Rosalind Farrow has chosen the ugliest gown she owns. The wool is the color of mud, the hem drags on purpose, and the heel of her left boot is loose because she scuffed it against the carriage step that morning. In the throne room of Vanholt, twenty women wait for a Lycan King to decide which of them he will take before noon, and Rosalind has spent all week practicing a slump. *A girl who couldn't hold herself properly was a girl no king would want.* Aldric Vanholt walks the line. He passes the candidate the whole court expects him to take, and stops in front of the girl in mud-colored wool. *I said this one.* By the time the murmuring dies, guards have her brother Tomlin by the arms. He is fifteen. Aldric offers the boy his own room, a tutor, weapons training when he is old enough, and does not pretend the offer comes without a price. *But your brother's life is in your hands. Remember that.* Her mother is dying of consumption, and the king's physician can be at that bedside tonight. Rosalind stays. What Aldric wants is not a wife. The Vanholt line is cursed, and every king in it becomes the thing his people whisper about in the woods. The only anchor is a willing bride. He watched the curse take his sister Elara; he held her hand while the wolf inside her tore its way out through her skin. What he has not told his bride is what the castle chronicles say about the women who came before her. *Every generation, the king's bride dies within a year of the wedding.* Rosalind has her own reason for being inside these walls. She once crouched in the hollow of an oak in the northern woods, hands clamped over her mouth, and watched a man open her father's chest. She has just seen that face again, here, with a name attached to it. Lord Malach Vex, silver hair, one eye clouded white, taloned fingers that never stop moving. He does not only want the throne. *Your throne. Your kingdom. Your bride.* And in the small tower that overlooks the stables, Lady Cecily is watching. Aldric's cousin, at Vanholt since she was twelve, the woman who had been preparing for the Choosing her whole life. She sends up tea. She calls herself the only friend Rosalind has in the castle. *You cannot prove anything, cousin. She is fragile.* A paranormal shifter romance set in the kingdom of Verain: a cursed king, a hostage bride, a village herbalist who knew too much, and an archery contest under a Moonfall moon. Closed-door.

Rosalind Marlowe kneels against the apothecary wall at the Stone Gate and packs a gash in a Lycan boy's ribs. It is a crime. No human healer touches Lycan flesh without a writ from the palace, and she has watched what the patrols do about it. The boy whispers that they shot him with silver. Silver arrows are outlawed in Thornwood. His mother presses a pouch of coins into Rosalind's hand. *"Take it and forget you saw us."* Rosalind does not forget. She carries the silver straight into the conscription yard, where a guard named Harker is reading names off a list to a crowd of families pressed against the iron railings. One of those names is her younger brother's. Tobias Marlowe is standing in chains. *"His name is a mistake,"* she says, and holds out the pouch. The bribe almost works. Then a shout goes up at the palace gates, and the whole yard drops to its knees for Prince Sebastian. He asks her why a healer has silver at a conscription gate. She could lie. She looks at the raw marks the cuffs have left on her brother's wrists and doesn't. *"I did what was right. If that's a crime, then chain me next to my brother."* Sebastian releases Tobias to the palace forge under Master Ironwood. Then he takes Rosalind inside, where the Lycan council rules on what a human who bribed a guard and treated a Lycan without a writ is worth: one moon cycle serving as palace healer, at the end of which her brother's case goes to the full council. So a commoner with burn scars crawling from wrist to elbow moves into a palace built to eat people who are not careful. Morgause Ravenscroft, the king's counselor, wants her own daughter on the throne. The rogues raiding the border are her creatures, funded through shell accounts and her husband's old trade connections, and their leader has plans for Thornwood Palace that end with ashes. Every scrap of evidence Rosalind digs up gets turned around and driven into Tobias instead. And there is Sebastian, who tells her, quietly, *"I had a brother once. He died in the conscription camps."* What grows between a human healer and a Lycan prince in that palace is not safe for either of them. It gets less safe when he bites her to keep her alive, and something that was never hers before starts answering from inside her chest. A fantasy shifter romance of palace politics, conscription lists and a bond neither lead asked for. The romance is closed-door.

