LOGINNora Hale didn’t come to Willowfall looking for magic, monsters, or fate. She came to disappear. At twenty-four, Nora is a veterinarian with a kind heart, a quiet nature, and scars no one can see. Fleeing an abusive past, she leaves everything behind for a run-down house on the edge of a small town and a chance to start over near her grandmother. Willowfall seems peaceful enough, wrapped in forest and folklore, until the nights fill with howls and the townspeople whisper about beasts that shouldn’t exist. When Nora discovers a massive black wolf chained and bleeding in the woods, her instincts override her fear. She frees him, heals him, and unknowingly alters the course of her life forever. The wolf disappears before dawn, but his piercing blue eyes haunt her, lingering in her thoughts long after he’s gone. Colton Grimfang is the Alpha of a powerful werewolf pack and a leader forged by duty and violence. Quiet, intimidating, and fiercely fair, he has protected his people for years by keeping their secret hidden. He never expected his fated mate to be human, nor to find her bleeding courage and compassion into the heart of a world that should never touch hers. As rogue wolves stalk the forest and hunters rise from the shadows, Nora is drawn deeper into a dangerous truth. Her past resurfaces in the form of a man who refuses to let her go, and the pack she never knew exists is divided over her place among them. Bound by fate and threatened by war, Nora must decide whether love is worth the cost of leaving her humanity behind, while Colton faces the ultimate choice between his pack and the woman who owns his soul.
View MoreOutside, the howl faded into the trees. Avery listened until it was gone. Her eyes were blue again, though a thin ring of amber still burned around the edges. It made her look haunted from the inside.“They’re not using words,” she said slowly, as if speaking to herself. “But I know what it means.”Colton stood across from her, one hand braced on the exam bed. Blood had spread through the fresh bandage on his arm, but he seemed unaware of it now. His gaze stayed on Avery.“What does it mean?” he asked.Avery’s mouth tightened. “Found.”The word slid coldly beneath my ribs. Avery looked toward the dark window. “Found. Wounded. Blood returned. Protected.” Her expression twisted. “Mine.”Gideon, still near the doorway, closed his eyes. Colton’s face changed. Something more painful.“The pack isn’t calling you Wren,” he said quietly. “They don’t know enough to call you that. Not most of them.”Avery laughed once, br
“The wolf would wake.” Avery said it like a curse. With such raw, disbelieving terror that the whole infirmary seemed to pull inward around her. Colton had gone utterly still beside the exam bed, silver blood seeping through his bandage again, because apparently his body had chosen the worst possible moment to remind everyone it existed.Avery stared down at her hands. Her fingers were changing. Slowly and wrongly. Not in the clean, impossible way Colton had shifted in my memory from man to wolf, not even like Evan’s fevered claws under silver pain. This looked like her body did not know the path and was trying to carve one through itself.Her nails darkened at the roots. The bones under her skin shifted once, a subtle, sickening movement that made her gasp and stagger backward into the cabinet. Bottles rattled behind her.Moss barked, frantic. Mara moved. Avery’s head snapped up. Her eyes were not blue anymore. Amber burned through them, wi
Avery had crossed. Moss pressed against her leg, hackles still raised, blood darkening the fur around one paw. Avery’s hand rested on his head, the syringe still trapped between two fingers. She looked back only once, toward the road behind us, toward the mud, the broken truck, the bound hunter groaning under Mara’s boot and Bailey’s horrified stare. Then she looked at Colton. “If this is a mistake,” she said, “I will make it everyone’s problem.” Colton’s mouth twitched. It was gone almost immediately, swallowed by fever and grief and the strain of standing upright while silver still burned through him, but I saw it. “I believe you,” he said. Avery stared at him for a second, as if she had expected an argument. Her gaze narrowed. “Good.” Behind us, the hunter spat mud and blood. “Doesn’t matter where you run, little thief.” Moss lunged. Avery caught his collar with
“She’s coming home,” Colton said. Avery Hart had spent thirty one years being warned away from Moonbrook, away from the woods, away from names like Holloway and Blake. She was driving west with a dog in her passenger seat and a wounded hunter in the back of her clinic truck. That was not a woman coming home. That was a woman running toward the thing she had been taught to fear because every other road had become worse. Colton stood over the map, fever pale and still bleeding beneath his bandage. Gideon remained across from him, rigid with a grief so old it looked like anger because maybe that was the only shape it remembered how to hold. Mara broke the silence first. “If either of you starts behaving like a dramatic wolf monument, I will sedate you both.” Gideon’s eyes cut to her. She lifted one syringe from the tray without blinking. He looked away first. Bailey whispered, “I have never loved
The wolf sat on my porch steps with an unnatural patience. I stood on the other side of the door with my forehead resting against the wood, one hand still wrapped around the knob, and tried to make my breathing sound less like fear.Outside, the porch light cast him in soft gold and shad
Colton held the second snare up in the porch light to show proof.The wire glinted pale, moonlight’s cruel twin, looped and ready to cinch around anything warm blooded and unlucky. My stomach rolled as if I could already feel it tightening.I opened the door only after I’d checked the lock twice, b
He was gone by morning. Of course he was. I woke sprawled awkwardly on the garage floor, my cheek pressed to my own folded arms, the concrete cold enough to make my bones complain. The lamp still glowed on the workbench. The thrush rustled once in her dim corner, alive and offended at the world.
Moonbrook looked like a postcard someone had held too close to a flame. Not burned. Warmed, softened at the edges. The late afternoon sun poured honey over the roofs and the quiet main street, gilding shop windows and turning passing dust into something almost holy. Even the people moved like they
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