Heir of the Iron Fang Pack

Dawn breaks cold over Talus Field. Runa Sigurdottir lets the frost bite her bare arms and walks the line of pups, tapping hips forward, correcting foot placement, telling a shaking girl to breathe. From the fence post, Freydis Ironfang laughs loud enough to carry. *"Your mother held it." Freydis's eyes flicked down to Runa's scarred palm, then back up. "You just wear her title."* The scar is old. Runa was seven the night Silvermoon wolves came through the wall of the nursery, seven when she lay across her little brother Bjorn to shield him, seven when a dying wolf pressed a muzzle to her cheek and made her swear something she had already decided to break. *"Promise me. When you're alpha. Promise me the war ends."* Now a scout limps in from the border with a letter in a bold, angular hand. A parley. No weapons, no guards, just the two of them at the old bridge on the logging road. It is signed Torben Viklund - the alpha of the pack that burned her home. Her beta Leif calls it a trick. Freydis calls it a chance to get the little heir killed. Runa goes anyway, because when she presses her scarred palm flat against the letter, the paper burns. What Torben brings to the meeting is a hand-drawn map, two years of dead bodies marked by season, and a scrap of dark wool stamped with the Iron Fang sigil and pinned to the chest of one of his own guards. Someone has been staging this war from the outside. Someone who was exiled seven years ago with a brand burned into his neck and a missing ear, and who has spent the time since building camps within striking distance of both territories. Sven Vargsson is not a ghost. He is a plan, twenty years old, and it runs straight through Bjorn. At home, Freydis is circling the armory. The pack is counting her failures. And the bond that wakes between two alphas from two packs that have been bleeding each other for a decade is the one thing neither of them can explain to anyone who matters. To keep her promise, Runa has to hand her enemy the pack's secrets, her elders' records, and eventually her own throat. A closed-door shifter romantasy of pack war, false flags and a mate bond between enemies, ending with an iron ring engraved *One pack, one blood, one moon.*