The camera is staked fifty yards up an old logging road, where the Douglas firs thin into alder. Callie Hendricks lifts it off the tree and the housing comes apart in her hands, strap chewed through, seal already pried at. The card still reads. She clicks through two months of deer and raccoons and one bobcat with a limp, and then she reaches day thirty-eight. A wolf walks up to the lens. Pale, heavy, unhurried. It stops. It stares into the camera, not past it, at it, and it does not blink. Then its jaws open and close around the glass, and the footage goes black. Callie is a freelance wildlife biologist on a six-month contract studying gray wolf migration through the Cascades. She is also a Hendricks, and her mother Edith raised her on one sentence. *They are not animals, Callie. They are monsters wearing skin.* She presses delete. The next morning a man from Wildlife Management takes the chair across from her in the diner, with six other tables empty, and tells her that her permits need his signature. Dain Redmond has amber eyes and a scarred brow, and Marge behind the counter says he is the one who keeps the peace between the town and the other side of the mountain. Callie has seen that brow before. She was twelve when she found a wolf cub in a rusted iron trap, worked the jaws open, and carried him down to the stream to wash the blood off his leg. The trap's teeth caught her on the way, three pale lines from wrist to elbow that she has been explaining away ever since. He remembers all of it. *You opened the jaws. You carried me to the stream. You washed the blood off my leg.* Everything Callie was told about her father's death is wrong, and the man who actually pulled the trigger is still in Wolf's Hollow. Rowan Kestrel walks with a limp and a gray beard, wants Dain's place at the head of the pack, and wants the old ways back. *He wants the old ways. Secrecy. Fear.* He has not been working alone. And Maya, Callie's nineteen-year-old sister, has been slipping out to meet a lycan named Finn and thinks the whole thing is a fairy tale. And Edith Hendricks is coming down out of the pass with twenty loyalists, silver bullets and wolfsbane, on a timetable set by the full moon. What stands against that is a cave under the Hollow, a door in the north that opens only at the full moon, and a bloodline Callie never knew she carried. A paranormal shifter romance with a suspense spine, told in Callie's voice, closed-door, ending with a hunter's daughter and a pack alpha walking toward the treeline hand in hand.

*"You're on Pack land."* Nora stops mid-stride, bare feet in the cold pine duff. She shifted back two miles ago and left her clothes folded under a hollow log, so she arrives at the Crescent Pack border at dusk with nothing, smelling of blood and distance. She does not raise her hands. She angles her neck, drops her shoulders, and asks permission to cross. The sentry takes one look at the silver scar along her collarbone and goes to fetch the Alpha. Bennett Shaw fills the doorway of his own great room like he was carved from the valley. He is missing a chunk of his left ear, and his eyes are the colour of wet slate. He already knows what she is. *"You're the survivor from the Blackwood Pack."* Blackwood territory is two hundred miles east. Nora has been running three weeks. Her father is under a cairn of rocks on a hillside she cannot name, her mother died with a blade through her throat, her brother was shot in the back while he was trying to shift. She is not asking for shelter. She is asking for a place to gather information and fight back, and Bennett does not believe a word of it. What buys her a night is his mother. Maggie Shaw comes down the stairs with a limp and a cardigan mended at the elbow, asks to see Nora's collar, touches the silver scar with trembling fingers, and says she knew Elena Blackwood. *"You have her face. Her fire. I would have known you anywhere."* One week, Bennett says. Then Nora sets her own condition: she does not work with people she cannot trust, so she wants to know who is in his inner circle. His mother. His beta, Thomas. His sentry lead, Clara Vance. Nora already knows what Clara's coat smells like. The man behind all of it is not a stranger. Damon Blackwood is her uncle, and the pack calls him the Butcher. He killed his own brother, his sister-in-law and his nephew, and he left Nora alive on purpose. He also killed Bennett's mate four years ago, by the same method, with silver through the heart and no witnesses. So the alpha who wanted her gone and the lone wolf with nothing left start planning the same raid, and neither of them can afford what is happening between them in the kitchen and the hallway and across a patrol map on a dead man's desk. A shifter romance about a survivor, a suspicious Alpha, a traitor inside a pack house, and a rogue who has spent a decade destroying his own bloodline. The book alternates between his point of view and hers, and the romance is closed-door.

