The Alpha's Vow

Ailsa MacKenzie counts steps, because counting keeps her from thinking about what happens if she stops. She makes it seventy-three before her arms start shaking. Her sister Eilidh's blood has already soaked through her shirt, warm and then cooling, and the crofter's barn Ailsa remembers from girlhood turns out to have collapsed years ago. What she finds instead is a scent boundary laid down in layers thick enough to taste, three sentry wolves who sit down rather than attack, and the man who owns the ground she is standing on. He is Callum Sinclair, and he names her before she names herself. *You have your mother's hair.* Moira MacKenzie has been dead six months, killed by Fergus Lindsay, the rogue alpha with a scarred throat and one milk-white eye who burned the MacKenzie pack house down around her. Ailsa carried Eilidh out of it, and she carried something else: a fragment of the alpha stone, wrapped in oilcloth, pressed against her ribs like a second heartbeat. Callum gives them a cottage, a healer and one night. Ailsa intends to be gone before the sun is high. She stays. She stays because Eilidh's wound turns septic and Morag's poultice has to be changed every four hours. She stays because the brooch at her collar is the old Cairn Pack knot and the thing in her pocket is the relic that pack has hunted for generations. She stays because Callum finally tells her about a starving rogue in a glen near Loch an Eilein, an order from his father, and a younger brother called Hamish. Graeme Sinclair has his own view. *Callum's soft. Always has been. Lets strays wander in off the moor.* Then the Cairn envoy rides in with the alliance Gleann Silver needs to survive Fergus, and names the price. *They want her.* Callum has sworn an alpha's vow on the stone, and the stone does not forgive a broken one. Every arrangement that protects his pack costs Ailsa her sister or herself. The Silver Feast is coming. Fergus is already moving wolves onto the eastern fields. *I choose you*, Callum says, and it is not a pretty line. It is a decision that takes his rank, his pack and the power the vow gave him, and leaves him standing in a stone circle with nothing but a broken spear shaft. A Highland shifter romance of peat, loch mist and pack law - closed-door, with a wounded sister who refuses to be left behind, a stolen relic that whispers, and an alpha who learns exactly what it costs to put people above the vow.