Bound by the Alpha

Woodsmoke, spilled ale, lanterns swinging in the birch trees. Isla Macrae is pushing through the Lochan Festival crowd on the shore of Loch Dour, looking for her brother, and when she finds Callum he is at the largest bonfire with a grill rack in front of him, a yellowing bruise on his jaw, and the alpha of Glenmorrow standing beside him. Isla came to take him home. She arrived weeks ago on the bus from Inverness and has been asking the wrong questions since, about the full moon, about why the village closes up shop after dark. Finlay McTavish has been counting. Scar across the bridge of his nose, silver eyes, and he already knows exactly who she is: *Your brother is Callum Macrae, son of Alistair Macrae, who drinks himself stupid at the Crooked Spindle three nights a week and has a bruise on his jaw that matches the one on Callum's.* Then he sets the terms. Stay for the festival. Eat the food. Dance if she wants. Then get on the bus and don't come back. Callum isn't coming. His father's grandfather was a shifter, the blood runs thin but it runs, and he would rather learn to be strong here than go back to Alistair's house. So Isla stays. She is soon standing at the eastern edge of the loch with her phone out, photographing Morag Sinclair accepting a leather pouch from Lachlan Kinloch, alpha of the rival pack whose scouts are already in the area. Morag wanted the mate bond Finlay never offered her. For taking it instead, Isla gets a glass vial of silverbane shattered across her shoulder and a crescent-moon scar that will not fade. What she does not yet know is why the Kinlochs want her specifically, why Mhairi the pack historian watches her the way she does, or why the starved silver wolf that comes out of the trees one night, ribs showing, one ear torn, presses a cold nose into her outstretched hand as though it knows her. It does. And when that wolf dies in the frost with a blade in her throat, Isla is left holding a name she never asked for, a village that does not want a human leading it, and silver poison working through Finlay's blood that only the Binding will draw out, with true names said aloud and palms cut, and no half-truths and no hesitation allowed. A Highland shifter romance about pack law, a traitor inside the ranks, and a woman told she doesn't belong who ends up rewriting the rule that says so. Closed-door.