Rain drips from the hemlock branches while Sasha Vance drags her brother toward a healer's cabin she is banished from reaching. Nori is twenty-one. The curse has hollowed him out, and the full moon is six nights away. Sasha is twenty-four, and what she has brought for protection is three inches of steel with a chipped handle. The patrol finds them first. *You're banished, Vance. You don't get to ask for anything*, says Callum Hayes, who gave her the scar above her eyebrow when they were children, and who once took a black eye from her in return. The alpha who comes for her is Finn Calder. At nineteen he knelt in wet pine needles and watched his father die on a granite slab while the elders chanted and the wolf inside the man ate him from the inside out. Eamon Calder's last words were *The Vance woman's blood sealed it.* Elena Vance had cursed the Crescent Pack on her way into exile, and the curse has been collecting ever since, one pyre at a time. Finn sends Sasha to the holding cells. He also sends the healer to her brother. Neither of them knows what to do with the thread that pulls tight the moment he walks through the longhouse door, and both of them would rather call it rage. What Finn finds behind a loose stone, wrapped in oilcloth, is his father's handwriting. The tattoo on the inside of Nori's wrist was never an accident. The dark lines climbing the boy's throat are the working of something Eamon arranged himself, and the way out is written in the same cramped hand: *The counter-rite requires a willing sacrifice of wolf and heart.* Finn means to be that sacrifice. *It'll just take my wolf*, he tells her, as though that were a smaller thing. His sister Mira tells him he does not get to throw himself on a pyre to fix what their father broke. Sasha tells him something harder, that she will not buy her brother's life with his, and that it is not a choice he gets to make alone. And the borders are going soft. Ren has been meeting someone from the Shadow Ridge Pack. Garrett's wolves cross with pine resin and ash rubbed into their coats to mask the smell. Thorne's needles keep drawing thin red lines from Nori's arm, and the marks keep climbing toward his jaw. This is a shifter romance built on an inherited feud: a banished wolf, an alpha holding a debt he did not incur, a curse with a named price, and a pack deciding whether one more body is worth the old hatred. The romance is closed-door.

Hazel Vance is poaching on pack land because her brother is dying and venison is what she has to give him. She draws on a buck, releases, and *the arrow was still in the air when the wolf hit her.* The enforcer who calls the wolf off knows her on sight. *"The Vance girl. Your brother's the sick one."* He tosses her a pouch of pack jerky instead of a citation. Enough for three days, maybe four. So she asks him about the thing a trader once told her: a cave in Silver Creek territory where Moonmoss grows, and the old claim that *Moonmoss can cure wasting diseases.* To reach it she has to walk into the pack's heart and ask for a miracle from the one man she swore she would never stand in front of again. Three years ago Darian Blackwood told Hazel she couldn't be luna, couldn't be his mate, couldn't stay. She felt the bond break. She has been living with the scar and the shame of it since, in a cabin with thin walls, listening to Finn's breathing get worse. Then, in a grotto deep inside the Moonmoss cave, she finds a messenger's satchel and an unsigned letter written in a sharp, angular hand. *Reject the Vance girl or her brother dies.* *You have three days to make it public.* Signed with a single initial. Luther Blackwood is the pack elder with the slicked-back hair and the cold eyes, the man who wanted the alpha position after his brother's death, who challenged Darian and lost, and who never accepted the defeat. He holds forged documents that would convict Darian's father of selling pack ground to the Rivers Pack, and he has enough pull with the elders to make the forgery stick. The rejection that broke Hazel was not contempt. It was a ransom, and Darian has been paying it every day since. But knowing that does not cure Finn, and it does not stop Luther. The boy is taken. The Rivers Alpha lays out the trade in front of a camp of witnesses: publicly reject Darian Blackwood, renounce the mate bond, and Finn goes to a healer instead of a grave. *"I have forty, plus the element of surprise, plus your brother's life in my hand."* Darian is coming through the trees with nineteen wolves and a grudge. And the cure has a catch nobody mentioned in the stories. Moonmoss binds to lycan blood; Alpha blood carries the strongest regenerative factor. To save Finn, someone has to bleed the one person in the camp who can spare it least. This is a second-chance fated-mates shifter romance about pack law, a forged inheritance, and a cruelty that turns out to have been a ransom. The heat is closed-door.

