The Forbidden Alpha's Secret

Callum was eight the night his mother put a knife in his hand and made him promise. His father was convulsing on the kitchen flagstones. The pack needed an Alpha before morning. And there was a condition attached to the blood she was pouring into him. *Promise that you will never bond. Never mate. Never love a woman the way your father loved me.* *Never love, never bond, or she will die.* He is thirty-one now, and the curse has grown with him: a tightness in the chest at twelve, his father's face in dreams at sixteen, and at twenty the first shift and the understanding that every change brings the thing closer to the surface. Sloane Ashworth comes to Raven's Hollow for one reason. Her younger brother Liam has an immune system that is failing, a doctor who has said two months and maybe less, and a battered copy of a novel about wolves that he has read fourteen times since the diagnosis. She has run out of hospitals. So she goes into the forest that the town does not talk about, and she is met with a rifle and a sentence. *You're on MacBride land.* What Callum does for Liam he does knowing exactly what it costs. Blood is what the curse travels through, and once his is in her brother's veins it does not stay a medical matter. *The curse binds through blood, Callum. Your blood is inside her brother. Every time she touches him, she touches a piece of you.* So the man who has spent his life making sure no woman ever got close has now tied himself to one by his own hand, twice over, and the thing in his chest has started to stir. All of it plays out beside a pack healer with a reagent that turns blue for the wrong reasons, a man who has been quietly testing a sample he should not have, an Icefang warband on the border, an old thing moving in the deep woods that leaves tracks and no scent, and a black stone that can unmake what was made. A closed-door wolf shifter romance about an inherited curse, a sick brother, a bargain that keeps changing its price, and a woman who refuses every version of the story where she is the one who gets protected.