The Rejected Luna

Welcome to Silver Creek. Population 847. Eight hundred and forty-seven people who know exactly who Ivy Morrow is, what she has been, and what she became. It has been three years, four months and twelve days since she drove this road in the opposite direction with her wolf whimpering so loudly in her skull that she nearly put the car into a Douglas fir. The rejection ritual had done its work. She felt Dorian's will sever the tether. Her wolf still remembers the sound, a wet, tearing noise that lives in her dreams. She is back because of a text from her brother. *Ivy I need u. Alexander is at the border. Dorian wont listen. Please.* Leo is seventeen and does not text for help. Leo once called her a coward to her face and meant it. Alexander Stone has been testing the lines for weeks, sending scouts. Duncan caught one just inside the western boundary two nights ago. Dorian wants to wait, talk to the elders, do it the pack way. Alexander has twice their numbers and half the pack would rather surrender than fight, and Leo has been out there on his own, following the scouts, learning where they stage. The council wants Ivy gone in twenty-four hours. The Law of Exile exists to protect the pack from outsiders who have rejected its bonds, and every shifter in the territory can still smell the bond-wound on her. Dorian invokes something else instead: liaison privilege. No voting rights, no territorial claim. She stays until the Silver Howl, three weeks, and then she walks out the way she walked in. At the table, a council member's fingers keep moving across a phone screen, too fast for a casual text. And there is a small carved wolf that Dorian gave Ivy years ago, and took back in front of the whole pack. What he has never told her is what happened in the moment he said the words, and what he put in a letter she never received. A shifter romance about exile, a border sprayed each full moon with pack scent and the alpha's blood, a younger brother who will not be protected, and a bond that was broken in front of witnesses; closed-door.