The Forbidden Alpha's Claim

What is a woman doing out on the moor before dawn with a satchel she will not open, and how long can she keep saying snares before somebody follows her? *You're up to something.* Mairi freezes with her hand on the leather. The voice comes from the shadow of the longhouse, low and knowing. She turns slowly, arranging her face into something bored and harmless. Hamish leans against the timber frame with his arms crossed, the missing notch of his left earlobe catching the grey pre-dawn light. *You've had that look all week. The one your mother used to wear before she went sneaking off.* *My mother's dead. And I'm going to check the snares before the sun catches the rabbits and makes them clever.* He snorts. *Since when do you set snares?* *Since you lot stopped bringing in enough meat to feed the pups.* She hoists the satchel higher and steps past him, pulse ticking hard against her collarbone, a steady drum she refuses to let him hear. What follows: a cave she was never supposed to find, a wolf who will not back down, a rope that tastes like iron, a storm that pushes two people into the same shelter, an elder who smiles like a blade, a brother who disappears, a bargain struck at a rock the clans have used for three hundred years, and a cell holding somebody who should not be in it. *He kept the token. He wrote it down. He knew she would betray him, and he kept proof anyway.* *I bind myself to you, wolf and woman, heart and pack, for as long as the rock remembers.* He will break the bargain, the truce and the rock itself if he has to. Whatever the elders decide and whatever the other clan sends, the next person who lays a hand on Mairi is going to be dealing with something that stopped being an alpha and started being a great deal worse.