Vivienne Moreau is not a capo. She is a thief, and the best in the city. When she steals a ledger from the Cattaneo family, she doesn't know it contains the names of every capo in the territory. She doesn't know the family will hunt her. She doesn't know the capo who finds her will lock her in his wine cellar instead of killing her. Dante Cattaneo has spent ten years protecting his family's secrets. He cannot kill Vivienne until he knows who she is working for. He locks her in the cellar and visits her every day. She mocks him. She thieves from his kitchen. She tells him the truth: she was hired by a rival family to steal the ledger, and she doesn't know who they are. Dante believes her. He lets her go. She comes back. She tells him she has nowhere else to go. They burn the ledger together. They run the territory together.

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.

Fiona MacLeod hides her brother in a hollow log forty yards into the trees, presses her palm to his forehead, and finds him too hot again. Finn is fourteen. *He's never even kissed a girl.* The curse has taken his strength, then his sight, and it is working its way toward his voice. Fiona is a healer whose whole inventory fits in one leather bag, and she has hauled him up out of the Highlands to the one place that might still hold a cure. The MacBain spring. When riders stop her on the road and ask what a woman with a healer's bag and a dead man's boots wants with the MacBain, she tells them the truth: *My brother is cursed. I need the spring water.* What she does not know yet is that the spring is poisoned, and that the man she has come to beg from is dying too. Callum MacBain is Pack Master, and the wasting curse that killed his father is in his hands now, a tremor that spreads from wrist to fingers whenever he is tired. *The wasting curse didn't just take your strength. It took your certainty.* His elders have called a vote of confidence. If he cannot call the pack spirit down at the full moon, they will replace him. Then there is Hamish. *"Hamish MacBain," he said, not offering his hand. "I'm the Master's cousin."* He is smooth about it, and reasonable, and he is the one telling the great hall that the outsider arrived and the trouble arrived with her. A letter in slanting handwriting eventually says otherwise. Hamish has been dealing with Duncan Ross, and the curse that has been killing MacBains for thirty years was never bad luck. Morag, who has been serving MacBain masters since before Callum was born, is the one who works out why the spring answers Fiona at all. Her grandmother was Elspeth MacLeod, who served as the spring's guardian before the curse took her, and who left the water locked behind her. The blood is still there. The spring recognises it. Which leaves Fiona a choice she never came for. *I came here to save my brother,* she says, standing over the black water. *I didn't come to bind myself to a pack.* The old rite is a blood oath spoken over the spring with the moon overhead, and the guardian has to speak the words willingly. There is no version of it where she saves Finn and then walks away clean. A Scottish-set wolf shifter romance told in both leads' voices, closed-door, ending on a bond made in the spring chamber with an enemy's second oath still waiting out past the hills.

Jamie has been crossing onto MacBain land twice a week, and he cannot understand why his sister minds. *"The pack's not dangerous. Callum MacBain's got rules."* Flora MacKenzie knows the rules. She memorised every stone and stream on Lunar Isle as a girl, because her father taught her that survival meant knowing exactly where the pack's territory began. In three days the blood moon rises and the Challenge begins, and boys who go out to watch wolves tear each other apart do not always come home. Then Duncan MacBain knocks on her door, smiling, asking after her brother. Flora is the island's healer - hemlock poultices, feverfew and willow bark, recipes written in Gaelic so faded the ink has gone brown. Callum MacBain is the alpha of the pack her family has paid a tithe to in land and labor for three generations, and he has spent seventeen years carrying the weight of what he did to that family. What he finally offers her is not an apology. It is a blood debt. *"One favor. No limits. You name it, and I'll do it. If you keep Jamie away from the pack until the blood moon passes."* Flora takes the bargain, and names her price: the truth about her father. The truth is worse than the silence was. A wild wolf in a silver collar came for her family's farm. Callum ended what the wolf started and called it mercy, then let Flora hate him for it. He also killed his own brother Conall over it - and Conall was not the one who paid for the collar. Duncan was. Duncan let his cousin bury the wrong man and stepped into the gap it opened, one place short of the alpha's seat. It takes a ledger, a scrap of parchment, an old healer named Mairi Ross, and a hard stomach to prove any of that in front of the pack. It also takes noticing that someone inside Flora's own cottage keeps switching nightshade into the comfrey paste. And there is the thing Flora has never asked about: the moon-shaped birthmark hidden beneath her dress, the word in an old tongue she speaks in her sleep, the reason the island's oldest women look at her chest and go quiet. This is a werewolf shifter romance set on a windswept island a channel crossing from the mainland, about a healer who refuses to be anyone's tithe and an alpha who has run out of ways to pay. Closed-door.

