The west woods have been closed for twenty-three years. No patrols, no hunting, no wolves across that line. So when Callum Brennan's dawn patrol scents a human in the old pack ruins, he sends his enforcers home and goes to handle it himself. He finds a woman photographing a stone foundation with one standing wall, scarred by fire. She does not step back when five men come out of the trees. *"Private land?"* she says. *"Funny. The county records show this parcel as unclaimed."* Her name is Maya Connelly. She is a photographer from Portland, here for two days, chasing the only thing she has ever had of her mother: a moonstone pendant and a note that said keep her safe. She has no idea that the ruins she is standing in are where her mother died, or that the stone around her neck belonged to the man whose son is now telling her to leave. Callum is Alpha of Redwood Crest. The massacre in these trees killed his father, William, along with an uncle, two cousins, and enforcers who had served since before he was born. He has spent his whole adult life keeping that wound sealed. Now a stranger has walked straight into it carrying his father's pendant, and his wolf will not let him send her away. They strike a bargain neither of them trusts. One day. A motel room he pays for. Answers in exchange for the stone. The trouble is that Derek wants her gone. *"Derek's not my beta. He's my rival. He's been waiting for me to slip."* And across the border, Jasper Vance of Shadow Creek has been waiting far longer than that, holding something in a stone cell that Callum has no idea is still alive. What Maya inherits is not a tidy origin story. It is a journal in her mother's handwriting, a prophecy an old wolf dreamed three nights before the fire, a vault sealed with blood, and a wolf of her own that surges up unbidden in the forest and will not come when she calls it. It is also a bond she never asked for, to a man whose pack has every reason to hate her name. By the end, both packs are looking to her, the bond between them has gone quiet, and Callum has started over: asking, properly, to court her. She is training every afternoon with wolves who were raised to hate her, and she is about to leave for three months to look for something older than the vault. A shifter paranormal romance about inherited blood feuds, a sealed forest, and two people who find out too late what they are to each other, told closed-door.

Woodsmoke, spilled ale, lanterns swinging in the birch trees. Isla Macrae is pushing through the Lochan Festival crowd on the shore of Loch Dour, looking for her brother, and when she finds Callum he is at the largest bonfire with a grill rack in front of him, a yellowing bruise on his jaw, and the alpha of Glenmorrow standing beside him. Isla came to take him home. She arrived weeks ago on the bus from Inverness and has been asking the wrong questions since, about the full moon, about why the village closes up shop after dark. Finlay McTavish has been counting. Scar across the bridge of his nose, silver eyes, and he already knows exactly who she is: *Your brother is Callum Macrae, son of Alistair Macrae, who drinks himself stupid at the Crooked Spindle three nights a week and has a bruise on his jaw that matches the one on Callum's.* Then he sets the terms. Stay for the festival. Eat the food. Dance if she wants. Then get on the bus and don't come back. Callum isn't coming. His father's grandfather was a shifter, the blood runs thin but it runs, and he would rather learn to be strong here than go back to Alistair's house. So Isla stays. She is soon standing at the eastern edge of the loch with her phone out, photographing Morag Sinclair accepting a leather pouch from Lachlan Kinloch, alpha of the rival pack whose scouts are already in the area. Morag wanted the mate bond Finlay never offered her. For taking it instead, Isla gets a glass vial of silverbane shattered across her shoulder and a crescent-moon scar that will not fade. What she does not yet know is why the Kinlochs want her specifically, why Mhairi the pack historian watches her the way she does, or why the starved silver wolf that comes out of the trees one night, ribs showing, one ear torn, presses a cold nose into her outstretched hand as though it knows her. It does. And when that wolf dies in the frost with a blade in her throat, Isla is left holding a name she never asked for, a village that does not want a human leading it, and silver poison working through Finlay's blood that only the Binding will draw out, with true names said aloud and palms cut, and no half-truths and no hesitation allowed. A Highland shifter romance about pack law, a traitor inside the ranks, and a woman told she doesn't belong who ends up rewriting the rule that says so. Closed-door.

