The Forbidden Luna

The robe is ceremonial white, silver-threaded at the collar, and it scrapes her skin like a shroud woven from nettles. Tamsin Blackwood stands still while Seren does up the tiny buttons at her shoulders. The silk is too thin and too white. It makes her look like something offered up, a lamb laid out on stone. Seren tells her where her brother is being held: east wing, two guards on the door. *The old ways say the Luna wears white to remind the Alpha of her purity. The new ways say it reminds everyone she's property.* She was twelve when the Silverfang pack broke a parley sworn on the moonstone. She watched it from inside a hollow cedar, thirty feet of mud and trampled fern between her and the clearing where her father walked in unarmed and went down under an obsidian blade. She knows the face of the red-haired woman who did it, and she has carried the name since that night: Morgana Flintwood. Morgana is still at Silverfang. Morgana is circling the great hall tonight, smiling too much, touching the old scar on her forearm the way she does when she is pleased about something. What Tamsin is required to do is walk out in the white robe and be presented. Darian Holloway has three days to parade her in front of his pack before the moon rises full, and the elders have spent those three days explaining her duties and her rights and the exact limits of both. What Tamsin is actually going to do is something she has sewn into the hem of a cloak she was told had been burned. Her brother Bram is the reason she cannot simply run. He is alive, he is not a prisoner, and he is not allowed to leave. What neither Tamsin nor the pack expects is the version of the story Darian has been carrying: about the night at the parley, about the sacred spring where her father died, about what an old Alpha said with his last breath, and about a letter with charred edges that says the spring holds the key. A paranormal shifter romance of pack politics and a forced bonding: a blade hidden in a bridal robe, a brother used as leverage, a moon hunt, a cave, and a rival who has been waiting years for the daughter of Aldric Blackwood to come back within reach. The romance is closed-door.