Three hours before dawn, Pearl Alden walks the southern shore of Ravenshale Island with a lantern in one hand and a canvas sack in the other, salvaging what she can from the wreck of the Morning Star before Victor Orr's men arrive with their carts and crowbars. The ship was carrying medical supplies. Her sister Ruth is at home with lunar fever in her bones, and Dr. Harlow has already handed Pearl a bottle of laudanum and a look that meant prepare yourself. What she finds in the rocks is a half-drowned man who says her name before he opens his eyes. She knows him. The last time Pearl saw Lucian Frost they were children in a sea cave under an eclipsed moon, and she was throwing rocks at the thing his father had become. She pulled him out of a crack in the wall, told him the Frost curse would pass when the shadow left the moon, and held his hand until the sun came up. He has come back to the island with a silver cane, a letter with her name on it, and questions about her mother. Catherine Alden went to the cliffs after dinner to check the tide charts and never came back. Her journals are in a trunk under the lighthouse roof: moonstone, lunar tides, a pact between two families, and a man who told her *The moon dreams through us.* The last thing she wrote to her daughter is a warning. *Do not trust the man with the silver cane.* Pearl reads by lantern light while Ruth's breathing thins in the next room. Irene Jewett, whose father owns the cannery, brings tea to the injured and leaves with a brass key that is not hers; what Irene wants is the Frost name and the Alden legacy, and she says so to Pearl's face. *You're a mapmaker's daughter with ink under your nails, and you have everything.* Victor Orr wants something older than money. He has been chasing a ghost for thirty years, and he will drug a sick girl and bind her to a chair in an icehouse cellar, behind a doorframe set with moonbane needles, to get to the end of it. The ritual that could break the curse is worked in the lighthouse beacon room, through the moonstone lens, and it asks for everything the wielder has. Pearl has read her mother's account of what moonstone magic costs. Victor is happy to say it out loud. *The girl becomes ordinary.* A historical paranormal romance of shifters, wardens, salvage and a wrecking coast, closed-door, ending with a woman who has to decide what she is willing to stop being.

Frozen scree skids under Freydis Bjornsdottir's boots. It is not yet dawn, she is on the wrong side of the Frostfang border, and she is cutting frostmoss off a granite cliff with a harvesting knife because the moss is the only thing that will slow the wasting sickness hollowing out her brother Ulf. Eirik Jarnsson, the Winter Pack medic, taught her to take the whole root without breaking the fronds. He could not teach her what to do if a patrol found her first. One does. A grey-black wolf steps into the clearing and shifts into a broad-shouldered man with white streaks at his temples: Torben, patrol leader for this stretch of border. His sister Yrsa opens the pouch, counts four patches, two of them deep-grade, and says the thing that keeps Freydis breathing - *Whoever taught her knew what they were doing.* Torben is unmoved. *She'll be judged at moonrise.* Judgment turns out to be an offer. The best moss grows in the contested valley that neither pack controls, and Torben has spent years trying to negotiate shared access to it rather than raid for it. He proposes a blood oath, plainly and without ceremony: Freydis finds him someone in her own pack who will actually talk, and he supplies enough deep-grade frostmoss to treat Ulf for a full season. She takes it. Her pack does not forgive her for it. Five hands go up in her own longhouse for banishment, and Gunnar Vargsson, who intends to be alpha by Solstice, takes charge of her brother. What she and Torben assemble after that - out of a journal hidden in a cave, a bundle of letters his sister sat on rather than hand him, and a hunter's knife marked the same way as a silver wolf-fang pin - is not a border dispute. Gunnar is the face of it. Signe, his sister, who fills a cup at every feast and never drinks from it, is the hand. She was dealing with the assassin guilds before Torben was born, and she has already sold the valley to mercenaries waiting in the north. To stand with Freydis, Torben has to face down his own council and an uncle who tells him to execute her. To stand with Torben, Freydis has to walk back into the pack that voted her out, under a truce that comes apart the moment Signe fails to arrive. *I'm not doing this for the alliance either*, he says, and she kisses him like someone who has been surviving so long she had forgotten what being alive felt like. A shifter romance set across a hard northern winter of rival wolf packs, treaty law and pack politics - closed-door, with a mate bond that is bargained for rather than granted, a brother worth crossing a border for, and a villain neither pack is looking at.

