Lena Vasquez has a knife against a scout's throat in a shack in the Oregon woods, asking where his pack keeps the moonpetal. He gives her one word before he bites down on the poison hidden in his collar and dies in her chair. Moonfall. Three days is what she has. Her brother Mateo is sixteen and dying of Silver Fever on a mattress in the next room, hollowed out by it, joking about the list of things he wants to get through before he goes. The only cure is moonpetal, and moonpetal grows in a sealed grove inside Shadow Pack territory, where a rogue is killed on sight. Clara, her grandmother, tells her where the standing stones are and what it will cost. *"If you're caught, don't beg. Shadow Wolves respect silence. If you beg, they'll break you slower."* Clara also lets slip something Lena never knew: she was an elder of the Shadow Pack herself, before she left. Lena crosses the border, swims the pool under the waterfall, and finds the ground between the three stones bare. The flower was moved three weeks ago. The man who moved it walks out of the shadows behind her, not into the dark but out of it, and gives his name as Dominic Rossi, Alpha of the Shadow Pack. Then he offers her a bargain. The Right of Claim. Five trials. If she survives them, the moonpetal is hers, along with her brother's life, a place in his pack, and answers to questions she has not learned to ask yet. One condition: she stops running, stops hiding, and walks into his territory as herself. Because Lena has a scar on her forearm from a failed shift at twelve and has spent her life certain her wolf never came. Dominic has just watched her vanish into shadow without shifting at all. *"You're a Shadow Wolf, Lena. You just don't know it yet."* What she walks into is more than trials. Vance Kincaid of the Red Pack wants Shadow territory and has made deals with her father's old allies to take it. A knife that looks like Dominic's turns up in Clara's wardrobe. The elders who already suspect the rogue girl are the ones who get to decide what she is. Lena stays anyway, and not to be kept safe. *"Then don't protect me. Stand beside me instead."* A wolf shifter romance set in the Oregon mountains, about a woman who came to steal a flower and the alpha who offered her a bargain instead. The romance is closed-door.

Morwen Carrick goes over the chain-link fence on the second rail, drops into a crouch on the pack side, and counts until the guard dog's snuffling passes. She grew up on this compound. She knows every limp, every cough, every tell in the Stoneclaw pack, and tonight she means to take her sister out of it. She finds Saoirse in the infirmary, red hair falling across her face, pressing dried yarrow into a glass jar with hands that tremble. There is a bruise along her jaw the shape of knuckles. *He hit you.* *He's alpha. He can do what he wants.* The alpha is Lachlan, and Lachlan is Morwen's uncle. There is a boat in the cove and cash enough to get them to Portland by dawn. There is also Niamh, his enforcer, in the doorway with her claws already coming out. *Deserters get brought back, or they get put down.* The knife that drops Niamh comes out of the tree line, thrown by a man Morwen has never met: dark hair streaked with grey, the left eye milky white and blind. Callum Reid. His pack held the territory north of the Stoneclaw lands for three generations, from the old lighthouse to the granite quarry, until Lachlan took it and killed his father. Callum has spent six months tracking wolves who went missing. Wolves who left packs, wolves who could no longer shift, wolves with witch blood in their veins. He has found graves in the old mining tunnels north of the compound, and what he needs is somebody who can testify to what happens inside. What he hands her instead is worse: her sister is next on that list, because the diluted witch blood in the Carrick line makes Saoirse expendable. Morwen carries it too. It shows as a white streak in her hair. Then his hand touches hers and something goes up her arm like a live wire, and he gives it a name. *It was the mate bond.* A rare, involuntary connection that bound two shifters for life, *impossible to forge and impossible to break*. *You can ignore it. You can fight it. But you can't cut it out.* She tries anyway. What she gets is a borrowed dress from a healer's spare trunk and a hood pulled low at a pack festival, a hunter muttering *twenty head, next full moon* into a notebook, a silver net dropping out of the dark, a witch's pendant that hides her from wolves and empties her when it does, and a stone circle at dawn with Lachlan's fist in her sister's red hair. And Callum, who has spent his whole life hiding the same blood his mother died from, has to decide whether to reach for it. This is a fated-mates shifter romance of pack politics, silver and witch blood, a woman who stops running and takes the territory instead, and an ending where she faces down a hall of elders with *He is my mate. That makes him pack.* Closed-door.

