The Feral Alpha's Vow

Fiona Marsh has spent six weeks of hospital vigils in a green vinyl chair, and the only thing left that might work is not a drug. It is a flower. *Three doses and your sister's marrow remembers how to make blood.* Dr. Orla Keane holds up the dried flake, translucent, veined with faint blue light even under the greenhouse fluorescents, and then tells Fiona what it will cost. The moonflower grows on exactly one piece of ground, and the man who owns it kills trespassers. *Humans and shifters alike.* Two hunters crossed his line last winter. Their truck was found at the logging road, engine running, doors open. His name is Callum MacBride. He was chieftain of Greyhearth once. Now he lives alone past the ridge where the pines grow so thick the sun cannot reach the ground, answering to no pack and no council, and the Border Accords do not cover him because he belongs to nothing. Fiona has three days. The moonflower opens under the waning moon, three nights before the Moonhowl Festival, and if she has not harvested by the third sunrise the blooms dissolve into dust. She crosses the border anyway, with a shovel, a bag and her mother's silver locket in her pocket, the chain worn bright at the clasp. What she does not know is that she has walked into somebody else's war. For months Callum has been finding marks scratched along his boundary. *Deliberate. Obvious. Designed to frame him for violence he had not committed.* They belong to Duncan, who is his brother, who took Greyhearth from him, and who would like nothing better than a dead human found on the feral alpha's land. So instead of killing her, Callum gives her three nights and teaches her the harvest. And Fiona starts noticing things she cannot account for: a cut on her finger that closed in seconds, a gash on her palm gone overnight, and a pull toward the moonflowers that feels less like theft than like recognition. A paranormal shifter romance about a human woman who will trespass on anything to keep her sister alive, and an exiled alpha who mistook being alone for being at peace. The romance is closed-door.