A dried marigold petal on the windowsill, crushed between Lorna's fingers and tipped into her apron pocket. Useless, like every remedy she has tried. Her brother Tobias lies on his side facing the wall, three cold cups of tea going mouldy on the nightstand beside him. The physician has given him until the next blood moon. *"Don't pretend it's working."* The moonflower grows in exactly one glasshouse: white petals, blue veins, blooming only under the blood moon. That glasshouse is inside Hollow Court, and everybody in the village knows what happens to the women who go up that hill. Lorna writes her father a letter, props it against the salt cellar on the kitchen table, and goes anyway. *"I'm not begging. I'm offering to trade."* Bramwell watches her come out of the mist from the window of the great hall. He has been expecting her. What he offers is a contract. *"Marry me. Stay for three months. On the final day, I will give you the moonflower and release you from the contract."* What he does not offer is any account of the seven women who signed the same contract across seven years and were never seen again. And what he does not mention at all is the conversation he had at that window while she was still climbing the hill. That her brother should be bedridden by now. That he is sitting up and taking broth instead. That three drops per cup is evidently not enough. Lorna signs. She has three days until the flower opens, three months until she can go home, and a husband who tells her to stay in her room after sunset and calls it a warning rather than an order. The moonflower, meanwhile, has been moved to the upper shelf. Out of reach. Not hidden, because he does not want it hidden. He wants her to have to ask. What neither of them has planned for is a registrar arriving at Hollow Court with a letter about irregularities, written by somebody already living in the house. A gothic shifter romance of a bargain struck between two people who are each lying about what they want: a glasshouse, a locked hand, a scar from temple to jaw, and a girl who came to trade rather than to beg. The romance is closed-door.

She is done being decided for. She says it out loud, in a room where four people have just finished deciding, and the latch clicks shut behind her like a rifle bolt. Smoke from the hearth curls through the lamplight carrying cedar and something sour. Fear, maybe, or the whiskey her father has been nursing since sundown. Rosalind slams the pack-house door hard enough to rattle the windows in their frames, and four heads turn. Duncan sits at the head of the long oak table, backlit by the fire, grey beard shadowing his collar. Meredith stands at his right hand with her arms crossed and a diamond-shaped scar catching the light like a brand. Pearl Blackwood occupies the far corner with her gloved hands folded on the tabletop, watching with the stillness of somebody who learned a long time ago not to flinch. *You weren't at the watch rotation. You were here. Deciding things.* *Close the door, Rosie.* *No.* *I'm going to the grove. Tomorrow. Alone.* She has spent her whole life as a line item in other people's plans: a daughter to be married off, a wolf to be posted on a rotation, a name to be traded when the traded thing needs to be a name. The grove is the first thing she has ever claimed outright, and she is not asking anybody's permission for it. What follows: cider and thorns, a trap she sets for both of them, an antidote handed over by a stranger, the price of being considered equal, a rival's whisper doing more damage than a rival's fist, and a failure she has been carrying since long before any of this started. *You said the bond would split it. You said-* *I lied. I've been lying for fifty years. Why would I stop now?* *Not without you.* There is a scar running from her collarbone to her wrist and a man who has stopped pretending he has not memorised it. He has the bond. He has the pack. He has the truth about what was done to both of them and by whom. Now he just has to convince a woman who has been decided for her entire life that this particular decision is genuinely hers to make.

The pine needles are slick with something that is not rain. Zara has one hand twisted in the back of her little sister's coat collar and the other pressed flat against her own sleeve, where a bite is still bleeding warm. She had planned this for six months. She had memorised the trails, cached food at three waypoints, and the emergency cash lifted out of her mother's locked drawer. She had planned for everything except her mother stepping between the girls and her father's wolf. The running does not stop after that. Lily is nine now, light as kindling across Zara's back. The last of their money went on gas at a truck stop where the clerk looked at Zara's scar a beat too long. Two weeks before that, Zara came back to a motel room with ice for Lily's fever and found a man holding a knife to her sister's throat. She killed him in the bathroom with the cartoons turned up loud next door. He belonged to Gregor Hartmann, and Hartmann's people burned the motel down to bury it. The eastern border of Timber Creek territory lies somewhere ahead, and past it, on the map Zara memorised at that truck stop, unclaimed land. No packs. No questions. She does not get past it. What Timber Creek offers instead is the Iron Claw trial. One moon cycle of service to the pack, and then a vote on whether a feral stranger can stay. The alpha, Cade McCullough, grey-eyed and short two fingers on his left hand, grants it over the open objection of his own council. Mira wants her thrown out. Marta quotes the law at everybody. The healer says the wound in Zara's ribs has gone septic and needs treating rather than interrogating. And Gregor, who has no business knowing anything about her, says he knew Zara's father, and fought beside him once, before the fire. Zara has been sure of exactly one thing her whole life: who her father was, and what he did. Every single thing she learns inside Timber Creek pulls at that thread, and so does the locket she has carried since the night on the ridge, the one with a crescent moon and a star cut into it that she has always taken for a pack emblem. A wolf shifter pack story about a feral woman who has kept her sister alive by whatever it took, an alpha who stakes his own authority on a stranger, and a family history that turns out to have been written by somebody else entirely.