A single red hair, caught on a thornbush at chest height, still warm. Morven MacLaren knows that burnt-copper shade, and she knows the slight kink where her sister's hair always curls at the end. Beside Catriona's light footprints in the mud are a man's boots, heavy tread, not trying to hide. Under the lavender and the cheap soap their mother used to buy: iron. She follows the trail along the River Doran into Finlay Sinclair's territory and walks straight into a sentinel post. Morven ran three weeks ago rather than accept the mating contract her father arranged, and she took her sister with her. Since then Alistair MacLaren has had wanted sketches of his own daughter circulating, and the Shadow Alpha's father put a bounty on her head. There is a poster on the notice board in Dunscraig with Finlay's own face on it too, five hundred pounds for information on the Shadow Alpha's son. Morven tore it down before she left home. Finlay cuts the cord off her wrists instead of collecting. He does not hunt runaways. What he wants is a border held. Grant Ross has been stockpiling weapons, and the iron under the disputed lands would arm him to challenge any pack in the Highlands. Finlay needs someone Ross will actually listen to, and Ross will listen to Alistair MacLaren's daughter. So they seal a bargain in blood on parchment: she speaks for him at Ross's keep, he helps her find Catriona. *"You're asking me to trust you." "I'm asking you to make a deal. Trust comes after."* What neither of them has accounted for is what Morven is. Ten years ago a MacLaren assassin died in Finlay's father's hall having said exactly one thing: *The daughter carries the old blood.* Morven does not bend when an alpha gives a command. And the lullaby her mother sang over her in the dark turns out to be a code, first for a map, then for something far worse, hidden in a water-stained journal she was never meant to read. Her brother Ewan turns up at the longhouse with snow melting on his shoulders and his hands raised, wanting to undo what he helped do to both his sisters. Her father wants a war. Ross wants a war. Finlay is the first alpha she has met who wants the other thing. Highlands shifter romance with pack politics, a tracker who can separate scents at five miles, a rescue that turns into a resistance, and a vow made on a chapel altar with no magic in it at all. Closed-door.

The border ridge runs three miles along the eastern edge of Sunstone territory, and Bronwyn Carrick has walked every yard of it since she was fourteen. She knows where the cedar gives way to pine, where the stream runs shallow and cold, and which fallen oak makes a tripwire in the dark. Tonight the wind carries something that is not a scent at all, but the absence of one. *Like a missing tooth in a familiar smile.* She draws her knife. *Cross the stones and I'll treat it as a challenge.* What comes out from under the hemlock is a wolf that drinks the light, with one ice-grey eye and one amber, and when it shifts there is a crescent branded over its heart. He says he is tracking one of Fenris Grym's rogues. She gives him ten seconds to turn around. He is faster than anyone she has ever sparred with, and when the fight ends she is on the ground with a mark burning on her collarbone that she did not agree to. He knows who she is. *You're Carrick's daughter. The one who trained with the warriors instead of the healers.* Torchlight comes through the trees before she can get an explanation. Her cousin Eamon Carrick leads the patrol that finds her glowing, and he has wanted a reason for years. *Well, well. Bronwyn Carrick, marked by a Shadow wolf.* The mark is a bond, and Sable says it is a door that opens both ways: Rhys Darrow feels her loyalty, her fear and her anger, and she feels his. Sunstone calls that collusion. Rhys calls it the thing he has been seeing in visions since before he knew her name. And Fenris does not want Bronwyn at all. He wants her brother. *Finnian Carrick. The healer. Fenris wants him.* A healer's blood is how a rogue alpha breaks a curse, and Bronwyn already knows who made that curse, because it was her own grandfather. So she is standing in a council chamber being asked to choose her pack by killing the one wolf who can find Finnian, and she is standing in the rain later with a crossbow pointed at her by a man who shares her name and who says, quite reasonably, *I sold him to end a war.* Marked by the Shadow Alpha is a shifter romance about a fated bond nobody consented to, a brother worth burning a pack down for, and two wolves who end up building something new out of exiles. It is closed-door, and it ends under paper lanterns in a valley that did not exist when the book started.

