The Alpha's Claim

Thirteen inches across. Lena measures the track twice, three times, hoping the tape will say something else, and it keeps saying the same thing. The pad impressions are too broad. The claw marks run a full two inches past the toes. No bear in the lower forty-eight makes a print like this, and no cougar either. Behind her, the sheriff of Cedar Hollow stands with her arms crossed and her fingers drumming on her elbow, which is how Violet Chen looks when she is deciding how much of the truth to hand over. *There are things in those woods that don't fit in your field guides.* Lena is a wildlife researcher who signed paperwork to study coyote migration and has spent two years mapping game trails instead. A rancher named Morrison has lost a heifer and owns a twelve-gauge and a short fuse. And her sister Tessa has been missing for three weeks, which is the real reason Lena walks into the north woods anyway with her best friend's phone buzzing unanswered in her pocket. What she finds is a man in a cave and a thing in the clearing that used to be a wolf and has grown past it, wearing a silver collar stamped with a crescent moon and a red fang. It speaks. It says a name. *Go back to Gideon. Tell him the north woods are mine.* Declan Thornwood holds this territory alone and has fought alone his whole life. Gideon runs the Redfang pack and wants him dead. Somebody in one of those packs has been selling birth records, and the payments route through accounts nobody will claim. And there is a photograph, ruined at the edges, of Tessa on the floor of a cage with her wrists bound in orange baling twine and a red fang painted on the door behind her. So Lena makes a bargain with an alpha she has no reason to trust, and every step toward her sister costs her something more permanent: a pack trial, a charge of treason, a bite, and a bond that keeps humming even when the two of them are apart. A shifter romance about a woman who would rather be wrong about the science than right about being too late, told closed-door.