The specialist in Edinburgh wants eight hundred pounds for the consultation alone. The treatment runs into the thousands. The waiting list is six months, and the doctors have started using words like aggressive and progressive, which Fia MacLeod has learned to translate as they do not know what is wrong with her brother. Hamish is eight. He has been out of school for a week. So when Connor McRae walks into her bookshop after closing, asking for a green leather ledger from the old McRae estate that was left for rebinding forty years ago, Fia knows he is not there for a book. He proves it quickly. He knows she takes the six-fifteen bus to Inverness. He knows about the hematology unit at Raigmore. He knows she buys tea at the café with the blue awning and never drinks it. *Nothing in Glenmorrow is private.* Fia plays the only card she has left. She pulls out her mother's locket, the silver oval she has worn every day since Iona MacLeod walked into the glen and never walked out, and shows him what is etched into it: a crescent moon with a star inside, the same mark cut into the ring on his right hand. Her mother's last instruction was to go to Connor McRae if Hamish ever got truly sick. So Fia offers the locket for the Moon Herb. One heirloom for her brother's life. Connor tells her the herb is pack property and cannot be given to a human. Then he hands her a silver-edged card - *Feast of the Silver Moon* - tells her to wear something silver, and says one more thing about her mother that knocks the shop sideways. What the pack remembers is different. Iona was their keeper, the one trusted with the herb, and she ran to the human world, married a human and bore human children. Morag Sinclair will say all of it out loud in front of the fire, and add thief, and spy, and dead blood. To get the herb, Fia will have to stop being a guest and start being pack: a stone box with a seven-pointed star that has not been opened in a decade, a trial by combat against a young wolf named Duncan, and a binding she cannot take back. A shifter romance set in the glen above a Highland village, with an alpha who has been watching her for months, an elder council that has not forgiven her mother, and a woman who came to barter for a cure and finds out what she is. The romance is closed-door.

Mairi walks the eastern border every night, and every night it is quiet. Then the wind comes from the north carrying something she does not know. Male. Wolf. Not from her pack. She finds him half-hidden under a rowan, a big grey wolf, dark along the spine and silver at the flanks, built heavier than anything in Glen Braonan. The careful choice is to slip away and let the pack decide. She goes at him instead, because she is the alpha, even if nobody knows it. The fight leaves his teeth marks along her ribs and her taste of his blood on her tongue, and a scrap of wool caught on a thorn: dark green and black and red, tight and even and expensive. McTavish tartan, left where it would be found. In the village her brother Ewan is up on the stone step of the meeting house in his good coat, saying out loud what everyone has been muttering. *The alpha has been silent for three years.* He is right that the alpha never shows her face. He has no idea whose face it is. Then a letter arrives from Torquil McTavish, requesting parley at the Standing Stones at dusk, two days hence. Come alone. Bring no weapons. Bring no pack, as the old law requires. Fenella tells Mairi what those stones actually are: the place where alphas once swore blood oaths, where bonds were made that could not be broken by death or distance. And the wolf she fought is lying wounded on the healer's cot in Fenella's cottage. His name is Hamish, second son of Torquil, and he crossed the border to find the hidden alpha and report back. Torquil is not planning a war. A female alpha mated to a McTavish would legitimise his claim to the valley without one, and the clans would call it unity instead of conquest. If she refuses, she dies. Which leaves Mairi with a brother who intends to call a formal challenge at Samhain, a raid on the east pens that costs thirty head and was never meant to be a proper raid at all, a village convinced it is led by a ghost, and a father who died because Torquil sent twenty wolves against him on a moonless night. A Highland shifter romance told from both sides, with a secret alpha, an enemy clan's son on the healer's cot, an old law about standing stones, and a pack that wants its leader to show herself. The romance is closed-door.

