Luna of the Crescent Pack

*"You're on Pack land."* Nora stops mid-stride, bare feet in the cold pine duff. She shifted back two miles ago and left her clothes folded under a hollow log, so she arrives at the Crescent Pack border at dusk with nothing, smelling of blood and distance. She does not raise her hands. She angles her neck, drops her shoulders, and asks permission to cross. The sentry takes one look at the silver scar along her collarbone and goes to fetch the Alpha. Bennett Shaw fills the doorway of his own great room like he was carved from the valley. He is missing a chunk of his left ear, and his eyes are the colour of wet slate. He already knows what she is. *"You're the survivor from the Blackwood Pack."* Blackwood territory is two hundred miles east. Nora has been running three weeks. Her father is under a cairn of rocks on a hillside she cannot name, her mother died with a blade through her throat, her brother was shot in the back while he was trying to shift. She is not asking for shelter. She is asking for a place to gather information and fight back, and Bennett does not believe a word of it. What buys her a night is his mother. Maggie Shaw comes down the stairs with a limp and a cardigan mended at the elbow, asks to see Nora's collar, touches the silver scar with trembling fingers, and says she knew Elena Blackwood. *"You have her face. Her fire. I would have known you anywhere."* One week, Bennett says. Then Nora sets her own condition: she does not work with people she cannot trust, so she wants to know who is in his inner circle. His mother. His beta, Thomas. His sentry lead, Clara Vance. Nora already knows what Clara's coat smells like. The man behind all of it is not a stranger. Damon Blackwood is her uncle, and the pack calls him the Butcher. He killed his own brother, his sister-in-law and his nephew, and he left Nora alive on purpose. He also killed Bennett's mate four years ago, by the same method, with silver through the heart and no witnesses. So the alpha who wanted her gone and the lone wolf with nothing left start planning the same raid, and neither of them can afford what is happening between them in the kitchen and the hallway and across a patrol map on a dead man's desk. A shifter romance about a survivor, a suspicious Alpha, a traitor inside a pack house, and a rogue who has spent a decade destroying his own bloodline. The book alternates between his point of view and hers, and the romance is closed-door.