In Loving Embrace - Cryptid Keeper Series, #3

The Beithir is the oldest cryptid ever bound to a human vessel. It has not forgotten what it was before, what it is still, beneath the bond it despises. It does not rage against Noah Murphy because rage is beneath it. It simply makes clear, in the way ancient things do, that it considers this arrangement beneath it too.

Noah is still learning to live with that.

He did not ask for the Beithir. He took it because someone had to; the alternative was watching it destroy the people he cared about. He is still paying for that decision, in sleepless nights and serpentine power that pulses through him without warning and the exhausting, endless work of holding something that hates its own containment. The last thing he needed was a reason to care about someone new.

Then Evelyn Brooks arrived in Scotland, sharp and self-contained, carrying a secret she had no intention of sharing with anyone.

She is not on holiday. She is a lawyer in hiding. Her informant is dead, her name surfacing in the wrong places, and a powerful firm with a long reach running out of patience. She tells herself she has it under control. She tells herself the man watching her with something ancient behind his eyes is just another complication she doesn't have time for.

The Beithir, for the first time in its long and violent existence, is curious.

When Evelyn's pursuers find her and the danger stops being something she can manage alone, she glimpses a world she was never meant to see and the creature at the center of it. What she does not yet know is that the oldest cryptid in the keeper system has already made a decision about her. Not out of sentiment. Not out of anything it would lower itself to name.

Out of certainty. The way it decides everything.

Noah and the Beithir do not agree on much. On this, they are unified.

No one touches her.