Bound by the Alpha King

The Thornwick Castle courtyard blazes with paper lanterns, and Rosalind Ashworth is wearing borrowed amber silk that pulls across her ribs with every breath. She is nineteen. She has been rehearsing composure her whole life, and tonight she needs one thing from the Alpha King: a way into his greenhouse. Her sister Annabel is dying of moonlung. *The Heartbloom is the only cure for moonlung. And the only Heartbloom in Eldmoor grows in the royal greenhouse.* A guard arrives from the Ashworth townhouse with the healer's verdict: *you need the Heartbloom within the week.* Then King Ronan St. Clair, who wears black with silver buttons and no crown, looks past every woman waiting at the dais and says her name. *Step forward.* He offers her the throne. He tells her he seeks a queen to love. And Rosalind tastes the lie. The Ashworth veritas, the family gift that lets her taste falsehood on her tongue, will not let her seal a bond with a man who is hiding something. So she pulls her hand back and recites her lineage instead: the formal rebuke, the only way an unmated female can refuse an Alpha without breaking pack law. In front of the entire court, she humiliates the one man who can open the greenhouse. What she brings him afterwards is not a marriage. It is a deal, made among the ironwood and moonstone with stolen Heartbloom sap and thorn-blood on a cloth in her hand. *A steady supply. Enough to treat my sister until she's well. In exchange, I'll help you find your traitor.* He does not accept quickly. Rosalind moves into Silverkeep as the king's living lie-detector, and every truth she turns up makes the ground less solid. Her brother Edmund has been making arrangements with Mirabelle Vance. A grey-eyed stranger in the dark turns out to be Gareth, who knows who paid for the silver blade that killed the king's first mate. And then the worst of it: *Your sister's not sick.* Annabel is being fed silver, drop by drop, by someone who wants Rosalind obedient. By the final chapters the traitor has a name, a captain lies buried under the oaks, and Ronan has drafted papers to dissolve the monarchy rather than keep Rosalind in range of the next blade. The lords come back with a counter-offer neither of them expected: *You remain Alpha King in name. But you share all decisions with Queen Rosalind as co-ruler. Equal voice. Equal authority.* A closed-door shifter romance set in the pack courts of Eldmoor, for readers who like a heroine whose gift is also her biggest liability.