Celestine Broussard kills the Model T's engine half a mile from the sugar mill and sits in the dark until her eyes adjust. Cypress roots gnaw at the mud like old bones. She pulls the silver knife from her boot and checks the blade by touch, because the shadow-sense at the base of her skull has found a cold thread running west through the reeds, and she knows what is waiting at the end of it. She is twenty minutes too late. The boy is twelve years old and his throat is open ear to ear, and the thing that did it is still in the mill, blonde and pale as bone in expensive dark linen, a fleur-de-lis burned into the skin at the base of his thumb. She throws the knife. He catches it between two fingers. *"Pretty,"* he says. *"But slow."* Then he tells her the equinox is coming, and that her mother will know what that means. She drives back to the French Quarter with jazz drifting from a speakeasy two streets over, and finds a sheet of cream-coloured stationery on the floor inside her sister's bedroom door. Three words in an educated hand. Odette is gone. The window is open, and there is no blood and no broken glass. Celestine is a Liaison of the Order, and her mother is the Order's matriarch, the woman who enforces the Accord between the living and the dead in this district. The mark on the killer's wrist belongs to the Devereux coven. So she goes to Julian Devereux, coven leader, amber-eyed, a man who collects debts the way other people collect stamps, and demands her sister back. Julian did not take Odette. Julian has a dead child on his conference table and a council that wants to hand someone over quickly, and he is the only one who can walk Celestine into the parts of the city that will not open for an Order badge. Their first witness is dead before dawn in a mausoleum in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, one finger pointed at a blank stone wall, and a shade rises out of her throat. What they uncover runs back through Celestine's own family: her mother's warded crypt and older lies, a cousin named Nina with an acting Sentinel's authority and an ambition that outgrows it, a stone with a fleur-de-lis split across it, and a faction of vampires who think the Accord is weakness. A vampire romance set in the bayou and the Quarter, ending on a bond that cannot be undone. Closed-door.

The bonfire catches the shift in Lena Ashford's chest before her mind does. Someone has strung lanterns through the lower branches of the pines, fifty wolves press close together, and after three years of standing at the edge of the Moonhowl Gatherings she has finally been asked to stand beside the alpha. Cade says her name. He takes her hand. Then he says it again, and finishes the sentence: *As alpha of the Shadow Pack, I invoke the right of refusal.* His reason is a prophecy. *The Ashford bloodline carries a curse.* The bond that has hummed beneath Lena's skin since her first bleed at fifteen tears out of her in front of the whole pack, and she is led home to her grandmother's cottage with a wound that will not close. Lena is a healer, from three generations of healers, and she does not leave. She keeps the greenhouse. She treats the people who stood and watched. And she starts pulling at the prophecy, because the man reciting it had his jaw locked and his hands shaking. What she finds underneath is not a curse. Cade's father altered the pack records. *The original prophecy didn't speak of destruction. It spoke of union.* The thing waiting under the Oathstone is not a metaphor either: it is Edna's own sister, driven through with a silver blade and buried there sixty years ago, and Edna's long fever is not a sickness at all but the price of holding that seal shut one more day. And Sierra, who wants to be alpha female and has wanted it since they were children, has been working the other side of it the whole time. She is also Lena's sister, which is why her confession lands the way it does. *I pushed you into that fire. I was seven years old.* To bind the demon again, Lena needs a bond that is given, not extracted: *Not forced. Not manipulated. Not borne of duty or fear or pack pressure.* Which means she needs Cade, the man who unmade her on the ceremonial stone, to choose her a second time with nothing arranged around it, no elders, no prophecy, no pack watching. And something has been hunting the Ashford line for three generations, and it is awake. This is a wolf-shifter paranormal romance about a rejected fated mate who stays, reads the records, and ends up giving the orders; the heat is closed-door.

