Stolen by the Shadow Alpha

A boy is kneeling in the heather with both hands pressed into his father's chest, trying to keep the life in. *You're twelve years old, Callum.* Fergus MacBain has the numbers and says them out loud: the MacRaes have sixty wolves, the MacBains have twenty-two, and half of those are old or hurt or green as spring whins. He makes his son swear by the split moon to take the pack into Gleann Dubh and never set foot on MacRae land again. Then his hand goes slack, and the boy is their alpha. Years later, in a pack house that has belonged to the MacRae family for eight generations, Mairi is grinding nightshade at midnight because her brother Aiden's fever will not break. Her uncle Lachlan fills the doorway. He has a letter, wax-sealed and spelled, that must reach a border runner at the standing stones before moonrise, and he needs a courier the shadow filth will not suspect. Aiden's tincture can wait an hour. It cannot, so Mairi picks the lock on the herb store instead. It takes her forty seconds. She has been practising on it for three years. The wolf is standing in the doorway when she turns around. Grey as storm clouds, with eyes the exact silver of the ones that have been watching her from the foot of her bed every night for a month. She throws a jar of foxglove at his face. He moves sideways like water running downhill, and then there is a hand on the back of her neck and a voice with the wrong vowels for the Highlands. *I'm not going to hurt you. But I need you to come with me. Now.* What Callum MacBain wants is not ransom. It is the thing her uncle has spent her whole life making sure she never learned: that her mother's bloodline is the last of its kind in the Highlands, and it is the only thing that can lift an omega curse that has held an exiled pack in a dark valley for forty years, stripping each generation of its wolf. So Mairi walks into a camp of rickets and hunger and children who have never been full, with a brand over its alpha's heart and a woman named Iona telling her plainly that her uncle did this and she gets to decide whether she helps or watches them rot. Stolen by the Shadow Alpha is a Highland shifter romance about exile, blood debt and a bargain nobody wins cleanly. It is closed-door, and it ends at a feast with a rowan and silver clasp, a kneeling alpha, and a howl coming down off the ridge in a voice still learning its own shape.