She was supposed to be passing through. One roll of film, a granite outcropping, out again before the weather turned. Rue Morrison presses her eye to the viewfinder and adjusts the focus ring until the rock sharpens. Moss. Lichen. Pale November light. Nothing worth the drive, nothing worth the petrol, nothing at all - - and then something moves at the very edge of the frame, and she takes the photograph she was not supposed to take. Calder has spent years ensuring this valley appears in nobody's pictures. What lives in the roots here does not survive being looked at, and historically neither do the people doing the looking. He has a system. The system has never failed. He should frighten her off the mountain inside a day. He has managed it with people considerably more persistent than one woman with a camera and no functioning sense of self-preservation. Instead she stays. She asks questions. She is not, at any point, afraid of him. There is a silver brooch belonging to somebody dead a very long time. There is a quiet act of war conducted entirely through small courtesies, and a ceasefire so fragile that both parties keep catching themselves holding their breath. There is a pit, and a promise made at the bottom of it that neither of them intended to make out loud. And there is his uncle, who has been selling this valley by degrees for years, and who will be dealt with the way an alpha deals with a traitor the moment Kael brings back proof. Then Carrow moves Wren to the station, and the arithmetic collapses. *You don't have time,* Rue says, soft and steady, with the tracker already in her hand and the plan already made and no intention whatsoever of telling him the rest of it. *I won't let her kill you.* *She won't.* Calder sounds the war council. Every able-bodied wolf, now, no exceptions. And somewhere between the price of a vision and the night she became something other than what she arrived as, he stops counting the days until she leaves and starts counting something else entirely. He tells himself he will let her go when the road clears. He will not. Not then, not after, not ever.

A key. Brass, tarnished to a muddy green, its teeth worn smooth by decades of use. Nora Blackwood has been gripping it since the ferry docked in Port Angeles. The gravel road into Mistfall is potholes and roots and a sign nailed to a tree that says PRIVATE ROAD - TURN BACK. She doesn't turn back. Her grandmother Eleanor died six months ago and left her the land, the cabin, and that key under a loose stone on the porch. Then the road curves hard right, and there is a wolf standing in it. A man walks out of the trees with the same silver-gray eyes as the animal. *"He's a wolf," the man said, stopping at her door. "And you're on pack land."* He is Callum Vance, Alpha of the Graywood Pack, and his terms are flat: the property line ends at the second oak, and if she crosses it, he will know. The brass key doesn't open the cabin door. It opens a wooden box on the mantel, and inside the box is a letter in Eleanor's hand. *The land I've left you is not a gift. It's a burden.* Eleanor made a pact with the previous alpha - Callum's father - and wants Nora to honor it. Then the warning: *The alpha's eyes cannot be trusted, no matter how much they look like* - and the ink simply stops, mid-sentence. What Eleanor really left is a notebook, and in it a formula: nightshade, ground stag horn, rowan ash, honey, and the impossible ingredient - *saliva from a willing alpha during a full moon.* A formula against a sickness that took four pack members decades ago and is rising again in the woods. When Nora tests it on her own blood, the drop doesn't mix with the dark liquid. It dissolves into it. The pack elders knew her grandmother as a seer. Now they have the seer's heir, living on the border, carrying the cure in her veins. Everyone wants a piece of that. Callum's sister Tessa has resented him since their father died, wants the alpha position, and is sending Silver Ridge details about the cure. Serena Whitfield, alpha daughter of Silver Ridge, has proposed a treaty mating that would settle Callum's politics for him. Serena's father Aldric arrives at the ceremony in a charcoal suit, wearing a rogue leader's pendant and smiling at the crowd like he owns them. And Nora's brother Leo, a journalist, has been calling the ranger station, the sheriff's office and the local newspaper about disappearances in the forest - and he is on his way to the cabin. Nora came to Mistfall to be left alone with a dead woman's house. What she inherits instead is a bond, a war, and a pack that has to decide whether a Blackwood can be trusted. A closed-door shifter romance with pack politics, a seer's inheritance and a slow-burning mate bond.

