The Feral Alpha's Secret

Wren Hart has been missing three months. The sheriff took notes with the patience of a man who thinks people go off-grid out here all the time. The search parties stopped going out after the first month. So Brynna drove to Silver Creek herself, because nobody else was going to look. Wren never hiked the marked trails. So Brynna goes right, toward the creek, and within an hour she has found broken ferns with the sap still tacky at the breaks, a six-inch strip of blue fabric snagged on a blackberry thorn, and a hiking boot half-buried in mud on the far bank with its laces still tied and a smear of dried blood on the leather. In a clearing ringed with moss-covered boulders she finds her sister's pack, and inside it a notebook. *Day 7: Found the trail. It's real. They're real. If you're reading this, Brynna* — *don't come looking for me.* Tucked into the back cover is a faded Polaroid of an enormous wolf with gold eyes and a small blue livestock tag clipped to one ear. On the back, in Wren's handwriting: *Alpha. Silver Creek Pack. Don't let them find this.* Then the same wolf comes down the ravine wall toward her. Fletcher Calloway does not kill her. That is the first problem. Pack law says a human who witnesses the shift goes to the Elders, and instead he puts her in his cabin and gives her his shirt, and his Gamma wants to know what has gone wrong with an Alpha the whole territory calls feral — the one who killed a Cinder Pack scout three autumns back and did not stop when he should have. Raelynn Vance made sure that story reached every pack from the Rogue River to the Columbia. She does not do her own dirty work. She employs people who do, and one of them leaves a note in the trees, written by someone careful enough not to be identified by handwriting. *Trade: the girl for the feral alpha's head.* So Wren is alive. And the price of her is the man whose wolf has already decided what Brynna is to him, and whose Elder, Hattie, is sitting on a journal in his dead father's handwriting that explains why Brynna's body keeps doing things a human body should not do. A fated-mates shifter romance in the Oregon Cascades, with a pack hiding in plain sight in a small town, a rival Alpha who fights with rumour, and a woman who came looking for her sister and found something moving under her own skin. The romance is closed-door.