The beginning of this story takes place in a short-story I have not read, and I find that unspeakably annoying. Do I really have to buy a collection of short stories for the sake of one I'm interested in? Couldn't they have collected it with this one? I would pay an extra dollar for the volume.

Backwards engineering from this story, in the short story, Charles Cornick finds Anna in a pack where she was, as an "Omega," raped and abused in an attempt to make her behave like a Beta wolf. Omegas are apparently an incredibly rare class of werewolf who are outside the power dynamics of the pack, neither dominant or subordinate, and apparently other wolves, especially alphas, find it incredibly relaxing to be around a wolf over whom they do not have to assert their authority. Strangely, all the careful attention paid to power dynamics makes this book seem less kinktastic than some werewolf books which seem to take place in a leather convention.

I'm guessing that the short story ends with her accepting Charles' protection, and by implication, his feelings for her, because the book begins with them in an uneasy relationship, Anna half-ways trusting Charles, but frightened by his power over her. Her wolf aspect trusts him completely, and has accepted him as her mate, but her human aspect is not ready for sex, and conditioned by her years of abuse to trust no one.

This aspect of the story, the "romance," is fairly well done. Anna sometimes uses her wolf-aspect to get her through situations her human aspect can't handle, and gives Charles the wrong idea of her psychological state. As an abuse-recovery narrative, it's a bit magically easy, but it seemed "realistic" within those parameters.

The problem for me was Charles. He's half Salish, and Anna is fascinated by his features and skin in a way which bothered me. It's fairly well done, as such things go, but the word "exotic" is actually used to describe him, from her POV. It's not egregious, and Briggs has clearly done research to learn as much as she could about the culture and history, it mostly left me going "I'm not sure how I feel about this."

Awesome: a lapsed Muslim character who occupies a secondary place in the narrative. As a werewolf, ageless, he dates from the Moorish occupation of Spain.

All in all, enjoyable.