After her mate is killed, Jessica Matthews forswears everything wolfen and builds a life for herself as a lone wolf among humans. So, she's understandably apprehensive when an old friend invites her to New York and accidentally-on-purpose embroils her in a civil war for control of the city's pack. Jessica agrees to help her friend out but is unprepared for how strongly her own instincts pull her back into the world she thought she wanted nothing to do with.

Nomadic rambler Derrick Crofton and his pack of jägerslayers have little use for humanity. It's their job, after all, to hunt down the humans who target, torture, and kill wolfen. When Derrick accepts the contract to protect the remains of the decimated New York pack, he has no idea he's signed his jägerslayers up to fight a war on two fronts. Holding back challengers from enemy wolfen seeking to take over the pack is one thing, but doing so while also fighting an army of hundejägers hell bent on bringing about the extinction of all wolfenkind is possibly biting off more than he and his pack of warriors can chew.

After an attack by a hundejäger posing as an Uber driver, Jessica comes face to face with Derrick, the one wolfen who could have kept her from fleeing all those years ago, that is, if he hadn't abandoned her and left her alone to deal with her grief. Derrick, realizing Jessica will never be safe now that the hunters have her in their database-and given his guilt over the role he played in her mate's death-feels compelled to protect her. However, due to a grave miscalculation on Jessica's friend's part, the city's pack decides Jessica's alpha female status is a threat to them and they declare her an enemy wolfen, assigning Derrick the job of removing her.

Jessica's instinctual alpha drive demands she stand her ground rather than flee, but to seize control of the pack from the clique of beta females she needs a suitable alpha male to support her claim. Her heart tells her Derrick is both the perfect and the worst choice. Perfect, because she's never been so powerfully drawn to any other wolfen in her life, and the worst because she needs a mate willing to settle in one place and, ideally, one who isn't also being paid to kill her.