The mud on the path up to Pinegrove's outer gate has turned to slurry, and Clara has her brother on her hip, his thin limbs dangling, his breath a shallow rattle against her neck. The guards tell her no outsiders past sunset. Pack law. *"Please. I walked six miles carrying him. He won't last the night if I have to turn back."* The man who comes up the path behind her wears no coat, only a wet linen shirt, and his knuckles are a grid of pale burn scars too regular to have come from a fight. James Blackthorn tells her what trespassing costs on his land: fifty silver or a week of labor in the ironwood groves. He does not look at the boy. Then he sees the tarnished silver locket at her throat, etched with an oak tree whose branches curl into a wolf's profile, and asks for her mother's name. *"Rose Morningside."* He lets her through the gate. He does not tell her that he has been looking for that locket since he was twelve, that his mother described it to him in bedtime stories, or that the crest inside it belongs to the Whitefang pack, the oldest in the Cascades, healers who could close wounds that would kill other shifters and sense sickness before it took root. Clara has spent her life not knowing what runs in her blood. Martha Whitethorn, the healer she has come six miles to beg, trained under her mother. Her timing is the problem. She arrives at the gate the same day Eleanor Cross's scouts are seen on the eastern ridge, and James decides he is not sheltering her, he is containing her. His own people argue about which kind of threat she is, and one of them already knew the scouts were coming three days before anyone else in the settlement did. What Eleanor Cross wants is an object James's father made. Aldric Blackthorn forged a collar in the year before he died, its face stamped with an inverted Whitefang crest, built to drain an alpha's power and funnel it into whoever wears the matching bracelet. It has one limitation, and it is the reason a Whitefang healer's daughter walking out of the rain is worth more than she can imagine: the collar only works on a wearer of that bloodline. This is the opening book of a shifter romance trilogy about a pack of twelve huts and three goats that is barely holding on, an alpha who burned his own hands on purpose, and a woman who came for one night of a healer's time and found out what she is. It ends with the door beneath the old territory still shut. The heat is closed-door.

The clock on the nightstand reads 6:47. Thatcher Hawke will be here in three hours. Vera Lennox swings her legs off the bed, crosses to the bathroom mirror without turning on the overhead light, and reaches behind the toilet for the bottle of dark brown dye she keeps hidden in an old coffee can. She mixes it one-handed, watching a reflection she has learned to lie to. She works it through the white strand at her temple until it is not there any more. Gone. Beta again. Then she rehearses the rest of it while the dye sets: shoulders rolled forward, chin down, the gaze that flickers away when it is held too long, the way a beta lets an alpha's words land without flinching. She was seven years old when her father was killed in the wet grass, when the pack bonds went loose and something in her chest broke open like ice. Silver fur. Claws like moonlight on water. A howl that carried across every ridge in the valley. A silver alpha, which had not happened in three generations. Corbin Shaw was fourteen and standing at the treeline, smelling of smoke and satisfaction, and he offered her a deal. He would tell the pack he had killed the rogue himself. She would stay quiet about what she was. He would keep her safe. She has kept her half of it ever since. Now Silver Creek has gone six months with no alpha, Corbin has appointed himself the one who speaks for the pack, and Thatcher Hawke has driven in from the other side of the state because a neighbouring pack with no chain of command and hunters in its woods is everybody's problem. He walks into the hardware store and asks the old man at the register about a woman. Dark hair. Silver streak. About yay high. *He doesn't know. He can't know.* But the wolf she buried has woken up, and it is pressing against her ribs, and it has an opinion about him that she cannot argue with. What Vera is hiding from is not only Corbin. It is the Vigil, who leave silver wire strung between trees. It is a pack that would have to account for what it allowed. And it is somebody inside her own family who has been writing to people he should not have been writing to. This is a wolf-shifter paranormal romance about a woman who has spent her life making herself smaller, an alpha who notices anyway, a sister who has visions and will not admit it, and a secret that has finally outgrown the house it was kept in. The heat is closed door.