The hiking boots sit beside the tent flap with the laces still tied, *like he had stepped out of them and never come back.* Maya Hartwell has been tracking her brother for six days, up from Eugene and into the Willamette National Forest, following convenience-store receipts and spotty cell tower pings that spiral inward toward a valley on no hiking map she can find. Sam is a journalist. He told her he was looking into something. Then his phone went dead. His campsite has everything in it but him. No blood. No struggle. Just a sleeping bag still zipped, a stove on its side, and mud on his boot tread the wrong color for this forest. Then she finds the line of white stones, fist-sized and freshly set, curving through the underbrush like a boundary. She steps over one without thinking, and the air changes: *like walking through a curtain of spider silk.* *You're lost.* Three men are standing behind her, and she never heard one of them approach. The one in front has iron-gray eyes and a scar across his jaw two weeks old, and the land is his. His name is Rafe Blackwood, and pack law is unambiguous about a human who finds out what they are: bound, or executed. The Shadow Pack no longer has an elder who can perform the binding. So Rafe does something else. He walks Maya into the lodge, stands her in front of his wolves, and tells them she is his fated mate. He calls it a ruse. *It's a ruse. Nothing more.* The pack healer, Elena, does not accept that for a second. *The bond is real, whether or not Maya understands it yet.* Maya's own terms are simpler. She is not leaving without Sam, even if it means sleeping in the alpha's bed and answering to a title she does not want. What neither of them has time for is the reason Sam went missing in the first place. Aldric Stone has been pushing the Shadow Pack's borders for six months, testing, bolder each season, and he holds the high valleys where the only reliable moonbloom grows. Rafe has a hardliner at his own table who wants Maya dead. And somewhere under everything is the question of why the bond formed at all around a woman who is supposed to be entirely human, and what her mother buried before Maya was born. A contemporary shifter paranormal romance in the Oregon Cascades: a missing brother, a fake mate bond that refuses to stay fake, poison and an antidote that has to be cut off a cliff by moonrise. The romance is closed-door.

The snow has teeth. Maren is ten years old, and she reaches the sentry post just as the clouds tear open and the winter moon spills through, and her father is lying on his back with the spear still standing in his chest. He makes her promise. Not survive. *Live.* Then he goes slack under her hands, and she pulls the spear out in three tries, and she drags him down the trail toward the longhouse, because she will not leave him out there for the Grey Pack to find. She is grown now, out on patrol at the marker stone, when she scents Grey Pack on the wrong side of the boundary line and finds three of them standing on the frozen creek. One is Larsen, second to the Grey Pack alpha. She puts a barbed arrow through his shoulder before she has finished deciding to. The cost arrives the same day. While she was out hunting scouts, the Grey Pack took Jens. Her brother is seventeen. There is a scrap of wet fabric on a branch and his fear still hanging in the air. Stian Isdal, alpha of the Winter Pack, with ice-blue eyes and a silver scar across his jaw, does not call a war party. He slides a folded piece of hide across the table instead. Jens was caught hunting on Grey Pack land. Jens was told to stop. *He's a pack member who broke the border truce.* So Maren works with what she has. A Snow Truce that forbids raids and says nothing about rescues. A challenger called Torben Hvit, who has been building support for months and has an old story about which alpha's father let which alpha's father die. A festival at Frostfire where a trade is supposed to happen. And a bargain with Rune Ulfsson that she makes anyway. What she gets back is not the brother she lost. There is a crossed-bone sigil inked over Jens's heart, and beneath it a date, and the date is three days after they took him. *I'm a traitor.* After that come a gate opened from the inside, a burning village, a body in the snow with a note pinned to the chest that says *A deal is a deal*, and a half-starved girl called Ylva with a tarnished crescent-moon locket, raised on the story that the Winter Pack murdered her mother. And an alpha who keeps bleeding through his bandage and will not let the healer rewrap it. This is a shifter romance set in a pack coming apart in a hard winter: border politics, a brother who walks to the wrong side with his hands empty, an orphan who needs somewhere to go, and two people who end the book shoulder to shoulder against an army that does not care whose fur they wear. The romance is closed-door.

