The Lone Alpha's Captive

A healer named Morven pressed a scrap of paper into Tamsin's palm on market day in Deepwater and said one thing: *Take it and don't come back.* The less I know, the less I can tell them. The cache is where the paper said it would be. Inside the pouch is a hand-drawn survey of Shadow Peak's whole territory, with patrol routes, den sites, and every prison cache Darius Kane has set up in the last three years. At the eastern boundary there is a small X and a name in tight script. *Finn.* Her brother, fifteen years old, limping from a leg that never set right, in a cage for six months because Darius wanted leverage on her. A hollowed-out mine shaft, three days' travel on foot if she pushes. The snare takes her left ankle half a second before the pain arrives. It drags her six feet across the duff, locks, and leaves her swinging upside down from a low branch with the map digging into her ribs. Cade Kincaid steps out from behind the fir she had been leaning against. He already knows her brother's name. He knows exactly which mine. *I know you're not getting him out with a map and a pocket knife.* What he wants in exchange is her allegiance, and there is a hunting cry coming up the ridge, so she does not have long to decide. Cade has been carrying something since he was nine years old and his father knelt in the mud of the spring house with a leather satchel. The deeds that say the Heartspring belongs to the Kincaid bloodline are forged. His grandfather did not buy that water. He took it, and paid a man to write papers saying otherwise, and the alpha's job ever since has been to keep lying. Now someone is poisoning the spring at its source, his healers cannot keep up, and the woman he has just brought inside his borders is the one person who has mapped every weak point in his territory. His own pack is not pleased. Mira wants the newcomer unmasked as a Blood Moon spy and demands a duel to settle it: first blood, no shifting. And every full moon, Cade lights a candle for Elara, which he has no intention of stopping. A fated-mates shifter romance in the Cascade foothills, built on pack law and guest-right, a boy in a cage, a poisoned spring, and an alpha whose entire inheritance is a lie handed to him when he was too young to refuse it. The romance is closed-door.