Marked by the Shadow Alpha

The border ridge runs three miles along the eastern edge of Sunstone territory, and Bronwyn Carrick has walked every yard of it since she was fourteen. She knows where the cedar gives way to pine, where the stream runs shallow and cold, and which fallen oak makes a tripwire in the dark. Tonight the wind carries something that is not a scent at all, but the absence of one. *Like a missing tooth in a familiar smile.* She draws her knife. *Cross the stones and I'll treat it as a challenge.* What comes out from under the hemlock is a wolf that drinks the light, with one ice-grey eye and one amber, and when it shifts there is a crescent branded over its heart. He says he is tracking one of Fenris Grym's rogues. She gives him ten seconds to turn around. He is faster than anyone she has ever sparred with, and when the fight ends she is on the ground with a mark burning on her collarbone that she did not agree to. He knows who she is. *You're Carrick's daughter. The one who trained with the warriors instead of the healers.* Torchlight comes through the trees before she can get an explanation. Her cousin Eamon Carrick leads the patrol that finds her glowing, and he has wanted a reason for years. *Well, well. Bronwyn Carrick, marked by a Shadow wolf.* The mark is a bond, and Sable says it is a door that opens both ways: Rhys Darrow feels her loyalty, her fear and her anger, and she feels his. Sunstone calls that collusion. Rhys calls it the thing he has been seeing in visions since before he knew her name. And Fenris does not want Bronwyn at all. He wants her brother. *Finnian Carrick. The healer. Fenris wants him.* A healer's blood is how a rogue alpha breaks a curse, and Bronwyn already knows who made that curse, because it was her own grandfather. So she is standing in a council chamber being asked to choose her pack by killing the one wolf who can find Finnian, and she is standing in the rain later with a crossbow pointed at her by a man who shares her name and who says, quite reasonably, *I sold him to end a war.* Marked by the Shadow Alpha is a shifter romance about a fated bond nobody consented to, a brother worth burning a pack down for, and two wolves who end up building something new out of exiles. It is closed-door, and it ends under paper lanterns in a valley that did not exist when the book started.