Brynn Calder has spent her whole life being the quiet girl who works at the Tidepool Inn and collects her grandmother's herbs from the apothecary. Then two Silvermoon enforcers come through the door, talking low about an Alpha King arriving by dawn, and the silver band under her sleeve starts to heat. *When I heard his name, my bracelet burned warm against my skin for the first time in years.* Her grandmother Etta finally explains it. The bracelet is not a keepsake. It is a binding, clasped on Brynn's wrist when she was three by the old Alpha King, who wanted a healer's gift in his bloodline: *So he bound you to his youngest child. A betrothal contract, written in silver and sealed with a bonding charm.* The clasp has no seam. Only the wolf who made it can take it off, and he is dead. The heir is Kian Ashford, and he has problems of his own. A border scout named Tomas has been carried into his courtyard with his throat torn open, and the wound is wrong. Ronan, his head enforcer, reads it as the work of Orin Vex, an exiled wolf gathering supporters. Lena stands at Kian's shoulder telling him what strength is supposed to look like. At the Blood Moon Festival, in front of every alpha on the West Coast, the bond snaps into place between them. Kian does exactly what Lena told him to do. *I reject this bond.* What follows is not an apology. Brynn is brought to the compound in chains and assigned to night watch. Kian keeps her because he needs to know what she is, and because rejection severed the connection without touching the bond underneath. And the traitor inside his own walls is not the man he suspects. The ink on the forged letters matches, shade for shade, down to the oxidation pattern, and it is Lena's hand. She has been feeding Orin Vex the patrol routes for months. Kian puts her on his personal guard and tells her he trusts her, and the lie tastes like ash on his tongue. By the time the curse at the centre of Orin's plan comes apart, Brynn has dragged an Alpha King out of a collapsing fortress, and Kian has to stand in his own hall and ask the pack to witness him asking for what he threw away. A dual-POV paranormal shifter romance, Brynn in first person and Kian in third, set on a wet stretch of Pacific Northwest coast, with a rejected fated bond, pack politics, and a grandmother who promises to turn a man's bones into soup if he breaks her girl's heart. Closed-door.

*"The gash is too deep for a normal bandage."* Briar Callahan has both hands on Denny's side and the blood is soaking through faster than she can fold the cloth. A boar caught him in the ravine. She could close the wound herself, and the heat in her palms is begging her to. She reaches for bandages instead, because of what her grandmother told her when she was fourteen: *Never let them see what you are, child. They'll call it a gift, then they'll call it a crime.* Then Sloane Corbin walks into the clearing and starts listing the things Briar always seems to be carrying. Moonstone pendants. Herbs. Salves. A raven goes out before dawn. By morning there is a scroll on the table in the alpha's house: by decree of Aldric Vane, Alpha King of the Six Territories, Thornwood Pack is summoned for investigation of a reported threat to pack security. The threat is Briar. Variants are forbidden in the Six Territories and the punishment is death. She cannot hide, either - the King travels with bloodhound shifters who scent magic the way other wolves scent rain, and her grandmother tried hiding once. It took them three days. Then, in front of the whole hall, Aldric offers an alternative. The Right of Claim allows an alpha to take any unmated she-wolf as his chosen mate if her pack refuses to surrender her for punishment. He invokes it on a woman he has just met. What he gives her at the other end of the journey is a room and a list of conditions. Stay in it. Do not use the magic. Do not contact her brother. Do not try to leave. What she gives him back is patience. Her grandmother taught her more than healing; she taught her to wait until an enemy shows his weakness. And there is a great deal to look at. Rogue camps clustered along the eastern border as if something were herding them. A king who says, flatly, that he would repeal the Right of Claim. A scarred man who keeps appearing in her dreams. And the question of what Aldric Vane actually did fifteen years ago, when the magic was burned out of her grandmother. Sloane is not finished either. Her father has served three Alpha Kings and knows where every secret in the pack is buried. This is a shifter romance about an outlawed healer, a king who takes first and explains later, and a woman who spends her captivity quietly building a case against the man who made it. The romance is closed-door.

