Rejected by the Lycan

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.