A woman with electric-blue hair is running through Douglas firs in the dark, her left arm torn from elbow to wrist. Her name is Lily Chen. She is twenty-two. She backs into the creek to get away from the thing on the bank, drags herself out on the far side, and collapses in a patch of ferns three miles short of the ranger station. Three weeks later her sister is standing in the trailhead parking lot with a rented Corolla and a map folded along the wrong lines. Maya Chen is a journalist. The last thing Lily ever sent her was a photograph of a waterfall, and Maya answered it with a thumbs-up emoji and went back into a deposition. Raven's Hollow has a population of 847, an inn called the Raven's Rest, and a forest that nobody wants Maya walking into. She finds Lily's earring at a trail junction and says out loud what she already knows: *Someone put this here.* She sees an animal in the fog and tells herself it was a timber wolf. She does not believe herself. In a converted barn outside town, the elders of the Hollowmoon Pack are arguing about how long to give her before they run her off. Cormac Vance has held them together for a hundred and forty years by being careful. Then his beta, Orin Blackwood, walks in smelling of pine needles and rain and woodsmoke, and underneath all of it *something faint, like a thread of music heard from far away.* The scent is Maya. The bond is not finished, but it is there, and it has arrived at the worst possible time. Bethany has been circling Cormac's place at the head of the pack, and what she is really hunting is the old pack chalice: *The golden cup. The thing that breaks bonds.* Break the alpha's bond to his pack and the alpha dies. Break a mate bond and both halves of it die. Miriam Cross meanwhile keeps the inn's front desk and a second mortgage, and a developer is waiting on the timber land. And Orin has known where Lily is the entire time. What Maya has to decide is not whether any of this is real. It is how much of herself she will trade to get her sister back breathing. A paranormal wolf shifter romance set in a fog-bound town under the Olympic peaks, closed-door, with a missing-person investigation running the whole way underneath the mate bond.

Dawn breaks cold over Talus Field. Runa Sigurdottir lets the frost bite her bare arms and walks the line of pups, tapping hips forward, correcting foot placement, telling a shaking girl to breathe. From the fence post, Freydis Ironfang laughs loud enough to carry. *"Your mother held it." Freydis's eyes flicked down to Runa's scarred palm, then back up. "You just wear her title."* The scar is old. Runa was seven the night Silvermoon wolves came through the wall of the nursery, seven when she lay across her little brother Bjorn to shield him, seven when a dying wolf pressed a muzzle to her cheek and made her swear something she had already decided to break. *"Promise me. When you're alpha. Promise me the war ends."* Now a scout limps in from the border with a letter in a bold, angular hand. A parley. No weapons, no guards, just the two of them at the old bridge on the logging road. It is signed Torben Viklund - the alpha of the pack that burned her home. Her beta Leif calls it a trick. Freydis calls it a chance to get the little heir killed. Runa goes anyway, because when she presses her scarred palm flat against the letter, the paper burns. What Torben brings to the meeting is a hand-drawn map, two years of dead bodies marked by season, and a scrap of dark wool stamped with the Iron Fang sigil and pinned to the chest of one of his own guards. Someone has been staging this war from the outside. Someone who was exiled seven years ago with a brand burned into his neck and a missing ear, and who has spent the time since building camps within striking distance of both territories. Sven Vargsson is not a ghost. He is a plan, twenty years old, and it runs straight through Bjorn. At home, Freydis is circling the armory. The pack is counting her failures. And the bond that wakes between two alphas from two packs that have been bleeding each other for a decade is the one thing neither of them can explain to anyone who matters. To keep her promise, Runa has to hand her enemy the pack's secrets, her elders' records, and eventually her own throat. A closed-door shifter romantasy of pack war, false flags and a mate bond between enemies, ending with an iron ring engraved *One pack, one blood, one moon.*