Freydis is the Silvermoon Pack's healer, and this morning she is short of yarrow. She is also short of comfrey, grain, salt pork and time. The pack stores are not low. They are bare, scraped down to three strips of meat hanging from the rafters like forgotten washing, because Bloodfang raids cut the supply lines through the eastern pass and nobody told her. Her brother Gunnar tells her to find some. In the middle of winter. Somewhere. Her father, Jarl Hjalmar Ironhand, has thirty men left and a horn he has been emptying since before dawn, and an envoy arriving today from the Wolf King. Tryggve Ulfhednar wants a marriage alliance. He wants a queen out of the Silvermoon Pack. *He wants a claim on our pack. A blood tie. A mating bond that makes him our kin whether we like it or not.* So Freydis does the thing nobody in the hall expects. She challenges him. The law does not specify gender, and Tryggve names the terms himself: a Trial of Wits, three contests over three days, her choosing. If she takes all three, the claim breaks. If he takes even one, she marries him at dawn. She opens with riddles passed down through six generations of Silvermoon healers. She has beaten every challenger in the village at Wolf and Renegade. What she has not accounted for is a king who watches how she stands, how she leans into her good leg, how her left foot turns out when she walks. His adviser Sigrid notices it first and says the thing out loud that neither of them wants said: that Freydis walks the way his dead wife walked. Ingrid's portrait sits on his desk in Frosthold, painted six months before she died, her hand on the swell of her belly. He moved it off the bedchamber wall so he could shut a door on it, and he still stares at it for three hours at a stretch. What follows is not a rescue and not a romance anyone approves of. There is a cellar, a torch, a planted vial of diluted nightshade frost, and Hilda Gormsdottir screaming for the guards that the new queen has tried to kill the king. There is a fever, a hunt, a scar Freydis has never shown anyone, and a war on two fronts that does not pause for a wedding. And there is Gunnar, coming through the great hall doors with his axe red to the haft and a sentence for his sister that lands better than any crown. This is shifter romance in a northern pack world: an arranged alliance, a contest fought instead of accepted, a widowed king who has not put his first wife down, and a healer who refuses to be handed over, and it is written closed-door.

Tova is a tracker three weeks into hunting a brother who stopped answering his phone. Rurik is an alpha whose wolf has not made a sound since the day he carried his daughter out of the river. She is three miles into the pines when the trail vanishes. She drops to a crouch and runs her fingers over the moss-crusted earth. Men's boots, size ten, a worn-down heel on the left, stopping mid-stride as though Erik had simply lifted his foot and never put it back down. Cold. Damp. Pine needles and the faint tremor of water moving underground. Twenty-one days since her brother texted from a gas station - *found something, Tove, I think I know what Dad was hiding* - and then nothing at all. Twenty-one days of calls ringing into dead air, of driving up in a rattling Honda, of knocking on doors in a town that has decided not to see her. The locals were polite. Polite and useless. Douglas firs and western hemlocks close eighty feet overhead and turn the early evening grey and underwater, and the trap she walks into was not set for her. Inside the compound she is a debt she did not choose and a disturbance he cannot explain away. The wolf in his chest has been mute since the recording: a small voice apologising for going down to the river to see the fish, a splash, and then nothing but the sound of moving water. He has been a man alone in his own skin ever since, and everyone in his pack has stopped mentioning it. Norheim raiders cut through the western border that same season, took three young hunters and left two dead. Nothing along that line has settled since. What follows: hands that heal and harm within the same hour, the story living underneath the scars, a leak in the dam, the cost of extending empathy to a man who has made himself deliberately unreachable, and a gesture that cannot be taken back. *I'm serious.* *I know.* *So am I.* He will not say what she is to him out loud. He does not need to. He has already decided that anyone who tries to take something of his out of these woods again will not be walking back out of them, and he has stopped pretending that decision has anything to do with pack law.

