Last Call

Violet Cole is exactly what she appears to be.

A twenty-six-year-old bartender in Milwaukee's Third Ward, she's spent her adult life behind the bar at Shakers - a pre-Prohibition haunt so old it has opinions about who crosses its threshold - mixing the right drink for the wrong moment and talking down trouble before it starts. Her magic is low-level, practical, and entirely unremarkable. Her coven has opinions about that. Violet doesn't.

She's also, decisively, done with love. The half-fire-demon who burned her arm during an argument was the last in a line of disasters, and she's made her peace with that. Some things aren't worth the wreckage.

Then a wounded man stumbles into her bar on a Thursday night in October.

He's bleeding. He's stubborn about it. He has amber eyes that catch the light in ways human eyes don't, and he carries the particular stillness of something much larger than the body currently containing it. His name is Aidan. He's a Griffin - and he's supposed to be across town at the Pfister Hotel, where the triennial Supernatural Council Summit is underway and where someone has already tried to kill him once tonight.

Violet patches him up, pours him a drink, and tells herself he's just a patron.

She's wrong.

Over four charged days, something ignites between them - combustible, complicated, and built on the collision of a man who has spent decades keeping the world at arm's length and a woman who can read everything he's trying to hide. He thinks she's fragile. She knows he's wrong. He leaves for Malta when the summit ends, certain it's the right thing.

He starts writing her letters that night. He doesn't send them.

But what happened in that bar - between Violet and Aidan, between Violet and the ability she's been unknowingly using her entire life - has already set something in motion. Something that the supernatural world's most dangerous organization has been waiting for. Something that Violet didn't know she was.

She's about to find out.

LAST CALL is the first book in the 414 Chronicles - a steamy paranormal romance series set in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the beer is cold, the ghosts have opinions, and the woman behind the bar is more powerful than anyone knows.