Ailsa MacKenzie counts steps, because counting keeps her from thinking about what happens if she stops. She makes it seventy-three before her arms start shaking. Her sister Eilidh's blood has already soaked through her shirt, warm and then cooling, and the crofter's barn Ailsa remembers from girlhood turns out to have collapsed years ago. What she finds instead is a scent boundary laid down in layers thick enough to taste, three sentry wolves who sit down rather than attack, and the man who owns the ground she is standing on. He is Callum Sinclair, and he names her before she names herself. *You have your mother's hair.* Moira MacKenzie has been dead six months, killed by Fergus Lindsay, the rogue alpha with a scarred throat and one milk-white eye who burned the MacKenzie pack house down around her. Ailsa carried Eilidh out of it, and she carried something else: a fragment of the alpha stone, wrapped in oilcloth, pressed against her ribs like a second heartbeat. Callum gives them a cottage, a healer and one night. Ailsa intends to be gone before the sun is high. She stays. She stays because Eilidh's wound turns septic and Morag's poultice has to be changed every four hours. She stays because the brooch at her collar is the old Cairn Pack knot and the thing in her pocket is the relic that pack has hunted for generations. She stays because Callum finally tells her about a starving rogue in a glen near Loch an Eilein, an order from his father, and a younger brother called Hamish. Graeme Sinclair has his own view. *Callum's soft. Always has been. Lets strays wander in off the moor.* Then the Cairn envoy rides in with the alliance Gleann Silver needs to survive Fergus, and names the price. *They want her.* Callum has sworn an alpha's vow on the stone, and the stone does not forgive a broken one. Every arrangement that protects his pack costs Ailsa her sister or herself. The Silver Feast is coming. Fergus is already moving wolves onto the eastern fields. *I choose you*, Callum says, and it is not a pretty line. It is a decision that takes his rank, his pack and the power the vow gave him, and leaves him standing in a stone circle with nothing but a broken spear shaft. A Highland shifter romance of peat, loch mist and pack law - closed-door, with a wounded sister who refuses to be left behind, a stolen relic that whispers, and an alpha who learns exactly what it costs to put people above the vow.

The basement of the Silver Creek pack house smells of wet concrete and old fear. Declan O'Malley has a rogue cuffed in silver-linked restraints, blistered and weeping, and the man's nose has stopped bleeding, which means he has healed enough for another round. *Last time. Who sent you?* What the rogue eventually gives up is this: Viktor is hunting a human woman who has a locket. At midnight the border cameras pick up a blue pickup with Oregon plates climbing Old Cascade Road. That road goes to exactly one place, the Blackwood property, a cabin that has stood empty for twenty years since the banishment and that Declan swore to keep empty. Rowan Blackwood has driven up to reclaim her father's land. Eamon Blackwood was run out of this valley for hunting wolves on pack ground, and she has spent twenty years wanting to know why. She stops ten feet from a man who steps out of the dark onto the road, keeps one hand in her pocket, and tells him she is not leaving. She is wearing a silver locket with a moon stag etched into the face, antlers curving, the eyes made of tiny chips of amber. It was her mother's. It is also the one Viktor wants. Declan has held this territory for twelve years and has never once felt his wolf stir for anyone. The O'Malley line carries a curse that kills the mates of its alphas: his father died trying to break it, his grandfather refused to watch it happen again, and Declan has intended the bloodline to stop with him. Then his fingers brush hers over a chain on a gravel road, and the bond snaps tight, and she feels it too. The thing waiting under all of it is not about the locket at all. *Your mother was my fated mate.* And Viktor is still building in the eastern ranges, and Declan's brother is walking the pack house in an expensive jacket with a vial of concentrated wolfsbane in the pocket, asking questions that are not yet a challenge. *I'm questioning you. There's a difference. For now.* Breaking the curse takes three objects, and it costs the alpha the one thing he has never let himself want. This is a wolf-shifter paranormal romance set in the Cascades: a cursed bloodline, a rival brother, a locket in pieces, and a woman with something dormant in her blood that nobody told her about. The heat is closed door.

