"Fifty for an hour," Steve tells her. "Sixty for my mouth." Steve sells the only thing he’s got left and Natasha's buying. She’s not the only one.

Armin, an Omega, has been raised all his life to be a consort. An Untouched, deprived of physical contact, he is desperate for an Alpha to choose him as their own. When he's brought to the palace to be the only consort of the crown prince, he thinks his life is perfect. But there are dark secrets buried beneath his Alpha's kind exterior, and when they begin to reveal themselves Armin's idyllic new existence is shattered.

Every student of House Mandrake is assigned a study partner, a counterpart from House Valerian. Lan Wangji suspects, with some outrage, that he's been given the troublemaker.