A boy is kneeling in the heather with both hands pressed into his father's chest, trying to keep the life in. *You're twelve years old, Callum.* Fergus MacBain has the numbers and says them out loud: the MacRaes have sixty wolves, the MacBains have twenty-two, and half of those are old or hurt or green as spring whins. He makes his son swear by the split moon to take the pack into Gleann Dubh and never set foot on MacRae land again. Then his hand goes slack, and the boy is their alpha. Years later, in a pack house that has belonged to the MacRae family for eight generations, Mairi is grinding nightshade at midnight because her brother Aiden's fever will not break. Her uncle Lachlan fills the doorway. He has a letter, wax-sealed and spelled, that must reach a border runner at the standing stones before moonrise, and he needs a courier the shadow filth will not suspect. Aiden's tincture can wait an hour. It cannot, so Mairi picks the lock on the herb store instead. It takes her forty seconds. She has been practising on it for three years. The wolf is standing in the doorway when she turns around. Grey as storm clouds, with eyes the exact silver of the ones that have been watching her from the foot of her bed every night for a month. She throws a jar of foxglove at his face. He moves sideways like water running downhill, and then there is a hand on the back of her neck and a voice with the wrong vowels for the Highlands. *I'm not going to hurt you. But I need you to come with me. Now.* What Callum MacBain wants is not ransom. It is the thing her uncle has spent her whole life making sure she never learned: that her mother's bloodline is the last of its kind in the Highlands, and it is the only thing that can lift an omega curse that has held an exiled pack in a dark valley for forty years, stripping each generation of its wolf. So Mairi walks into a camp of rickets and hunger and children who have never been full, with a brand over its alpha's heart and a woman named Iona telling her plainly that her uncle did this and she gets to decide whether she helps or watches them rot. Stolen by the Shadow Alpha is a Highland shifter romance about exile, blood debt and a bargain nobody wins cleanly. It is closed-door, and it ends at a feast with a rowan and silver clasp, a kneeling alpha, and a howl coming down off the ridge in a voice still learning its own shape.

Nobody is taking her out of that compound except him. He decides it before he has spoken to her, and holds the line against wardens, elders and his own pack for the length of the book. Clara presses her palm flat against the chain-link and lets the bond-sense ripple outward. Seven heartbeats, all lupine, all male, spread across the compound in a lazy patrol pattern. The new moon hangs invisible somewhere above the pine canopy and the prison glows sickly yellow through the trees, a converted ranger station ringed by floodlights and barbed wire. She has been watching for three hours. Long enough to memorise the guard rotations. Long enough to count the floodlights, nine of them, with one flickering on the southeast corner. Long enough to watch a doe pick her way through the salal and ferns on the forest side of the fence, entirely unmolested by any ward the pack might have laid. The doe was the confirmation she needed. No magic here. Just men, just steel and concrete, and the particular arrogance that comes from believing a fence and a few patrols will keep out somebody who has nothing left to lose. Inside that building is the last member of her family still breathing, and the pack holding him has no idea that the woman counting their floodlights can feel every heartbeat inside the fence as clearly as her own. What follows: a prison she cannot burn, a blood claim she did not make, a map that should have been destroyed, a trial bond drunk down in front of witnesses, wardens who watch her constantly, a rage he will not explain, a feast she was not invited to, and a moon that refuses to hear anybody. *You're impossible.* *I know.* Softer the second time. A promise instead of a claim. What Clara learns about the bond, about the woman who taught her to read it, and about why seven men are guarding one building may permanently rewrite everything she has believed about the night her own pack fell.

