Rejected by the Alpha King

Brynn Calder has spent her whole life being the quiet girl who works at the Tidepool Inn and collects her grandmother's herbs from the apothecary. Then two Silvermoon enforcers come through the door, talking low about an Alpha King arriving by dawn, and the silver band under her sleeve starts to heat. *When I heard his name, my bracelet burned warm against my skin for the first time in years.* Her grandmother Etta finally explains it. The bracelet is not a keepsake. It is a binding, clasped on Brynn's wrist when she was three by the old Alpha King, who wanted a healer's gift in his bloodline: *So he bound you to his youngest child. A betrothal contract, written in silver and sealed with a bonding charm.* The clasp has no seam. Only the wolf who made it can take it off, and he is dead. The heir is Kian Ashford, and he has problems of his own. A border scout named Tomas has been carried into his courtyard with his throat torn open, and the wound is wrong. Ronan, his head enforcer, reads it as the work of Orin Vex, an exiled wolf gathering supporters. Lena stands at Kian's shoulder telling him what strength is supposed to look like. At the Blood Moon Festival, in front of every alpha on the West Coast, the bond snaps into place between them. Kian does exactly what Lena told him to do. *I reject this bond.* What follows is not an apology. Brynn is brought to the compound in chains and assigned to night watch. Kian keeps her because he needs to know what she is, and because rejection severed the connection without touching the bond underneath. And the traitor inside his own walls is not the man he suspects. The ink on the forged letters matches, shade for shade, down to the oxidation pattern, and it is Lena's hand. She has been feeding Orin Vex the patrol routes for months. Kian puts her on his personal guard and tells her he trusts her, and the lie tastes like ash on his tongue. By the time the curse at the centre of Orin's plan comes apart, Brynn has dragged an Alpha King out of a collapsing fortress, and Kian has to stand in his own hall and ask the pack to witness him asking for what he threw away. A dual-POV paranormal shifter romance, Brynn in first person and Kian in third, set on a wet stretch of Pacific Northwest coast, with a rejected fated bond, pack politics, and a grandmother who promises to turn a man's bones into soup if he breaks her girl's heart. Closed-door.