Blood Contract

Claire Shen is a 24-year-old resident physician at a teaching hospital, and her mother has been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer—three months to live. Desperate and out of options, she receives an anonymous text at midnight: "Want her to live?" She follows the address to the 11th floor of an abandoned office building, where she meets Lucian—a six-hundred-year-old pureblood vampire. He offers her a contract written on his own skin: her blood once a week, in exchange for her mother's life. She signs. The next morning, her mother walks again. But the contract has a true name—the Eternal Marriage Vow, the oldest bonding ritual of the bloodline. Six brides before her have all died before the bond was complete. She is the seventh. And the bond was not activated by Lucian's choice, but by a curse left in the ashes of a fire her mother set six hundred years ago, when she was a vampire hunter who killed Lucian's mother. Bound together by an ancient debt of blood and fire, they have six months to complete the marriage—or both their blood will freeze in their veins. Her only way to survive is to willingly accept everything he is—his memories, his power, his sins—and share his eternity. A daughter of the family that destroyed his, and a loneliness six hundred years deep: is this marriage of blood a salvation, or the beginning of another death?