She runs a healing hut. She runs a sister's medication schedule. She runs the arithmetic of how many weeks are left, every morning, before she has finished grinding the first handful of anything. The hut smells of yarrow and failure. Cora crushes another handful of feverfew into the mortar, the pestle scraping stone in a rhythm she learned at twelve, when her mother first showed her how to grind grief into something that passes for hope. The paste will do nothing. She knows it. The plant knows it. But grinding gives her hands something to do while her sister coughs herself hollow on the cot behind her. *Stop.* Eliza's voice comes out scraped thin, like paper drawn over a wound. *You're making that sound again. The one where you're calculating my funeral.* Cora sets down the pestle and turns. Her sister lies propped against three thin pillows with the blankets pulled to her chin despite the summer heat coming through the eastern window. Dark circles carved into half-moons under hazel eyes. Skin gone the colour of old milk. *I'm not calculating anything.* Jenner arrives with an offer that is not an offer, and the bargain they strike is witnessed, written and entirely unsurvivable if either of them tells the truth about it. There is one thing in the valley that might work and it belongs to a pack her own people have not spoken to in thirty years, and the price of asking is the kind of price you do not get to renegotiate afterwards. What follows: a wolf in the clearing, a prisoner's bargain, a healer's test, a week of embercake, a scar she cannot forget, a messenger from home, and a confession made in the rain. *She just proved he was a murderer. She just saved this pack from a traitor.* *The law is the law. She compromised our borders.* A mortar. A cot. Three thin pillows. One bargain, witnessed. One bond, unasked for. *But I know I'm not leaving.*

Wren Hart has been missing three months. The sheriff took notes with the patience of a man who thinks people go off-grid out here all the time. The search parties stopped going out after the first month. So Brynna drove to Silver Creek herself, because nobody else was going to look. Wren never hiked the marked trails. So Brynna goes right, toward the creek, and within an hour she has found broken ferns with the sap still tacky at the breaks, a six-inch strip of blue fabric snagged on a blackberry thorn, and a hiking boot half-buried in mud on the far bank with its laces still tied and a smear of dried blood on the leather. In a clearing ringed with moss-covered boulders she finds her sister's pack, and inside it a notebook. *Day 7: Found the trail. It's real. They're real. If you're reading this, Brynna* - *don't come looking for me.* Tucked into the back cover is a faded Polaroid of an enormous wolf with gold eyes and a small blue livestock tag clipped to one ear. On the back, in Wren's handwriting: *Alpha. Silver Creek Pack. Don't let them find this.* Then the same wolf comes down the ravine wall toward her. Fletcher Calloway does not kill her. That is the first problem. Pack law says a human who witnesses the shift goes to the Elders, and instead he puts her in his cabin and gives her his shirt, and his Gamma wants to know what has gone wrong with an Alpha the whole territory calls feral - the one who killed a Cinder Pack scout three autumns back and did not stop when he should have. Raelynn Vance made sure that story reached every pack from the Rogue River to the Columbia. She does not do her own dirty work. She employs people who do, and one of them leaves a note in the trees, written by someone careful enough not to be identified by handwriting. *Trade: the girl for the feral alpha's head.* So Wren is alive. And the price of her is the man whose wolf has already decided what Brynna is to him, and whose Elder, Hattie, is sitting on a journal in his dead father's handwriting that explains why Brynna's body keeps doing things a human body should not do. A fated-mates shifter romance in the Oregon Cascades, with a pack hiding in plain sight in a small town, a rival Alpha who fights with rumour, and a woman who came looking for her sister and found something moving under her own skin. The romance is closed-door.

