The Forbidden Alpha's Vow

She left it unguarded for ten minutes. Maybe twelve. That is the whole story, and everybody in the glen is going to hear it in some version before the month is out. *You'll never catch him on two legs.* Fiona MacLeod ignores the voice, hers or somebody else's, it does not matter, and pushes harder through the bracken. The rogue has a thirty-yard lead and the moon at his back, silver spilling over grey fur like he was carved out of mist. She has tracked him three miles from camp, across the burn and up into the scree where the heather gives way to bare rock and the wind carries nothing but iron and old snow. The Moonstone is in his mouth. She can see it catching light, pale as bone, the size of her thumb joint. The stone her mother pressed into her hand the night she died. The stone that holds her pack's claim to the eastern glen. The stone she was fool enough to leave unattended while she washed the blood off her hands after the day's hunt. Ten minutes. Long enough for a rogue to slip the camp's scent line and long enough for Duncan to be the one who sees her lose it. What follows: a vow that burns going in, a debt she cannot pay, a healer's price, an alpha's burden, a bear's den, echoes of a mother's silence, a grave she never knew existed, and an accusation made in front of both packs. *Fear doesn't make a man a traitor.* *No. But what he did with that fear does.* His hand comes up to cup her jaw, gentle despite the burns, and he kisses her back like she is the only real thing left in a world that is mostly fire. Fiona has to decide whether the man who watched her fail is worth the one thing she has left to trade, which is the claim her mother died putting into her hand.