Promised by the Lone Wolf

The wolf pacing Lena Borden through the sword ferns is bigger than any wolf has a right to be, and she has been tracking the scar on its right foreleg for three days. She does not run. She plants her boots in the wet duff and lifts her hiking pole like a spear. Then the wolf shifts. Bone reshapes, fur recedes, and a man with silver eyes and a scarred brow tells her she is on his territory and has until nightfall to be gone. Lena has a laminated photograph in her jacket pocket. *Caleb Borden. He disappeared two years ago. The rangers called it a hiking accident.* Caleb is her twin. *He has our eyes,* she says. *We're twins.* A man in town with a crescent moon tattooed on his neck gave her one instruction: find the wolf with silver eyes and bring him something called the Moonstone, and she can have her brother back. That man is Tomas. Darius Stone has spent thirty years in the Cedarwood forest avoiding exactly this. No pack, no bonds, no one to bury. He knows what happened to Caleb, because he watched him walk willingly into Tomas's compound thinking he was getting a job, and said nothing. Every night since, he has fed Tomas information about pack movements and the whereabouts of other lone wolves. It is how he has stayed alive and how he has kept Tomas looking anywhere but here. Now Caleb's sister is standing in his clearing refusing to leave, and the wolf in his chest has already decided for him. *Mate, it whispered. Ours.* The full moon is three nights out. What follows runs along logging roads and under cabin floorboards: a journal in handwriting that is not his, a dented Zippo lighter passed hand to hand, and Garrett Ross, a local who offers to guide Lena to the loner's borders and whose brown eyes flicker gold when a howl rolls out of the trees. There is Will Torey, a scout too frightened to lie well, whose younger sister Rosalind is locked in a storage room behind the mill boiler because she was feeding him information. One shotgun, one knife, one injured spy, and a stone Tomas has been using to turn people into weapons. Lena did not come here to be rescued, and Darius has forgotten how to be anything but alone. Neither of them gets to keep that. A shifter romance with a lone-wolf hero, a mate bond neither lead asked for, and a rescue that costs both of them everything they were hiding behind. Closed-door.