She came to the end of the world to disappear.
Dr. Wren Calloway has spent forty-seven days alone at a remote Arctic research station in Alaska's Brooks Range — a reinforced cabin bolted to a granite shelf at four thousand feet, sixty miles from the nearest human being. She's there to study wolverines. That's the official reason. The real one is buried under the snow with everything else she left behind: the man who controlled her, the bruises she stopped explaining, the university that looked the other way.
She checks her locks three times every night. She sleeps with a shotgun within reach. She tells herself she's adapted.
Then he shows up.
Cade Morrow — six foot three, built like something the wilderness made on purpose, with grey-green eyes that don't move when the rest of his face does. He says he's a Fish & Game contractor tracking a rogue grizzly. His credentials check out. His cover is flawless. His reason for being here is a lie.
Cade is a private investigator hired to find out what happened to the previous researcher at this station — a man who vanished without a trace. A man Wren knows far better than she'll admit. Every piece of evidence points to the woman who requested the same remote posting four months after he disappeared.
When a catastrophic arctic storm locks them inside the one-room cabin, there's nowhere to go. One stove. One cot. Twelve feet of charged silence between a woman hiding a secret and a man paid to uncover it.
Outside, the temperature drops to negative forty. Inside, it rises.
She watches him the way prey watches a predator — carefully, constantly, with an attention that starts as survival and shifts into something she can't control. He watches her with the discipline of a man cataloging evidence — except the evidence is the way she braids her hair, the three locks on the door, and the fire iron with the brand-new handle.
He knows she's lying. She knows he's not who he claims. Neither of them can leave. And somewhere in the killing cold beyond the walls, an eight-hundred-pound grizzly circles the cabin like a warning neither is willing to hear.
PERMAFROST is a dark romance set in the most isolated landscape on earth — a story of forced proximity, dangerous obsession, buried trauma, and two people who specialize in hiding finding the one person they can't hide from.
The most dangerous animal in any wilderness is the one you let through the door.
