The Rejected Alpha's Luna

Vera Cross learned to be quiet in a closet that smelled of cedar and her mother's lavender soap, counting to ten the way her father taught her, while men with her family's blood on them worked through the house. She got as far as six. The man who dragged her out of that closet was Kellen Marrow. He did not finish the job, because something grey and enormous came out of the dark and put him on the ground, and said one word: run. What she took with her was a locket with her mother's handwriting on the back of the photograph inside. *The moon will call you home.* Years later she is carrying her brother through rain-slicked underbrush toward a barn with a sagging roof and a door hanging crooked on its hinges, on land marked with symbols she cannot read. She has followed the river south into the mountains for one reason: mountain packs have healers, and Theo is dying, and she does not have one. The pack she walks into is Ashfall. The alpha is Connor. The healer is Maeve, who spends half the night on Theo and does not promise anything. What Connor wants to know is who put the wound in the boy. What Vera does not say, at first, is anything at all. What neither of them expects is what happens when she puts her hands on someone who is hurt and reaches for the thing she buried so deep she had nearly convinced herself it did not exist. It answers like a struck match. So a woman who came to beg for a healer is offered the healer's post, temporarily, and then something considerably less temporary in front of the whole pack. And out beyond the border, the man from the closet is still alive, still wearing somebody's mark, and bound to something older and worse than a grudge. A shifter paranormal romance about survival, pack politics and a brother worth crossing a mountain range for, with a woman whose power costs her every time she uses it. Closed-door, ending on a set of porch steps at sunset with a raven on the totem pole that has one eye too many.