Hunted by the Shadow Alpha

A single red hair, caught on a thornbush at chest height, still warm. Morven MacLaren knows that burnt-copper shade, and she knows the slight kink where her sister's hair always curls at the end. Beside Catriona's light footprints in the mud are a man's boots, heavy tread, not trying to hide. Under the lavender and the cheap soap their mother used to buy: iron. She follows the trail along the River Doran into Finlay Sinclair's territory and walks straight into a sentinel post. Morven ran three weeks ago rather than accept the mating contract her father arranged, and she took her sister with her. Since then Alistair MacLaren has had wanted sketches of his own daughter circulating, and the Shadow Alpha's father put a bounty on her head. There is a poster on the notice board in Dunscraig with Finlay's own face on it too, five hundred pounds for information on the Shadow Alpha's son. Morven tore it down before she left home. Finlay cuts the cord off her wrists instead of collecting. He does not hunt runaways. What he wants is a border held. Grant Ross has been stockpiling weapons, and the iron under the disputed lands would arm him to challenge any pack in the Highlands. Finlay needs someone Ross will actually listen to, and Ross will listen to Alistair MacLaren's daughter. So they seal a bargain in blood on parchment: she speaks for him at Ross's keep, he helps her find Catriona. *"You're asking me to trust you." "I'm asking you to make a deal. Trust comes after."* What neither of them has accounted for is what Morven is. Ten years ago a MacLaren assassin died in Finlay's father's hall having said exactly one thing: *The daughter carries the old blood.* Morven does not bend when an alpha gives a command. And the lullaby her mother sang over her in the dark turns out to be a code, first for a map, then for something far worse, hidden in a water-stained journal she was never meant to read. Her brother Ewan turns up at the longhouse with snow melting on his shoulders and his hands raised, wanting to undo what he helped do to both his sisters. Her father wants a war. Ross wants a war. Finlay is the first alpha she has met who wants the other thing. Highlands shifter romance with pack politics, a tracker who can separate scents at five miles, a rescue that turns into a resistance, and a vow made on a chapel altar with no magic in it at all. Closed-door.