Luna of the Winter Pack

The snow has teeth. Maren is ten years old, and she reaches the sentry post just as the clouds tear open and the winter moon spills through, and her father is lying on his back with the spear still standing in his chest. He makes her promise. Not survive. *Live.* Then he goes slack under her hands, and she pulls the spear out in three tries, and she drags him down the trail toward the longhouse, because she will not leave him out there for the Grey Pack to find. She is grown now, out on patrol at the marker stone, when she scents Grey Pack on the wrong side of the boundary line and finds three of them standing on the frozen creek. One is Larsen, second to the Grey Pack alpha. She puts a barbed arrow through his shoulder before she has finished deciding to. The cost arrives the same day. While she was out hunting scouts, the Grey Pack took Jens. Her brother is seventeen. There is a scrap of wet fabric on a branch and his fear still hanging in the air. Stian Isdal, alpha of the Winter Pack, with ice-blue eyes and a silver scar across his jaw, does not call a war party. He slides a folded piece of hide across the table instead. Jens was caught hunting on Grey Pack land. Jens was told to stop. *He's a pack member who broke the border truce.* So Maren works with what she has. A Snow Truce that forbids raids and says nothing about rescues. A challenger called Torben Hvit, who has been building support for months and has an old story about which alpha's father let which alpha's father die. A festival at Frostfire where a trade is supposed to happen. And a bargain with Rune Ulfsson that she makes anyway. What she gets back is not the brother she lost. There is a crossed-bone sigil inked over Jens's heart, and beneath it a date, and the date is three days after they took him. *I'm a traitor.* After that come a gate opened from the inside, a burning village, a body in the snow with a note pinned to the chest that says *A deal is a deal*, and a half-starved girl called Ylva with a tarnished crescent-moon locket, raised on the story that the Winter Pack murdered her mother. And an alpha who keeps bleeding through his bandage and will not let the healer rewrap it. This is a shifter romance set in a pack coming apart in a hard winter: border politics, a brother who walks to the wrong side with his hands empty, an orphan who needs somewhere to go, and two people who end the book shoulder to shoulder against an army that does not care whose fur they wear. The romance is closed-door.