Fiona Marsh has spent six weeks of hospital vigils in a green vinyl chair, and the only thing left that might work is not a drug. It is a flower. *Three doses and your sister's marrow remembers how to make blood.* Dr. Orla Keane holds up the dried flake, translucent, veined with faint blue light even under the greenhouse fluorescents, and then tells Fiona what it will cost. The moonflower grows on exactly one piece of ground, and the man who owns it kills trespassers. *Humans and shifters alike.* Two hunters crossed his line last winter. Their truck was found at the logging road, engine running, doors open. His name is Callum MacBride. He was chieftain of Greyhearth once. Now he lives alone past the ridge where the pines grow so thick the sun cannot reach the ground, answering to no pack and no council, and the Border Accords do not cover him because he belongs to nothing. Fiona has three days. The moonflower opens under the waning moon, three nights before the Moonhowl Festival, and if she has not harvested by the third sunrise the blooms dissolve into dust. She crosses the border anyway, with a shovel, a bag and her mother's silver locket in her pocket, the chain worn bright at the clasp. What she does not know is that she has walked into somebody else's war. For months Callum has been finding marks scratched along his boundary. *Deliberate. Obvious. Designed to frame him for violence he had not committed.* They belong to Duncan, who is his brother, who took Greyhearth from him, and who would like nothing better than a dead human found on the feral alpha's land. So instead of killing her, Callum gives her three nights and teaches her the harvest. And Fiona starts noticing things she cannot account for: a cut on her finger that closed in seconds, a gash on her palm gone overnight, and a pull toward the moonflowers that feels less like theft than like recognition. A paranormal shifter romance about a human woman who will trespass on anything to keep her sister alive, and an exiled alpha who mistook being alone for being at peace. The romance is closed-door.

What is a woman doing out on the moor before dawn with a satchel she will not open, and how long can she keep saying snares before somebody follows her? *You're up to something.* Mairi freezes with her hand on the leather. The voice comes from the shadow of the longhouse, low and knowing. She turns slowly, arranging her face into something bored and harmless. Hamish leans against the timber frame with his arms crossed, the missing notch of his left earlobe catching the grey pre-dawn light. *You've had that look all week. The one your mother used to wear before she went sneaking off.* *My mother's dead. And I'm going to check the snares before the sun catches the rabbits and makes them clever.* He snorts. *Since when do you set snares?* *Since you lot stopped bringing in enough meat to feed the pups.* She hoists the satchel higher and steps past him, pulse ticking hard against her collarbone, a steady drum she refuses to let him hear. What follows: a cave she was never supposed to find, a wolf who will not back down, a rope that tastes like iron, a storm that pushes two people into the same shelter, an elder who smiles like a blade, a brother who disappears, a bargain struck at a rock the clans have used for three hundred years, and a cell holding somebody who should not be in it. *He kept the token. He wrote it down. He knew she would betray him, and he kept proof anyway.* *I bind myself to you, wolf and woman, heart and pack, for as long as the rock remembers.* He will break the bargain, the truce and the rock itself if he has to. Whatever the elders decide and whatever the other clan sends, the next person who lays a hand on Mairi is going to be dealing with something that stopped being an alpha and started being a great deal worse.

Isla MacMorran is eight years old and halfway down the root-cellar stairs when the thing comes through the cottage door. It is bigger than a man, wrong in the shoulders, and it has to stoop to fit the frame. Her mother swings the iron poker and the iron connects and the thing does not flinch. The last thing Mairi MacMorran says to her daughter is *Trust no one but yourself.* Twelve years later, Isla still calls her father Fergus rather than Da, and still sleeps with the knife. She rides back into the village of Morrowdun three hours past dusk from a pointless patrol and finds her brother Callum in a doorway with a packed satchel and their mother's mended coat on his back. The contract has been accepted. He leaves for Blackwood territory by the new moon, and Morna Blackwood has her sights set on him. Fergus had promised Isla a week to negotiate. Fergus, as Callum puts it, promised her a lot. So she goes in through the warped shutters of her father's study, the trick she learned at twelve, and reads the contract by candlelight. *Callum MacMorran to wed any female of the Blackwood pack, first moon of winter, in exchange for mutual defense against the Ravenwood pack.* Any female. Not Morna specifically. Beneath it, folded between two ledgers, is a note sealed with a cluster of ravens in flight, their beaks open as if screaming. *The debt falls due at the dark moon.* Her father is not buying an alliance. He is buying time, with his son. Isla saddles her mare to catch the messenger before the border. What she finds instead is Gareth Blackwood: the limping alpha, the mute's son, a man with a clean scar where his ring finger should be, silver coming into his hair, who has learned to move with a wolf-trap injury rather than fight it. Then a rogue turns up dead with a brand burned into its flank above the hip, still pink and less than a week old, and it is the same raven's claw that seals her father's debt note. A closed-door wolf shifter romantasy of pack debts, marriage contracts and border war, about a girl who promised herself at eight that she would never need anyone again.

