The Hidden Alpha's Prize

Mairi walks the eastern border every night, and every night it is quiet. Then the wind comes from the north carrying something she does not know. Male. Wolf. Not from her pack. She finds him half-hidden under a rowan, a big grey wolf, dark along the spine and silver at the flanks, built heavier than anything in Glen Braonan. The careful choice is to slip away and let the pack decide. She goes at him instead, because she is the alpha, even if nobody knows it. The fight leaves his teeth marks along her ribs and her taste of his blood on her tongue, and a scrap of wool caught on a thorn: dark green and black and red, tight and even and expensive. McTavish tartan, left where it would be found. In the village her brother Ewan is up on the stone step of the meeting house in his good coat, saying out loud what everyone has been muttering. *The alpha has been silent for three years.* He is right that the alpha never shows her face. He has no idea whose face it is. Then a letter arrives from Torquil McTavish, requesting parley at the Standing Stones at dusk, two days hence. Come alone. Bring no weapons. Bring no pack, as the old law requires. Fenella tells Mairi what those stones actually are: the place where alphas once swore blood oaths, where bonds were made that could not be broken by death or distance. And the wolf she fought is lying wounded on the healer's cot in Fenella's cottage. His name is Hamish, second son of Torquil, and he crossed the border to find the hidden alpha and report back. Torquil is not planning a war. A female alpha mated to a McTavish would legitimise his claim to the valley without one, and the clans would call it unity instead of conquest. If she refuses, she dies. Which leaves Mairi with a brother who intends to call a formal challenge at Samhain, a raid on the east pens that costs thirty head and was never meant to be a proper raid at all, a village convinced it is led by a ghost, and a father who died because Torquil sent twenty wolves against him on a moonless night. A Highland shifter romance told from both sides, with a secret alpha, an enemy clan's son on the healer's cot, an old law about standing stones, and a pack that wants its leader to show herself. The romance is closed-door.