Claimed by the Alpha

A key. Brass, tarnished to a muddy green, its teeth worn smooth by decades of use. Nora Blackwood has been gripping it since the ferry docked in Port Angeles. The gravel road into Mistfall is potholes and roots and a sign nailed to a tree that says PRIVATE ROAD - TURN BACK. She doesn't turn back. Her grandmother Eleanor died six months ago and left her the land, the cabin, and that key under a loose stone on the porch. Then the road curves hard right, and there is a wolf standing in it. A man walks out of the trees with the same silver-gray eyes as the animal. *"He's a wolf," the man said, stopping at her door. "And you're on pack land."* He is Callum Vance, Alpha of the Graywood Pack, and his terms are flat: the property line ends at the second oak, and if she crosses it, he will know. The brass key doesn't open the cabin door. It opens a wooden box on the mantel, and inside the box is a letter in Eleanor's hand. *The land I've left you is not a gift. It's a burden.* Eleanor made a pact with the previous alpha - Callum's father - and wants Nora to honor it. Then the warning: *The alpha's eyes cannot be trusted, no matter how much they look like* - and the ink simply stops, mid-sentence. What Eleanor really left is a notebook, and in it a formula: nightshade, ground stag horn, rowan ash, honey, and the impossible ingredient - *saliva from a willing alpha during a full moon.* A formula against a sickness that took four pack members decades ago and is rising again in the woods. When Nora tests it on her own blood, the drop doesn't mix with the dark liquid. It dissolves into it. The pack elders knew her grandmother as a seer. Now they have the seer's heir, living on the border, carrying the cure in her veins. Everyone wants a piece of that. Callum's sister Tessa has resented him since their father died, wants the alpha position, and is sending Silver Ridge details about the cure. Serena Whitfield, alpha daughter of Silver Ridge, has proposed a treaty mating that would settle Callum's politics for him. Serena's father Aldric arrives at the ceremony in a charcoal suit, wearing a rogue leader's pendant and smiling at the crowd like he owns them. And Nora's brother Leo, a journalist, has been calling the ranger station, the sheriff's office and the local newspaper about disappearances in the forest - and he is on his way to the cabin. Nora came to Mistfall to be left alone with a dead woman's house. What she inherits instead is a bond, a war, and a pack that has to decide whether a Blackwood can be trusted. A closed-door shifter romance with pack politics, a seer's inheritance and a slow-burning mate bond.