Callum was eight the night his mother put a knife in his hand and made him promise. His father was convulsing on the kitchen flagstones. The pack needed an Alpha before morning. And there was a condition attached to the blood she was pouring into him. *Promise that you will never bond. Never mate. Never love a woman the way your father loved me.* *Never love, never bond, or she will die.* He is thirty-one now, and the curse has grown with him: a tightness in the chest at twelve, his father's face in dreams at sixteen, and at twenty the first shift and the understanding that every change brings the thing closer to the surface. Sloane Ashworth comes to Raven's Hollow for one reason. Her younger brother Liam has an immune system that is failing, a doctor who has said two months and maybe less, and a battered copy of a novel about wolves that he has read fourteen times since the diagnosis. She has run out of hospitals. So she goes into the forest that the town does not talk about, and she is met with a rifle and a sentence. *You're on MacBride land.* What Callum does for Liam he does knowing exactly what it costs. Blood is what the curse travels through, and once his is in her brother's veins it does not stay a medical matter. *The curse binds through blood, Callum. Your blood is inside her brother. Every time she touches him, she touches a piece of you.* So the man who has spent his life making sure no woman ever got close has now tied himself to one by his own hand, twice over, and the thing in his chest has started to stir. All of it plays out beside a pack healer with a reagent that turns blue for the wrong reasons, a man who has been quietly testing a sample he should not have, an Icefang warband on the border, an old thing moving in the deep woods that leaves tracks and no scent, and a black stone that can unmake what was made. A closed-door wolf shifter romance about an inherited curse, a sick brother, a bargain that keeps changing its price, and a woman who refuses every version of the story where she is the one who gets protected.

She left it unguarded for ten minutes. Maybe twelve. That is the whole story, and everybody in the glen is going to hear it in some version before the month is out. *You'll never catch him on two legs.* Fiona MacLeod ignores the voice, hers or somebody else's, it does not matter, and pushes harder through the bracken. The rogue has a thirty-yard lead and the moon at his back, silver spilling over grey fur like he was carved out of mist. She has tracked him three miles from camp, across the burn and up into the scree where the heather gives way to bare rock and the wind carries nothing but iron and old snow. The Moonstone is in his mouth. She can see it catching light, pale as bone, the size of her thumb joint. The stone her mother pressed into her hand the night she died. The stone that holds her pack's claim to the eastern glen. The stone she was fool enough to leave unattended while she washed the blood off her hands after the day's hunt. Ten minutes. Long enough for a rogue to slip the camp's scent line and long enough for Duncan to be the one who sees her lose it. What follows: a vow that burns going in, a debt she cannot pay, a healer's price, an alpha's burden, a bear's den, echoes of a mother's silence, a grave she never knew existed, and an accusation made in front of both packs. *Fear doesn't make a man a traitor.* *No. But what he did with that fear does.* His hand comes up to cup her jaw, gentle despite the burns, and he kisses her back like she is the only real thing left in a world that is mostly fire. Fiona has to decide whether the man who watched her fail is worth the one thing she has left to trade, which is the claim her mother died putting into her hand.