The Blackthorne Bargain

He held the wall his whole life. One winter, four people tried to make him set it down. Damien Blackthorne was raised on a single rule: hold the wall with one hand, and keep the other free, so nothing can ever be taken from you. By thirty-one he had perfected it — cold, exact, and on his way to becoming the old man in the front hall with nothing left to set down. Then, in the space of one winter, four people tried to hand him back the thing his family traded away a hundred years ago. A dying grandfather with one true sentence left to say. A vanished mother, and a green stone sent from far away. The housekeeper who kept the warm thing alive before dawn. And the lawyer who offered him the one honest way out of the war. He chose the other way. The Blackthorne Bargain is the story of the man Juliet meets in The Vow — the winter before he bought a wife, told from his side, ending the moment everything begins. A prequel novella to the Blackthorne Dynasty. Start here — then begin with The Vow. Dark contemporary romance · slow burn · a complete origin story.