Perched between branches and shadows, we watch, we scheme, fighting for a kingdom forgotten and forlorn. Until we rip her away with our claws, our prisoner, our pawn, our plaything. She’s innocent and pure, fragile and helpless…but oh so guilty by blood. She calls us beasts, wicked and evil, vicious and cruel. We are all that and worse. One of us offers her shelter beneath his wings, whispering promises of pleasure, seeking redemption. The other longs to shatter her into a million pieces, whispering promises of pain, seeking revenge.

Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders. But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away...because dragons don’t bond to “fragile” humans. They incinerate them.

Violet is a typical, down-on-her-luck millennial: mid-twenties, over-educated and drowning in debt, on the verge of moving into her parents' basement. When a lifeline appears in the form of a very unconventional job in neighboring Cambric Creek, she has no choice but to grab at it with both hands.

I'm a doctor and a researcher. My pack is small, in a quiet part of central Texas. It's a simple existence, and I like it that way. It's just me and my two besties, living our best single lives. That is until the mandate comes. Every unmated wolf in the entire world called to one place. I'm a psi, the weakest designation there is. I can barely shift, and there's no chance of me getting matched—only humiliated. It can't get worse—until it does. I've barely made it off the bus when I lock eyes with the hottest wolf I've ever seen, and he reeks of power.

After watching my mother succumb to a mysterious illness, I promised myself two things. I'd find the cure for what ravaged her and leave the godforsaken city where she abandoned me. Four years later, I received an acceptance letter from Dracadia University, one of the oldest most prestigious schools in the country. Nestled on a secluded island off the coast of Maine, it's rumored to be haunted by the souls of the mental patients exiled there centuries before, those whose bones are said to make up the island's white sandy shores. And restless ghosts aren't even its most daunting peculiarity.