The Forbidden Alpha's Prize

Isla MacMorran is eight years old and halfway down the root-cellar stairs when the thing comes through the cottage door. It is bigger than a man, wrong in the shoulders, and it has to stoop to fit the frame. Her mother swings the iron poker and the iron connects and the thing does not flinch. The last thing Mairi MacMorran says to her daughter is *Trust no one but yourself.* Twelve years later, Isla still calls her father Fergus rather than Da, and still sleeps with the knife. She rides back into the village of Morrowdun three hours past dusk from a pointless patrol and finds her brother Callum in a doorway with a packed satchel and their mother's mended coat on his back. The contract has been accepted. He leaves for Blackwood territory by the new moon, and Morna Blackwood has her sights set on him. Fergus had promised Isla a week to negotiate. Fergus, as Callum puts it, promised her a lot. So she goes in through the warped shutters of her father's study, the trick she learned at twelve, and reads the contract by candlelight. *Callum MacMorran to wed any female of the Blackwood pack, first moon of winter, in exchange for mutual defense against the Ravenwood pack.* Any female. Not Morna specifically. Beneath it, folded between two ledgers, is a note sealed with a cluster of ravens in flight, their beaks open as if screaming. *The debt falls due at the dark moon.* Her father is not buying an alliance. He is buying time, with his son. Isla saddles her mare to catch the messenger before the border. What she finds instead is Gareth Blackwood: the limping alpha, the mute's son, a man with a clean scar where his ring finger should be, silver coming into his hair, who has learned to move with a wolf-trap injury rather than fight it. Then a rogue turns up dead with a brand burned into its flank above the hip, still pink and less than a week old, and it is the same raven's claw that seals her father's debt note. A closed-door wolf shifter romantasy of pack debts, marriage contracts and border war, about a girl who promised herself at eight that she would never need anyone again.