Fated to the Alpha

A woman with electric-blue hair is running through Douglas firs in the dark, her left arm torn from elbow to wrist. Her name is Lily Chen. She is twenty-two. She backs into the creek to get away from the thing on the bank, drags herself out on the far side, and collapses in a patch of ferns three miles short of the ranger station. Three weeks later her sister is standing in the trailhead parking lot with a rented Corolla and a map folded along the wrong lines. Maya Chen is a journalist. The last thing Lily ever sent her was a photograph of a waterfall, and Maya answered it with a thumbs-up emoji and went back into a deposition. Raven's Hollow has a population of 847, an inn called the Raven's Rest, and a forest that nobody wants Maya walking into. She finds Lily's earring at a trail junction and says out loud what she already knows: *Someone put this here.* She sees an animal in the fog and tells herself it was a timber wolf. She does not believe herself. In a converted barn outside town, the elders of the Hollowmoon Pack are arguing about how long to give her before they run her off. Cormac Vance has held them together for a hundred and forty years by being careful. Then his beta, Orin Blackwood, walks in smelling of pine needles and rain and woodsmoke, and underneath all of it *something faint, like a thread of music heard from far away.* The scent is Maya. The bond is not finished, but it is there, and it has arrived at the worst possible time. Bethany has been circling Cormac's place at the head of the pack, and what she is really hunting is the old pack chalice: *The golden cup. The thing that breaks bonds.* Break the alpha's bond to his pack and the alpha dies. Break a mate bond and both halves of it die. Miriam Cross meanwhile keeps the inn's front desk and a second mortgage, and a developer is waiting on the timber land. And Orin has known where Lily is the entire time. What Maya has to decide is not whether any of this is real. It is how much of herself she will trade to get her sister back breathing. A paranormal wolf shifter romance set in a fog-bound town under the Olympic peaks, closed-door, with a missing-person investigation running the whole way underneath the mate bond.