Bound by the Shadow Alpha

Lena Vasquez has a knife against a scout's throat in a shack in the Oregon woods, asking where his pack keeps the moonpetal. He gives her one word before he bites down on the poison hidden in his collar and dies in her chair. Moonfall. Three days is what she has. Her brother Mateo is sixteen and dying of Silver Fever on a mattress in the next room, hollowed out by it, joking about the list of things he wants to get through before he goes. The only cure is moonpetal, and moonpetal grows in a sealed grove inside Shadow Pack territory, where a rogue is killed on sight. Clara, her grandmother, tells her where the standing stones are and what it will cost. *"If you're caught, don't beg. Shadow Wolves respect silence. If you beg, they'll break you slower."* Clara also lets slip something Lena never knew: she was an elder of the Shadow Pack herself, before she left. Lena crosses the border, swims the pool under the waterfall, and finds the ground between the three stones bare. The flower was moved three weeks ago. The man who moved it walks out of the shadows behind her, not into the dark but out of it, and gives his name as Dominic Rossi, Alpha of the Shadow Pack. Then he offers her a bargain. The Right of Claim. Five trials. If she survives them, the moonpetal is hers, along with her brother's life, a place in his pack, and answers to questions she has not learned to ask yet. One condition: she stops running, stops hiding, and walks into his territory as herself. Because Lena has a scar on her forearm from a failed shift at twelve and has spent her life certain her wolf never came. Dominic has just watched her vanish into shadow without shifting at all. *"You're a Shadow Wolf, Lena. You just don't know it yet."* What she walks into is more than trials. Vance Kincaid of the Red Pack wants Shadow territory and has made deals with her father's old allies to take it. A knife that looks like Dominic's turns up in Clara's wardrobe. The elders who already suspect the rogue girl are the ones who get to decide what she is. Lena stays anyway, and not to be kept safe. *"Then don't protect me. Stand beside me instead."* A wolf shifter romance set in the Oregon mountains, about a woman who came to steal a flower and the alpha who offered her a bargain instead. The romance is closed-door.