The Hidden Alpha's Vow

The clock on the nightstand reads 6:47. Thatcher Hawke will be here in three hours. Vera Lennox swings her legs off the bed, crosses to the bathroom mirror without turning on the overhead light, and reaches behind the toilet for the bottle of dark brown dye she keeps hidden in an old coffee can. She mixes it one-handed, watching a reflection she has learned to lie to. She works it through the white strand at her temple until it is not there any more. Gone. Beta again. Then she rehearses the rest of it while the dye sets: shoulders rolled forward, chin down, the gaze that flickers away when it is held too long, the way a beta lets an alpha's words land without flinching. She was seven years old when her father was killed in the wet grass, when the pack bonds went loose and something in her chest broke open like ice. Silver fur. Claws like moonlight on water. A howl that carried across every ridge in the valley. A silver alpha, which had not happened in three generations. Corbin Shaw was fourteen and standing at the treeline, smelling of smoke and satisfaction, and he offered her a deal. He would tell the pack he had killed the rogue himself. She would stay quiet about what she was. He would keep her safe. She has kept her half of it ever since. Now Silver Creek has gone six months with no alpha, Corbin has appointed himself the one who speaks for the pack, and Thatcher Hawke has driven in from the other side of the state because a neighbouring pack with no chain of command and hunters in its woods is everybody's problem. He walks into the hardware store and asks the old man at the register about a woman. Dark hair. Silver streak. About yay high. *He doesn't know. He can't know.* But the wolf she buried has woken up, and it is pressing against her ribs, and it has an opinion about him that she cannot argue with. What Vera is hiding from is not only Corbin. It is the Vigil, who leave silver wire strung between trees. It is a pack that would have to account for what it allowed. And it is somebody inside her own family who has been writing to people he should not have been writing to. This is a wolf-shifter paranormal romance about a woman who has spent her life making herself smaller, an alpha who notices anyway, a sister who has visions and will not admit it, and a secret that has finally outgrown the house it was kept in. The heat is closed door.