The Rejected Alpha's Secret

Two years ago he was exiled, which means he no longer has the right to intervene in anything, which is why he is burying a body at two in the morning three miles from where it was left. *I'm not asking you again.* Connor Blackwood keeps his voice low, almost a whisper, because the woods have ears tonight. The dead wolf at his feet weighs more than shame. It weighs forty years of pack law and a brother's silence. He dragged it three miles from the clearing where the enforcers left it, through ferns wet with October dew, past the boundary stones where the old magic thins. The body was warm when he found it, still limp with the strange softness of recent death, and he had to stop twice to catch his breath and remind himself that this was not his fault, that he had not been there to stop it, that being exiled means he no longer has the right to intervene. The grave he has dug is shallow. It will have to do. Lilah finds him at it, which is the second-worst thing that could have happened, and she does not run, which is the first. What follows: the lie he has built his life on, a door he swore he would never open, a storm that tears things down, blood and common ground, a scar beneath a question, a mine full of shadows, what a witch knows, and a trial conducted by teeth. *Vance is a traitor. He'll say anything to save his own skin.* *He's not lying.* *You just refused to give up on me. That's everything.* Will what the two of them build in an exile's cabin hold once the pack convenes and the trial goes ahead? Or does Connor take the sentence, protect the only person who came looking for him, and say goodbye at the boundary stones where he was sent out the first time?