The Rejected Alpha's Vow

The clinic's fluorescents hum overhead, casting the sickly green that makes even the healthy look two steps from dead. Rosa lies small and still under a white sheet, her curls dark against the pillow, her breath shallow and uneven. The oximeter on her finger blinks ninety-two percent, and it has been too low for a week. The pack doctor has been awake for thirty hours. The blood exchange would kill her. He has seen it happen. There is one thing that works on a wasting curse: the petals of the Wolfsbane Lily, ground to powder, mixed with moon-touched water. Three doses and the curse breaks. It grows in exactly one place, in a medicinal garden cultivated by Calder Kincaid's grandmother, in territory Evy's pack has been feuding with for three generations. Marcus gives Rosa three days. Maybe four. Evy inherited the alpha mantle six months ago when her father died, and she never wanted it. She wanted to be a hunter, someone who solved things with her fists and her teeth. Pine Hollow lost twelve wolves in the last border skirmish. A rogue alpha named Damon Vancroft has been picking at the borders for years, and the curse that took Rosa came through warded windows, which means somebody inside the pack opened a door. *"He owes you a life-debt,"* the elder tells her. She saved Calder's sister from a rogue attack when they were both seventeen, and the debt has never been called. What the elder does not say, because he does not have to, is the rest of it. Three years ago Calder Kincaid stood in a clearing under the full moon and said the words that shattered her. *I reject the bond.* She bled for months. She can still feel the phantom ache on quiet nights, and she never thinks of him. She has three days. She makes the call. A closed-door shifter romance about a reluctant alpha, a sister dying of a curse, and a man who rejected her once and now has to decide what he is willing to lose to stand beside her.