The Savage Alpha's Prize

The bracelet is silver, engraved with wolves chasing each other through thistles, and it was a wedding gift from a man whose name Alistair MacKenzie has never said aloud. Iona has worn it exactly once, the night of the burial, and the silver left a mark on her wrist that lasted three days.

She is seventeen. She keeps seven inches of good Spanish steel strapped to her thigh under her wool skirt, traded for when she was twelve, and she has spent three years learning to throw it at the wall behind the old byre. She can take a hare at twenty paces, clean through the eye.

It will not stop a wolf.

Her father tells her the MacTavish alpha comes in a week and that she will be ready. He also tells her that Hamish wants the alpha seat, and that Hamish has been talking to the MacDonalds about the Silver Pact: the treaty that binds the clans never to hunt humans, never to kill them, never to let the secret out of the Highlands. Breaking it brings a curse on the whole clan, and the curse is worse than death.

The marriage buys time. Bound to Callum MacTavish, Iona makes it impossible for Hamish to move on her father without declaring war on two clans at once.

When she rides in, the MacTavish gates stand open. Not in welcome. In display. Callum is standing in the middle of the courtyard, bare from the waist up, blood streaked across his chest and forearms like a butcher's apron, a stag on the ground. He looks at her the way a man looks at a fly that has landed on his dinner.

His sister Fenella, silver birthmark spreading from brow to cheekbone, chipped tooth, tells her the bread is three days old and the ale will strip paint, and warns her about Mhairi, who has been after Callum for years.

What Iona finds inside that keep is not the story her father told her. Not about her mother, whose death he explained in four words she believed for five years. Not about who has been lying, or how long.

A closed-door Highland wolf shifter romance of clan treaties, an arranged marriage and a girl who has stopped believing much of what her father tells her.