The Broken Alpha's Vow

A wounded stranger turns up at the gate of a pack that has no reason to open it, and the alpha lets her in for three days because she is bleeding. She is lying about all of it. *I'm not letting her past the gate.* Alistair MacBride plants his walking stick in the mud and lets his weight settle onto the good leg. The woman on the other side of the iron bars is mud-splattered and winded, cradling her left arm, short auburn hair plastered to her skull by the drizzle that has followed the mist off the moors all afternoon. A crescent birthmark shows at her collarbone where the torn shirt has slipped. *She's bleeding*, Fenella says behind him. *She's not ours.* She says she tracked a deer into the gullies, lost it, walked since dawn. Her voice comes out steady, but the wrong kind of steady. Pushed. There are no pack markings on her clothes and the nearest road is twelve miles east, and when he asks her which pack she is from she blinks like the question is new. Hamish brings him the answer two days later. Trained in tracking and infiltration by MacEwan himself, who took her in as a ward after her mother died. Her name is Isla Ross. He gave her three days. She lied to his face in a Highland accent she almost certainly practised in a mirror. And he does not throw her out, which is a decision he will be justifying to himself for a long while afterward. *You said brother. But your lip trembled on half-brother. Why?* *I don't know what you mean.* *I think you do.* What follows: a wound he cannot show anyone, a name in the pack records that should not be there, a trap she set that closes on the wrong person, the shape of a recurring nightmare, and a wolf that wants something neither of them is prepared to say aloud. A bad leg. A cold kitchen. One truthful sentence, finally, at two in the morning. *Then do*, she says. *Start now.* A forced-proximity Highland shifter romance about two people who are each running a strategy, and the exact moment they both notice the strategy stopped being the point.