The Pain Threshold

In the Avalon Federation, the frontier province of Wildridge is a lawless scar where disability claims conceal a savage economy of organ trafficking and migrant exploitation. When young parliamentary secretary Aidan Shaw uncovers a scheme linking his ambitious minister, Conrad Valk, to a criminal syndicate that fakes pain records to launder fortune, he is plunged into a lethal power transition. As Valk orchestrates the assassination of a whistleblower doctor and prepares to burn every archive, Aidan must choose between the justice that will destroy his career and the complicity that could crown him kingmaker in a new government—all while the borderlands pulse with a primal, untamed vigor that defies every law of the Federation.