The Cursed Alpha's Vow

Callum Hawthorn tells the woman with the scalpel that the antivenom is for his sister's dog, a copperhead bite, the vet in Tillamook closed at six. She tells him the vial in his hand is sodium chloride. She tells him that a bite already gone systemic needs two vials minimum plus supportive care, so the dog would be dead by now. Then she says, without any accusation in it, that he is lying. And then she unlocks the case, hands him two vials, and says the second one is free. He is one leg over the sill when she adds the thing that follows him all the way home through the Douglas fir: *"I know what you are," she said. "I can smell it."* Briar Cole came back to Mistwood to disappear. Her grandmother left her the house six years ago, when the cancer finally took her, and left her a journal too. Inside it, a wolf drawn in charcoal with a crescent moon on its chest. The mark is under Callum's shirt. What Callum carries is not a gift. A blood ritual bound his emotions to his pack's well-being, so that every time they hurt, he hurts. It is getting worse. The tremor in his hand, the nerve damage and old scar tissue from a rogue attack that never healed right, are what the curse looks like from the outside. His sister Lydia is the one who walks into the clinic and asks for help. *"My brother doesn't have much time. The full moon is three days away, and if Garrick doesn't kill him, the curse will."* Briar's answer is that she is a vet, not a witch. Lydia's answer is that her grandmother was both. Outside that room, Garrick's people have been squeezing the suppliers until the pack's own medicine ran dry. Maris Alden thinks his alpha has gone soft and intends to say so in front of everyone. And a seven-year-old girl who lost both parents in a rogue attack is alive only because a stranger broke into a clinic in the middle of the night for her. The way out leads back to a bowl of trees where the mist pools thick as cream, the old ritual ground where the binding words were spoken and where Callum's mother died giving birth to Lydia. It ends with a vote taken by show of hands, with vows that took eleven drafts and eleven failures before he gave up and told the truth, and with a hand laid quietly on a belly in the moonlight above the valley. A closed-door small-town shifter romance about a cursed alpha, a healer who inherited more than a house, and a pack worth breaking a ritual for.