A damp snarl cuts the dusk, low and territorial, and it does not come from a human throat. Nadia Wren has come back to Wolf Hollow for her brother. The chain-link gate across the pass is new since she was last here: twelve feet of industrial-grade steel topped with razor wire, flanked by pine trunks scarred by claws. Two men are standing at it, and the stocky one, missing a pinky finger on his left hand, tells her to turn around, human. She takes out her mother's pendant instead. A flat disc of carved bone on a leather cord, the rune for sight worn shallow by decades of thumb-rubbing, untouched in a drawer for seven years. She presses it to her sternum and walks into the ward. The burn goes across every inch of exposed flesh and her mouth fills with iron. She does not stop walking. Corbin Thornwood comes down the road from the lodge and has the gate opened. The alpha of Wolf Hollow moves like a man who has forgotten he has a body. Her brother is in the lodge, he says, fed and bored. *He keeps asking if I can turn into a wolf.* Micah has been told three times that Corbin can't. Then the evening light catches Corbin at an angle, and Nadia sees what nobody else in the valley can. It hangs at his throat like a collar of rotting silver, filaments of sickly light threaded through skin and into his chest, dark spots crawling through it like necrosis. It is not only keeping his wolf from him. It is killing him. She has a jagged scar across her left palm, from a game the pack children called the Blood-Truce: a hunting knife, a creek, two cut hands pressed together, and a grey-eyed boy she has spent twenty years not thinking about. He has his father's knife, its hilt carved from moonstone, runes down the spine in Old Wolf script that read *For the true-seer's hand.* There is also Vaughan, who does not think a human belongs inside the ward and who carries word to a rival alpha named Mordecai. There is a ritual at the equinox with a price on it. To break the curse and get Micah home, Nadia is asked to give up her sight - and Corbin, who has spent three years watching his own pack look at him with pity dressed up as patience, would rather put her on a trail as bait than watch her pay it. *You're using me as bait, Corbin,* she tells him. *Don't dress it up in noble language.* He does not deny it. A werewolf shifter romance with a seer heroine, an alpha who cannot shift, and a plan that needs somebody to walk into the trap on purpose, and a closed-door love story under it.

Gideon Croft's boot meets the bottom step and the pain in his right hip sings up through his ribs. The pack house door groans on its iron hinges and twenty-three faces turn toward him, elders in mismatched chairs around the hearth, and Rowan leaning on the mantel with a grin that never reaches his eyes. *With an alpha who can't run a full patrol without limping back like a dog with a stone in its paw?* Gideon puts him back in his place with the alpha voice. It costs him. The scar that runs from his ear to his chin twitches, something hot and metallic floods his mouth, and only Lydia Croft, the pack healer, knows why. A rogue hit him with dark magic three years ago. It is not a wound. It is a poison, it is in his blood and in his wolf, and it is winning. That same night, a wolf crosses the southern border alone. No pack scent on her. She is asking for sanctuary. She gives the name Maggie, says Silver Creek up in the Virginias, exiled for insubordination, three weeks on the road. Each detail is fitted to the last. Lydia takes one breath of her and her eyes go wide before she can stop them. Her real name is Calla Vance, and she is the last of a pack that burned three years ago. She has the scar from collarbone to elbow to show for the night she got out. She did not come to Croft Hollow for shelter. She came for whoever destroyed her family, and the dates keep pointing back at this pack's own patrols. Neither of them planned on the bond: a thin green line on her wrist, a second heartbeat under his ribs, and the one thing the curse goes quiet around. It is also the thing that makes them both worth taking. Tad Boone's enforcers camp two miles inside the border. A pack ledger puts Rowan Croft on the Vance border three days before the massacre. And when Boone finally says it out loud, it is worse than a raid. *I hired the rogue. There's a difference.* There is a witch in a swamp shack, a bond cut clean through, and a hand opened over a blade to put it back. Croft Hollow comes out the other side of a curse, a betrayal and a war - and then a leaf still wet with swamp water arrives at the south gate, written on in green ink. *Your bond with the Vance wolf is a powerful artifact.* Three weeks to the Blood Moon Gala. A shifter romance of pack politics, an old massacre and a borrowed name - closed-door, with a hidden curse, an identity that cracks a piece at a time, and a close that sets the board for what comes next rather than tying it off.

