The Feral Alpha's Luna

A wildlife researcher sets a camera trap on a creek bank to photograph whatever is leaving palm-sized tracks in the mud, and gets back an image that ends her funding, her credibility and her ability to leave. The trap clicks shut in Lena's hands, a sound she has heard ten thousand times, and she snaps the lock into place. Overhead a Douglas fir groans in the wind and sheds a cascade of needles that catch in her hair and stick to the sweat on her neck. She does not brush them off. She learned a long time ago that fighting the forest is a losing game. *Last one*, she mutters, kneeling by the creek bank. The water runs low and fast, glinting with pale morning light through the canopy. She chose this spot for the tracks: muddy impressions pressed deep into soft earth, each one the size of her palm. *A large predator*, she wrote in her field notebook. *Canis lupus, or something bigger.* The committee will want photographs. They will want proof. They will want anything at all other than another rejection letter sitting in her mailbox like a dead bird. Declan Walsh stood thirty yards from his own front door once and listened to a fire scream, and he has not let anybody close enough to matter since. What follows: the last place either of them wanted to end up, a mark on a shoulder, a wound that will not close, a dinner laid as a trap, a second slip, a note written in blood, a confession, and a first real fight. *She lied. You know that, don't you?* *Same time tomorrow?* Will what the two of them build across one autumn hold once the photographs are submitted and the pack works out who took them? Or does Lena file the grant, publish the findings, and say goodbye to a valley that was never going to let her stay anyway?