Hunted by the Lone Wolf

Maya is on the phone with her sister, sloshing along an old logging road after dark, promising she will be home in forty minutes. Her research camera is three hundred yards deeper into the ravine and the red record light is still blinking, and she is not leaving without the memory card. Then she hears it. A low, wet rasp, like something breathing through damaged lungs. The snare is a loop of braided steel cable anchored to a spike in a Douglas fir, and it is poacher's gear, illegal as hell, meant for something big enough to break a deer's neck. It has not caught a deer. It has caught a man with one leg twisted the wrong way and blood pooling in the mud under him, and when her headlamp finds his face he does not beg. He snarls. *"You don't know what I am."* Maya is a wildlife biologist. Her sister Lily is dying at home of something the doctors have run out of names for, and Maya has spent six months getting laughed out of academic journals chasing an enzyme called Lunar Transferase through discredited genetics papers. So she cuts the cable, and she carries him out, and she does not ask the question she already knows the answer to. His name is Jack Korhonen. His own pack expelled him. His brother Gunnar took the alpha seat and put a price on his head. And a group of hunters called the Pact has been harvesting lone wolves for years, led by a gaunt man with a graying ponytail and a silver wolf-tooth necklace who can smell blood on the wind. What Maya wants is two vials. What the cure actually requires is a live transfer and a mate bond, which is to say: everything. Jack refuses. The scent of his blood on her hands is already a map leading Silas Redding straight to Lily's front door. What follows runs through a moonhowl festival crowded with families, a sawmill, an old trapper's cabin Lena Halonen keeps stocked, a colleague in a fieldwork vest asking too many questions about Maya's research locations, and a prophecy about a blood moon child that nobody wanted to be about them. It ends in a hospital room with a portable centrifuge, a silver locket on a hospital gown, and Maya holding a letter of recommendation that would take her back to the life she had before, deciding whether to tear it in half. A shifter romance about a woman who is bad at running and better at standing still and fighting, told closed-door.