locked door hides a deeply damaged man who communicates his fierce, terrifying devotion through chopped wood, shared firelight, and charcoal words written on the floorboards.

As the ice thaws, the boundary between captor and captive blurs into a dangerous, consuming need. Tamsin begins to realize that Kellan's silence is the loudest confession of love she has ever heard. But the cult she left behind does not forgive, and her husband's men are tracking her footprints through the snow. Soon, Kellan and Tamsin will have to face the ultimate test: what happens when the man who locked you away is the only one who can truly set you free?

Bark and Bleed is a dark, atmospheric psychological romance about broken people, harsh landscapes, and love that draws blood before it heals.