The Cursed Alpha's Claim

An alpha who has slept eleven nights in the same chair beside his dying brother meets the one person who claims she can stop it, and every reason she gives him for helping is a lie. *He's not going to make it through the night.* Garrett Wolfe says it from the frame of the bedroom door with the words still burning in his throat. Ethan lies propped against three pillows, chest rising in shallow uneven jerks, the blue vein at his temple pulsing like a metronome counting down. *I've made it through every other night. Why would this one be special?* The ceiling light turns everything jaundiced yellow. Garrett crosses the room and sits in the chair he pulled up three weeks ago, the one he has slept in for eleven nights running. The wood has memorised his shape. *You're paler than the sheets.* *You're uglier than the sheets. We all have our burdens.* *Go patrol or something. You're hovering like a damn storm cloud.* *Silas has patrol.* *Silas has ambitions.* Lena arrives with the skills, the reading and the nerve to attempt what nobody in this pack will attempt, and with a grimoire she has not mentioned, a network she has not mentioned, and an entire history she has decided he does not need. What follows: ash and iron on the tongue, the weight of a mother's expectation, an unpaid debt, the hollow that lies between two territories, a hunt that has selected its prey, and a candle in a wind that should have put it out. *I'd choose you a thousand times.* It worked. He is breathing. And she lied to him about the grimoire, about the hunters, about every reason she gave for walking into that valley in the first place. Will what the two of them built across one impossible winter hold once he learns how much of it was arranged? Or does Lena finish the job, save the brother, and let Garrett say goodbye to somebody who was never quite who she said she was?