The knife in her hand was a bonding gift. She used it to gut the man who killed the wolf who gave it to her, and she has carried it every day since. *You said no one crossed the eastern ridge.* Tess keeps her voice low, almost a whisper, though the four wolves behind her have ears sharp enough to catch a snapped twig at fifty yards. She crouches at the creek's edge, fingers brushing the damp granite where the water has washed the blood downstream. Still pink. Still warm. Maybe ten minutes old. Micah is seventeen, wired tight, and desperate to prove he is not the pup she still treats him like, and his knife snaps open on the last word. Calla steps past without asking permission, nudges a torn piece of fabric with her boot, and says what everyone is already thinking. Rogues. Cheap whiskey and desperation. Heading for the meadow. The moonflower field lies half a mile beyond the ridge, the only place in two hundred miles where the pale blossoms push up through volcanic soil. Her grandmother planted the first bulbs, and her grandmother's mother before that. The pack holds the land because it holds the flowers. Then Ronan Voss steps out of the shadows between two cedars with his hands open at his sides. No weapon showing. Nothing in his posture that reads as aggression. Just a tall man with pale grey eyes cataloguing every wolf, every blade and every breath in that creek bed. He wants an oath sworn. She wants to know what he is actually doing on her territory. Neither of them gets the honest version for a long while, and the delay costs more than either expected. A raid she allowed to happen. A wound she gave him with her own hand. A sister held as the price of cooperation. A poison made mostly of secrets. Two packs. One meadow. Several bodies. No clean way through. *Thank you. For pulling me back.* *I'd do it again.* *I know.* A shifter romance about a woman who leads because nobody else survived to, and a man whose reasons for lying turn out to be considerably worse than the lying itself. The bond burns. The rescue costs. The ash is still warm when they start again.

Dorian Ashford kneels in the memorial grove before first light and adds a stone to the cairn. *Not a river-stone, smooth and polished. A chunk of the mountain itself, sharp-edged, dark with damp.* One stone for every week Elena has been gone. The Mourning Law has twenty-one days left. After that, every wolf with ambition can step forward and demand what he killed to keep. Then the wind shifts and carries him a scent that is not pack. Female, and it catches at the back of his throat like woodsmoke and rain on warm stone. His wolf stirs for the first time in months with something other than grief, and Dorian gives the only order he can live with: she leaves by sundown. Rowan crossed the scent line without circling and without evasion, limping on a leg that never healed right, carrying a pack that has been through a dozen towns. She tells the warriors she was hiking the Pacific Crest Trail and took a wrong turn at the river. She counts the cracks in a holding cell ceiling and gives away nothing, because lost is safer than prepared. What brought her here is a letter she found in a box of her old things, from a mother she never knew, saying she had a sister. What she finds is a birth record on page 47. Twin birth. One stillborn, one surviving. Mother: Elena Vance. And then the detail that stops her breathing, because the alpha's dead mate was Elena Ashford, née Vance. The stillborn twin is not dead. A coded reply out of Clawmark territory places Maya Vance alive in a Silver Creek holding cell, red hair, green eyes, held since June 12, inside the lands of a starving alpha named Zane Fletcher. And Kian, who has spent forty years learning the language of blood, runs Rowan's sample twice and gets the same answer both times. Nightshade. A concentration consistent with long-term ingestion. Not enough to kill her, just enough to keep her wolf locked away, and it began when she was still a child. Then he opens Elena's file, and the concentrations match almost exactly. The woman who can answer for both is still walking the pack grounds, and her own daughter calls her a jailer rather than a mother. It ends under a full moon with braided sage and two packs standing witness, and with campfire smoke rising from beyond the ridge where something much larger is coming. A closed-door shifter romance about a grieving alpha, a woman who was poisoned out of her own wolf, and a twin nobody was supposed to find.

A wounded stranger turns up at the gate of a pack that has no reason to open it, and the alpha lets her in for three days because she is bleeding. She is lying about all of it. *I'm not letting her past the gate.* Alistair MacBride plants his walking stick in the mud and lets his weight settle onto the good leg. The woman on the other side of the iron bars is mud-splattered and winded, cradling her left arm, short auburn hair plastered to her skull by the drizzle that has followed the mist off the moors all afternoon. A crescent birthmark shows at her collarbone where the torn shirt has slipped. *She's bleeding*, Fenella says behind him. *She's not ours.* She says she tracked a deer into the gullies, lost it, walked since dawn. Her voice comes out steady, but the wrong kind of steady. Pushed. There are no pack markings on her clothes and the nearest road is twelve miles east, and when he asks her which pack she is from she blinks like the question is new. Hamish brings him the answer two days later. Trained in tracking and infiltration by MacEwan himself, who took her in as a ward after her mother died. Her name is Isla Ross. He gave her three days. She lied to his face in a Highland accent she almost certainly practised in a mirror. And he does not throw her out, which is a decision he will be justifying to himself for a long while afterward. *You said brother. But your lip trembled on half-brother. Why?* *I don't know what you mean.* *I think you do.* What follows: a wound he cannot show anyone, a name in the pack records that should not be there, a trap she set that closes on the wrong person, the shape of a recurring nightmare, and a wolf that wants something neither of them is prepared to say aloud. A bad leg. A cold kitchen. One truthful sentence, finally, at two in the morning. *Then do*, she says. *Start now.* A forced-proximity Highland shifter romance about two people who are each running a strategy, and the exact moment they both notice the strategy stopped being the point.