A healer named Morven pressed a scrap of paper into Tamsin's palm on market day in Deepwater and said one thing: *Take it and don't come back.* The less I know, the less I can tell them. The cache is where the paper said it would be. Inside the pouch is a hand-drawn survey of Shadow Peak's whole territory, with patrol routes, den sites, and every prison cache Darius Kane has set up in the last three years. At the eastern boundary there is a small X and a name in tight script. *Finn.* Her brother, fifteen years old, limping from a leg that never set right, in a cage for six months because Darius wanted leverage on her. A hollowed-out mine shaft, three days' travel on foot if she pushes. The snare takes her left ankle half a second before the pain arrives. It drags her six feet across the duff, locks, and leaves her swinging upside down from a low branch with the map digging into her ribs. Cade Kincaid steps out from behind the fir she had been leaning against. He already knows her brother's name. He knows exactly which mine. *I know you're not getting him out with a map and a pocket knife.* What he wants in exchange is her allegiance, and there is a hunting cry coming up the ridge, so she does not have long to decide. Cade has been carrying something since he was nine years old and his father knelt in the mud of the spring house with a leather satchel. The deeds that say the Heartspring belongs to the Kincaid bloodline are forged. His grandfather did not buy that water. He took it, and paid a man to write papers saying otherwise, and the alpha's job ever since has been to keep lying. Now someone is poisoning the spring at its source, his healers cannot keep up, and the woman he has just brought inside his borders is the one person who has mapped every weak point in his territory. His own pack is not pleased. Mira wants the newcomer unmasked as a Blood Moon spy and demands a duel to settle it: first blood, no shifting. And every full moon, Cade lights a candle for Elara, which he has no intention of stopping. A fated-mates shifter romance in the Cascade foothills, built on pack law and guest-right, a boy in a cage, a poisoned spring, and an alpha whose entire inheritance is a lie handed to him when he was too young to refuse it. The romance is closed-door.

The scent is wrong for the inner boundary. *Not deer, not fox, not any of the half-dozen game trails he could name by smell alone.* Soap. Something floral. Lavender. Graham Munro tracks it downhill through pines planted generations back for some landlord's shooting estate, and finds a trampled fern, a woman's boot print with a worn heel, and a torn piece of waxed jacket, olive green, snagged on a thorn at waist height and still holding her body heat, with one blue thread off a scarf caught in the stitching. She has come three miles past the village, past the cairn, into the middle of a werewolf war, and she has lit a fire in the abandoned bothy, which sits *directly in the path of the ridge Lachlan's wolves used for their southern patrols.* Graham weighs the options on the walk down. *Drag her back to the village. Or kill her and dump the body where Lachlan couldn't use it.* He has killed before. He was there the night Lachlan's wolves came through Glen Lyon with fire and iron and left his father's body hanging from the old bridge. Instead he opens the door. Mhairi is a veterinarian, up on a train from Glasgow, small and freckled and entirely unimpressed by a large stranger informing her she is on private land. She has a contract, three months of veterinary work for the Clachan crofters, and she is not being run off a hill by a man warning her about dogs. *I've been charged by a bull, bitten by a badger, kicked by a horse.* What neither of them asks for is the pull that starts anyway. Graham has been carrying this war alone for years, with silver from an old wolf trap still singing in the scar on his left hand every time he shifts. And when his enemy works out what the incomer is worth to him, Lachlan takes the sister who raised Graham after their parents died, and sends a note. *The woman for your sister. Tomorrow at midnight. The old bothy at the head of the glen. Come alone.* A Highland shifter romance about a lone alpha running a war of one and the outsider who treats what is wounded whether or not it wants her to, ending with a rebuilt pack and a foundling pup. The romance is closed-door.

Three nights to the full moon, one trespasser limping across the eastern boundary, and a pack already looking for a reason. Gideon's boots hit the forest floor before his wolf has fully settled back into his bones. Knees bent, fists clenched, breath sawing in and out. The scent hits him again, wrong wolf on wrong territory, and he forces his lungs to slow, forces the animal back down into the dark place where it lives. Three minutes out from the boundary, tracking her since she crossed the creek. Female, alone, limping. The kind of trespass that gets people killed when a pack is already on edge, when a rival is looking for any excuse to call a challenge, and when the moon is three nights out and pulling at everybody's instincts like a tide. He moves through the ferns without sound, keeping the wind in his face. Rowan is not lost, is not sorry, and has a very specific reason for crossing that creek which she is not going to explain to anybody with that much authority in his voice. She will not give a name, will not explain the limp, and will not accept the escort off the territory that every wolf in the valley would accept gratefully. By the second day she has been given a room, which is a decision Gideon is going to have to justify to eleven people. What follows: blood he could not taste, a debt he did not ask for, a promise he could not keep, pain buried too deep to reach, a wall he refused to see, a door he swore he would never open, the poison people call duty, and blood that binds as much as it separates. *I love you. You're the only family I have left.* *You lied to me.* The cost is stated plainly by the end. Gideon loses the distance that has kept him functional as an alpha since his father died, which is that nobody in Silver Creek has ever been able to hurt him through somebody else. Rowan loses the anonymity she crossed three states to buy, and she loses it in front of a pack that has every reason to use it.