Callum Hawthorn tells the woman with the scalpel that the antivenom is for his sister's dog, a copperhead bite, the vet in Tillamook closed at six. She tells him the vial in his hand is sodium chloride. She tells him that a bite already gone systemic needs two vials minimum plus supportive care, so the dog would be dead by now. Then she says, without any accusation in it, that he is lying. And then she unlocks the case, hands him two vials, and says the second one is free. He is one leg over the sill when she adds the thing that follows him all the way home through the Douglas fir: *"I know what you are," she said. "I can smell it."* Briar Cole came back to Mistwood to disappear. Her grandmother left her the house six years ago, when the cancer finally took her, and left her a journal too. Inside it, a wolf drawn in charcoal with a crescent moon on its chest. The mark is under Callum's shirt. What Callum carries is not a gift. A blood ritual bound his emotions to his pack's well-being, so that every time they hurt, he hurts. It is getting worse. The tremor in his hand, the nerve damage and old scar tissue from a rogue attack that never healed right, are what the curse looks like from the outside. His sister Lydia is the one who walks into the clinic and asks for help. *"My brother doesn't have much time. The full moon is three days away, and if Garrick doesn't kill him, the curse will."* Briar's answer is that she is a vet, not a witch. Lydia's answer is that her grandmother was both. Outside that room, Garrick's people have been squeezing the suppliers until the pack's own medicine ran dry. Maris Alden thinks his alpha has gone soft and intends to say so in front of everyone. And a seven-year-old girl who lost both parents in a rogue attack is alive only because a stranger broke into a clinic in the middle of the night for her. The way out leads back to a bowl of trees where the mist pools thick as cream, the old ritual ground where the binding words were spoken and where Callum's mother died giving birth to Lydia. It ends with a vote taken by show of hands, with vows that took eleven drafts and eleven failures before he gave up and told the truth, and with a hand laid quietly on a belly in the moonlight above the valley. A closed-door small-town shifter romance about a cursed alpha, a healer who inherited more than a house, and a pack worth breaking a ritual for.

A single bloodberry crushed between thumb and forefinger stains her glove the colour of a fresh wound. Mhairi holds her hand up to the grey dawn light and watches the juice run toward her wrist. One berry buys her brother perhaps another hour of breath. She needs a hundred times that, and they grow only on the other side of the stream, past the squat carved boundary stones with their spiral patterns. Finlay MacKinnon walked forty miles to come home, and the fever came home with him. He was twelve the last time it took him; he came out of it with a limp and a tremor in his left hand. Their mother died that winter and their father the next spring, and since then there has only been an uncle who refused them help. The healer will say what she always says: she can slow it, not cure it. The cure is bloodberries, which fruit only in autumn under the Hunt Moon, in a glen that belongs to the alpha. *"He's not the monster the stories make him out to be. But he's not a generous man, either."* And there is a price named before Mhairi ever crosses the water. The MacBain wolves will not attack one of their own kind, but the alpha may claim her as a forfeit, which means her body, her blood and her loyalty, pack property. Lachlan MacBain took his pack at twenty-two, the youngest alpha in living memory. His hands are scarred from the fire that killed his father and his uncle. He faced three challenges in his first year and won all three, and the third left him a broken nose and a gash from temple to jaw. Mhairi kneels at a stream to drink in the middle of his territory and hears breathing that is not her own. Something large, close, unhurried. She stands up with water dripping from her chin and tells it exactly why she is there. A closed-door shifter romance set in the pinewoods and glens around Glen Morar, about a woman who trades herself for a fistful of berries, and what happens to a bargain when both parties start keeping their side of it for the wrong reasons.

