The Cursed Alpha's Mate

The basement of the Silver Creek pack house smells of wet concrete and old fear. Declan O'Malley has a rogue cuffed in silver-linked restraints, blistered and weeping, and the man's nose has stopped bleeding, which means he has healed enough for another round. *Last time. Who sent you?* What the rogue eventually gives up is this: Viktor is hunting a human woman who has a locket. At midnight the border cameras pick up a blue pickup with Oregon plates climbing Old Cascade Road. That road goes to exactly one place, the Blackwood property, a cabin that has stood empty for twenty years since the banishment and that Declan swore to keep empty. Rowan Blackwood has driven up to reclaim her father's land. Eamon Blackwood was run out of this valley for hunting wolves on pack ground, and she has spent twenty years wanting to know why. She stops ten feet from a man who steps out of the dark onto the road, keeps one hand in her pocket, and tells him she is not leaving. She is wearing a silver locket with a moon stag etched into the face, antlers curving, the eyes made of tiny chips of amber. It was her mother's. It is also the one Viktor wants. Declan has held this territory for twelve years and has never once felt his wolf stir for anyone. The O'Malley line carries a curse that kills the mates of its alphas: his father died trying to break it, his grandfather refused to watch it happen again, and Declan has intended the bloodline to stop with him. Then his fingers brush hers over a chain on a gravel road, and the bond snaps tight, and she feels it too. The thing waiting under all of it is not about the locket at all. *Your mother was my fated mate.* And Viktor is still building in the eastern ranges, and Declan's brother is walking the pack house in an expensive jacket with a vial of concentrated wolfsbane in the pocket, asking questions that are not yet a challenge. *I'm questioning you. There's a difference. For now.* Breaking the curse takes three objects, and it costs the alpha the one thing he has never let himself want. This is a wolf-shifter paranormal romance set in the Cascades: a cursed bloodline, a rival brother, a locket in pieces, and a woman with something dormant in her blood that nobody told her about. The heat is closed door.