The Savage Alpha's Luna

Fiona is twelve years old and hiding in the hayloft when the first howl comes from the east, near the old logging road. She had climbed up to surprise her father. She had mucked out the stalls without being asked and she wanted to see his face. Then the second howl comes from the west, and the third from the north, and she understands, in the way children sometimes understand things they should not, that the wolves have surrounded them. Her father gets off two shots with the rifle. Her mother comes out of the house with the shotgun and puts Liam behind her. Liam is four years old and already crying. Fiona does not remember climbing down the ladder or crossing the yard. She remembers the gravel biting into her bare knees and the weight of her own body slamming into her brother, driving him sideways off the porch into the mud. She covers him with her arms and her back and she waits for the teeth. The teeth come. One wolf, larger than the others, black with silver threading through the ruff, eyes the colour of storm clouds over the lake. Its jaws close around her left wrist and press without puncturing, as if measuring the depth of its own violence. Then it releases her, turns, and trots back into the treeline, and the rest of the pack follows without a sound on the dead leaves. And much later, Fiona is taken on Greyclaw land with a hunting story nobody believes. Helga Voss, pack elder, explains the law: an outsider caught on sacred ground without escort is marked and expelled, permanently, and there is no discretion in it. Every child in three counties knows where the territory begins. The alpha has a scar across his left cheek and those same grey eyes, and when he sees the wolf's tooth Fiona wears at her throat he handles it as though it has burned him. Her mother, he tells her, was not hiding a piece of the monster that killed her. She was marking it, so that Fiona would know him when she found him. And Liam is lying somewhere with black veins pulsing under his skin like they have a heartbeat of their own. The full moon is nine days away. A shifter romance about pack law, an inherited debt and a bone that has to be found before the moon comes up; closed-door.