Fiona is twelve years old and hiding in the hayloft when the first howl comes from the east, near the old logging road. She had climbed up to surprise her father. She had mucked out the stalls without being asked and she wanted to see his face. Then the second howl comes from the west, and the third from the north, and she understands, in the way children sometimes understand things they should not, that the wolves have surrounded them. Her father gets off two shots with the rifle. Her mother comes out of the house with the shotgun and puts Liam behind her. Liam is four years old and already crying. Fiona does not remember climbing down the ladder or crossing the yard. She remembers the gravel biting into her bare knees and the weight of her own body slamming into her brother, driving him sideways off the porch into the mud. She covers him with her arms and her back and she waits for the teeth. The teeth come. One wolf, larger than the others, black with silver threading through the ruff, eyes the colour of storm clouds over the lake. Its jaws close around her left wrist and press without puncturing, as if measuring the depth of its own violence. Then it releases her, turns, and trots back into the treeline, and the rest of the pack follows without a sound on the dead leaves. And much later, Fiona is taken on Greyclaw land with a hunting story nobody believes. Helga Voss, pack elder, explains the law: an outsider caught on sacred ground without escort is marked and expelled, permanently, and there is no discretion in it. Every child in three counties knows where the territory begins. The alpha has a scar across his left cheek and those same grey eyes, and when he sees the wolf's tooth Fiona wears at her throat he handles it as though it has burned him. Her mother, he tells her, was not hiding a piece of the monster that killed her. She was marking it, so that Fiona would know him when she found him. And Liam is lying somewhere with black veins pulsing under his skin like they have a heartbeat of their own. The full moon is nine days away. A shifter romance about pack law, an inherited debt and a bone that has to be found before the moon comes up; closed-door.

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.

*Her name is Maya Hartwell. She's my sister. She came up here six weeks ago to paint the autumn landscape, and she hasn't been heard from since.* Lena says it flat, in the voice she has practised in motel rooms across three states. The police shut the file after a fortnight and told her what police tell people. *Said she probably just ran off with some guy.* Lena has done the work herself: a credit card trail into Silver Creek, gas on Main Street, groceries at the general store, and then nothing at all. Ned Porter is the best tracker in the county and he wants her gone. *There are things in those woods that don't want to be found.* What he gives her instead of help is a shape of a story: an old alpha dying, a succession fight, and a contender with pale blue eyes and silver hair whom people call Theo. An old woman named Rose gives her the rest, along with a silver ring with a wolf's head carved into it. *Find the alpha's son. His name is Connor Blackthorn. He's the only one who can stand against Theo.* Lena walks into the trees holding the ring like a prayer, and a voice out of the dark tells her she should not have come. Connor has his own inheritance to manage, and it is not a title. There is something in the Blackthorn blood that turns red at the edges, that his father could not stop and that half his pack is waiting to see surface in him. *He's a berserker. You saw his eyes. They were red.* He has spent seven years eating alone in a one-room cabin to keep everyone at a safe distance. Neither of them can get what they want without the other, and neither of them intends to say so. What Theo is building requires a full moon, a ceremony and a woman nobody local would miss. A closed-door wolf shifter romance about a missing sister, a bloodline nobody wants to inherit, and a human outsider who walks into pack politics and refuses to be handled, ending with a howl and a prophecy that is not finished.

Look for the split trunk where lightning struck twice. Morag presses her palm flat against the old pine's bark and pushes, and there it is - a thirty-foot scar of blackened wood twisting upward like a frozen scream. She wedges her thumb into the groove she started earlier and gouges another inch-deep notch facing northwest. *If you get lost, mark your way back. The forest doesn't forgive.* Her grandmother's voice, twelve years dead, still carries. The heather grows thicker here, purple-bloomed and knee-high, catching at her boots. Behind her the village lies two miles and a whole world away. Ahead, the Moonshadow Forest swallows the light. She has an hour, maybe less, before sunset bleeds out across the valley, and she has already wasted three days finding nothing. What she is looking for is Moonpetal, growing at the base of a cairn near a standing stone, marking where the old territory ends and the wild begins. What she finds is a boy who feels the moon in his bones and the pack that will not let him go. Callum MacTavish was nine years old the first time he lay flat against the damp earth on those moors with his fingers dug into the soil, and he has been holding the same ground ever since. What follows: blood on the heather, the price of a cure, a boy who feels the moon, a herbalist's bargain, a trap in the glen, the stitches between two people, a whisper from the pups, and a night that changes what both of them are prepared to swear to. *You made a decision based on poisoned information, delivered by a traitor, while you were bleeding from a wound she'd packed with paralytic herbs.* *Then remember this. You're pack.* Highland shifter romance with a herbalist crossing into wolf territory for a cure, an alpha carrying a childhood he has never described to anybody, a traitor working slowly and patiently, explicit scenes, and a guaranteed happy ending.