The Cursed Alpha's Prize

A damp snarl cuts the dusk, low and territorial, and it does not come from a human throat. Nadia Wren has come back to Wolf Hollow for her brother. The chain-link gate across the pass is new since she was last here: twelve feet of industrial-grade steel topped with razor wire, flanked by pine trunks scarred by claws. Two men are standing at it, and the stocky one, missing a pinky finger on his left hand, tells her to turn around, human. She takes out her mother's pendant instead. A flat disc of carved bone on a leather cord, the rune for sight worn shallow by decades of thumb-rubbing, untouched in a drawer for seven years. She presses it to her sternum and walks into the ward. The burn goes across every inch of exposed flesh and her mouth fills with iron. She does not stop walking. Corbin Thornwood comes down the road from the lodge and has the gate opened. The alpha of Wolf Hollow moves like a man who has forgotten he has a body. Her brother is in the lodge, he says, fed and bored. *He keeps asking if I can turn into a wolf.* Micah has been told three times that Corbin can't. Then the evening light catches Corbin at an angle, and Nadia sees what nobody else in the valley can. It hangs at his throat like a collar of rotting silver, filaments of sickly light threaded through skin and into his chest, dark spots crawling through it like necrosis. It is not only keeping his wolf from him. It is killing him. She has a jagged scar across her left palm, from a game the pack children called the Blood-Truce: a hunting knife, a creek, two cut hands pressed together, and a grey-eyed boy she has spent twenty years not thinking about. He has his father's knife, its hilt carved from moonstone, runes down the spine in Old Wolf script that read *For the true-seer's hand.* There is also Vaughan, who does not think a human belongs inside the ward and who carries word to a rival alpha named Mordecai. There is a ritual at the equinox with a price on it. To break the curse and get Micah home, Nadia is asked to give up her sight — and Corbin, who has spent three years watching his own pack look at him with pity dressed up as patience, would rather put her on a trail as bait than watch her pay it. *You're using me as bait, Corbin,* she tells him. *Don't dress it up in noble language.* He does not deny it. A werewolf shifter romance with a seer heroine, an alpha who cannot shift, and a plan that needs somebody to walk into the trap on purpose, and a closed-door love story under it.