The Savage Alpha's Secret

*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.