The robe is ceremonial white, silver-threaded at the collar, and it scrapes her skin like a shroud woven from nettles. Tamsin Blackwood stands still while Seren does up the tiny buttons at her shoulders. The silk is too thin and too white. It makes her look like something offered up, a lamb laid out on stone. Seren tells her where her brother is being held: east wing, two guards on the door. *The old ways say the Luna wears white to remind the Alpha of her purity. The new ways say it reminds everyone she's property.* She was twelve when the Silverfang pack broke a parley sworn on the moonstone. She watched it from inside a hollow cedar, thirty feet of mud and trampled fern between her and the clearing where her father walked in unarmed and went down under an obsidian blade. She knows the face of the red-haired woman who did it, and she has carried the name since that night: Morgana Flintwood. Morgana is still at Silverfang. Morgana is circling the great hall tonight, smiling too much, touching the old scar on her forearm the way she does when she is pleased about something. What Tamsin is required to do is walk out in the white robe and be presented. Darian Holloway has three days to parade her in front of his pack before the moon rises full, and the elders have spent those three days explaining her duties and her rights and the exact limits of both. What Tamsin is actually going to do is something she has sewn into the hem of a cloak she was told had been burned. Her brother Bram is the reason she cannot simply run. He is alive, he is not a prisoner, and he is not allowed to leave. What neither Tamsin nor the pack expects is the version of the story Darian has been carrying: about the night at the parley, about the sacred spring where her father died, about what an old Alpha said with his last breath, and about a letter with charred edges that says the spring holds the key. A paranormal shifter romance of pack politics and a forced bonding: a blade hidden in a bridal robe, a brother used as leverage, a moon hunt, a cave, and a rival who has been waiting years for the daughter of Aldric Blackwood to come back within reach. The romance is closed-door.

Fiona MacTavish wrenches her arm out of a guard's grip in the middle of the MacLaren great hall and tells the laird's son what she thinks of marrying him. *I'd sooner gut ye like a trout and feed yer entrails to the ravens.* Alistair MacLaren does not flinch. He observes that the entrails part is new, and then he says a name she has not spoken to anyone in this valley. Ewan. Eleven years old. He took a loaf of bread from the magistrate's kitchen at Dalmally, and he is in the cold cell under the courthouse until the winter assizes. The magistrate is a MacLaren tenant. The magistrate answers to Alistair's father. And Alistair's father has given him until the Hunter's Moon to find a bride of pure heart, or the pack loses the moon forever. Fiona came to the keep because the MacLarens own Glen Brae and her father always said that if trouble finds you, go to the laird. She did not expect a proposal inside the hour, or the arithmetic behind it: a treadwheel through the winter, then transportation to the colonies for seven years, if the fever does not take the boy first. She does not believe in the curse. She has seen the laird at market, and he looked like a man who had taken too much whisky, not a man who turns into a beast. What she believes does not matter. *Belief is not required. Only willingness.* In the tower room she counts the days to the Hunter's Moon and gets to twenty-one. The healer who brings her a blanket has her own reading of the situation: Alistair is not a cruel man, he is a desperate one. Alistair's brother Callum, who wants the pack for himself, has been hunting a pure-hearted human of his own for months. Then Fiona finds a lock of red hair in a box, bound with a frayed strip of blue wool tied in a bow she knows by heart, because she gave it to Ewan for his tenth birthday. Somebody has been to her brother. Somebody cut a piece of him away and kept it, carefully. A dark shifter romance set in a Highland glen of rents, magistrates and a pack living on a fraying bargain - closed-door, with a heroine who bargains rather than swoons, a silver mine with a ledger in it, a handfast bound in green and grey ribbon, and a rider who arrives at the very end with three days' warning.