The Broken Alpha's Mate

Dorian Ashford kneels in the memorial grove before first light and adds a stone to the cairn. *Not a river-stone, smooth and polished. A chunk of the mountain itself, sharp-edged, dark with damp.* One stone for every week Elena has been gone. The Mourning Law has twenty-one days left. After that, every wolf with ambition can step forward and demand what he killed to keep. Then the wind shifts and carries him a scent that is not pack. Female, and it catches at the back of his throat like woodsmoke and rain on warm stone. His wolf stirs for the first time in months with something other than grief, and Dorian gives the only order he can live with: she leaves by sundown. Rowan crossed the scent line without circling and without evasion, limping on a leg that never healed right, carrying a pack that has been through a dozen towns. She tells the warriors she was hiking the Pacific Crest Trail and took a wrong turn at the river. She counts the cracks in a holding cell ceiling and gives away nothing, because lost is safer than prepared. What brought her here is a letter she found in a box of her old things, from a mother she never knew, saying she had a sister. What she finds is a birth record on page 47. Twin birth. One stillborn, one surviving. Mother: Elena Vance. And then the detail that stops her breathing, because the alpha's dead mate was Elena Ashford, née Vance. The stillborn twin is not dead. A coded reply out of Clawmark territory places Maya Vance alive in a Silver Creek holding cell, red hair, green eyes, held since June 12, inside the lands of a starving alpha named Zane Fletcher. And Kian, who has spent forty years learning the language of blood, runs Rowan's sample twice and gets the same answer both times. Nightshade. A concentration consistent with long-term ingestion. Not enough to kill her, just enough to keep her wolf locked away, and it began when she was still a child. Then he opens Elena's file, and the concentrations match almost exactly. The woman who can answer for both is still walking the pack grounds, and her own daughter calls her a jailer rather than a mother. It ends under a full moon with braided sage and two packs standing witness, and with campfire smoke rising from beyond the ridge where something much larger is coming. A closed-door shifter romance about a grieving alpha, a woman who was poisoned out of her own wolf, and a twin nobody was supposed to find.