Novels by Zyra Ace

Wren & KadeThe five years that followed didn't happen all at once, the way the worst nights sometimes felt like they had. They happened the way most real change happens — slowly, then suddenly, then slowly again, in a rhythm neither of them fully noticed until they looked up and found themselves standing somewhere entirely different from where they'd started.Wren.She learned to lead a pack the way Ezra had promised she would: badly at first, then less badly, then well enough that Nightshade's numbers doubled, then tripled, wolves drifting in from failing packs across the northern territories drawn by rumors of an Alpha who took in strangers and made something out of them worth having. She learned to control her power fully — not just the vanishing, but the lie-sense underneath it, sharp enough by year two that Ezra joked she'd put every dishonest trader in three territories out of business. She buried Petra in year three, gently, at the old woman's own quiet request, and grieved he

WrenEzra finally told her about Ashenmoor on a night when the rest of the pack had gone to sleep and it was just the two of them by the dying fire, the question she'd been quietly circling for six months finally getting asked directly enough that he couldn't deflect it again."You knew that brand," she said. "The night Rurik found it. You said you'd seen it before, and then you wouldn't say anything else, and it's been six months, Ezra."He was quiet long enough that she thought he might deflect again. Then he sighed, the particular sound of a man setting down something heavy he'd been carrying a long time. "Ashenmoor was Nightshade's sister pack, once. Same bloodline, split off three generations back over some dispute nobody living remembers the details of anymore. They kept more of the old blood than we did — more of the power you're carrying now. Forty years ago, something wiped them out. Wiped them out thoroughly, in a way that doesn't happen to packs by accident, and left this t

WrenSix months into leading Nightshade, Wren had developed a working theory that Rurik Thorne found excuses to visit her territory roughly twice as often as actual alliance business required, and she'd stopped pretending, even to herself, that she minded."The brand," Rurik said, spreading a rough sketch of the mark across the table between them — the same mark he'd found on the rogue's collar six months back, the one Ezra still wouldn't fully discuss. "I've had someone tracing it through old records. It's not new. Whoever's using it now didn't invent it — they're reviving something that used to belong to a pack called Ashenmoor. Wiped out, or near enough, about forty years back. Nobody's sure by who, or why, or what happened to whatever was left of them afterward.""Ezra knows something about it. He won't say what.""Might be worth pushing him on that, gently, when you're ready. Whatever this is, it's bigger than rogue incursions. Organized brands don't happen by accident, and neith

KadeThe rumors kept coming, more specific each time, the way rumors did once a thing became interesting enough for people to bother getting the details right.Nightshade had a name now, or near enough — an Alpha, young, who'd apparently come from nowhere five months back and rebuilt a dying pack from six starving survivors into something northern traders had started routing around out of simple caution. Female, according to two separate sources, which Kade noted and then spent an uncomfortable amount of time trying not to think about."They're calling her something now," Torren said, dropping into the chair across from Kade's desk with the particular energy of a man who'd been sitting on information he found more interesting than he was letting on. "Not a real name — nobody's gotten that far, she keeps it close — but a nickname. The Nightshade Ghost, on account of some trick she does in a fight. Rogues who go up against her patrol report losing track of her mid-attack. Just — gone, a

WrenThe moon ceremony Nightshade held for her didn't look anything like the one that had broken her four months ago, and Wren suspected that was at least partly deliberate.No birch arch. No crowd of forty wolves standing in careful, judgmental rows. Just six people — seven, counting Rurik, who'd ridden in that afternoon uninvited and unapologetic, claiming he "happened to be in the area," which nobody believed and nobody challenged either — gathered in the same clearing where she'd fought off three rogues five months earlier, moonlight falling clean and silver through a gap in the canopy that Ezra swore wasn't planned and Wren suspected absolutely was.Ezra stood at the center, the old pack seal — dug out from wherever he'd kept it hidden for six years, waiting, she now understood, for exactly this occasion — resting in his weathered hands."Nightshade hasn't named an Alpha in six years," he said, voice carrying easily in the small clearing, no need to raise it for a crowd of seven.

WrenIt was Petra who brought it up first, which surprised Wren more than anything else about the conversation that followed — Petra, who'd spoken maybe six words directly to her in four months, choosing this particular evening to break her long silence with something that mattered."You should be Alpha." She said it plainly, from her spot by the fire, not looking up from the mending in her lap. "Ezra's been holding this pack together on borrowed time for six years. Everyone knows it. He knows it best of anybody."Ezra, across the room, didn't look surprised by the ambush, which told Wren this conversation had probably been planned before she'd even walked in that evening."She's not wrong," he said. "I've been thinking it since the rogue fight, if I'm honest. Been putting off saying it because I wasn't sure how you'd take it, and because naming a new Alpha isn't a small thing to ask of anybody, let alone somebody who's had exactly one pack already decide what she was worth without as