Luna of the Shadow Pack

The hiking boots sit beside the tent flap with the laces still tied, *like he had stepped out of them and never come back.*

Maya Hartwell has been tracking her brother for six days, up from Eugene and into the Willamette National Forest, following convenience-store receipts and spotty cell tower pings that spiral inward toward a valley on no hiking map she can find. Sam is a journalist. He told her he was looking into something. Then his phone went dead.

His campsite has everything in it but him. No blood. No struggle. Just a sleeping bag still zipped, a stove on its side, and mud on his boot tread the wrong color for this forest.

Then she finds the line of white stones, fist-sized and freshly set, curving through the underbrush like a boundary. She steps over one without thinking, and the air changes: *like walking through a curtain of spider silk.*

*You're lost.*

Three men are standing behind her, and she never heard one of them approach. The one in front has iron-gray eyes and a scar across his jaw two weeks old, and the land is his. His name is Rafe Blackwood, and pack law is unambiguous about a human who finds out what they are: bound, or executed. The Shadow Pack no longer has an elder who can perform the binding.

So Rafe does something else. He walks Maya into the lodge, stands her in front of his wolves, and tells them she is his fated mate. He calls it a ruse. *It's a ruse. Nothing more.* The pack healer, Elena, does not accept that for a second. *The bond is real, whether or not Maya understands it yet.*

Maya's own terms are simpler. She is not leaving without Sam, even if it means sleeping in the alpha's bed and answering to a title she does not want.

What neither of them has time for is the reason Sam went missing in the first place. Aldric Stone has been pushing the Shadow Pack's borders for six months, testing, bolder each season, and he holds the high valleys where the only reliable moonbloom grows. Rafe has a hardliner at his own table who wants Maya dead. And somewhere under everything is the question of why the bond formed at all around a woman who is supposed to be entirely human, and what her mother buried before Maya was born.

A contemporary shifter paranormal romance in the Oregon Cascades: a missing brother, a fake mate bond that refuses to stay fake, poison and an antidote that has to be cut off a cliff by moonrise. The romance is closed-door.