On the night Iona Rattray is meant to die, she wakes in the contract room of Mortlach House with a previous life still on her: the trustees who stripped her family, the father who never came home, and the five beast-blooded men she kept chained by ten blood seals and punished at will. This time she cuts the first seal loose and offers the other nine as payment: escort her north to find her father before her twenty-seventh birthday, when an inherited curse is set to open and bleed her out. Keir, the silver-poisoned wolf, keeps his distance; Fergus, whose scales she tore, tries to drown her on the first night. Yet the road makes allies of them - flooded rails, a forged partner transfer, an eagle heir who drags her off a cliff, a dragon at the border, an archive that finally names the curse. Each seal she burns buys another stretch of road, and every day makes it harder to tell whether the five stay because the contract holds them or because they want to. The last seal is hers to break.
