Alpha's Forbidden Mate

The west woods have been closed for twenty-three years. No patrols, no hunting, no wolves across that line. So when Callum Brennan's dawn patrol scents a human in the old pack ruins, he sends his enforcers home and goes to handle it himself. He finds a woman photographing a stone foundation with one standing wall, scarred by fire. She does not step back when five men come out of the trees. *"Private land?"* she says. *"Funny. The county records show this parcel as unclaimed."* Her name is Maya Connelly. She is a photographer from Portland, here for two days, chasing the only thing she has ever had of her mother: a moonstone pendant and a note that said keep her safe. She has no idea that the ruins she is standing in are where her mother died, or that the stone around her neck belonged to the man whose son is now telling her to leave. Callum is Alpha of Redwood Crest. The massacre in these trees killed his father, William, along with an uncle, two cousins, and enforcers who had served since before he was born. He has spent his whole adult life keeping that wound sealed. Now a stranger has walked straight into it carrying his father's pendant, and his wolf will not let him send her away. They strike a bargain neither of them trusts. One day. A motel room he pays for. Answers in exchange for the stone. The trouble is that Derek wants her gone. *"Derek's not my beta. He's my rival. He's been waiting for me to slip."* And across the border, Jasper Vance of Shadow Creek has been waiting far longer than that, holding something in a stone cell that Callum has no idea is still alive. What Maya inherits is not a tidy origin story. It is a journal in her mother's handwriting, a prophecy an old wolf dreamed three nights before the fire, a vault sealed with blood, and a wolf of her own that surges up unbidden in the forest and will not come when she calls it. It is also a bond she never asked for, to a man whose pack has every reason to hate her name. By the end, both packs are looking to her, the bond between them has gone quiet, and Callum has started over: asking, properly, to court her. She is training every afternoon with wolves who were raised to hate her, and she is about to leave for three months to look for something older than the vault. A shifter paranormal romance about inherited blood feuds, a sealed forest, and two people who find out too late what they are to each other, told closed-door.