Chosen by the Shadow Alpha

Morwen Carrick goes over the chain-link fence on the second rail, drops into a crouch on the pack side, and counts until the guard dog's snuffling passes. She grew up on this compound. She knows every limp, every cough, every tell in the Stoneclaw pack, and tonight she means to take her sister out of it. She finds Saoirse in the infirmary, red hair falling across her face, pressing dried yarrow into a glass jar with hands that tremble. There is a bruise along her jaw the shape of knuckles. *He hit you.* *He's alpha. He can do what he wants.* The alpha is Lachlan, and Lachlan is Morwen's uncle. There is a boat in the cove and cash enough to get them to Portland by dawn. There is also Niamh, his enforcer, in the doorway with her claws already coming out. *Deserters get brought back, or they get put down.* The knife that drops Niamh comes out of the tree line, thrown by a man Morwen has never met: dark hair streaked with grey, the left eye milky white and blind. Callum Reid. His pack held the territory north of the Stoneclaw lands for three generations, from the old lighthouse to the granite quarry, until Lachlan took it and killed his father. Callum has spent six months tracking wolves who went missing. Wolves who left packs, wolves who could no longer shift, wolves with witch blood in their veins. He has found graves in the old mining tunnels north of the compound, and what he needs is somebody who can testify to what happens inside. What he hands her instead is worse: her sister is next on that list, because the diluted witch blood in the Carrick line makes Saoirse expendable. Morwen carries it too. It shows as a white streak in her hair. Then his hand touches hers and something goes up her arm like a live wire, and he gives it a name. *It was the mate bond.* A rare, involuntary connection that bound two shifters for life, *impossible to forge and impossible to break*. *You can ignore it. You can fight it. But you can't cut it out.* She tries anyway. What she gets is a borrowed dress from a healer's spare trunk and a hood pulled low at a pack festival, a hunter muttering *twenty head, next full moon* into a notebook, a silver net dropping out of the dark, a witch's pendant that hides her from wolves and empties her when it does, and a stone circle at dawn with Lachlan's fist in her sister's red hair. And Callum, who has spent his whole life hiding the same blood his mother died from, has to decide whether to reach for it. This is a fated-mates shifter romance of pack politics, silver and witch blood, a woman who stops running and takes the territory instead, and an ending where she faces down a hall of elders with *He is my mate. That makes him pack.* Closed-door.