The mud on the path up to Pinegrove's outer gate has turned to slurry, and Clara has her brother on her hip, his thin limbs dangling, his breath a shallow rattle against her neck. The guards tell her no outsiders past sunset. Pack law.
*"Please. I walked six miles carrying him. He won't last the night if I have to turn back."*
The man who comes up the path behind her wears no coat, only a wet linen shirt, and his knuckles are a grid of pale burn scars too regular to have come from a fight. James Blackthorn tells her what trespassing costs on his land: fifty silver or a week of labor in the ironwood groves. He does not look at the boy. Then he sees the tarnished silver locket at her throat, etched with an oak tree whose branches curl into a wolf's profile, and asks for her mother's name.
*"Rose Morningside."*
He lets her through the gate. He does not tell her that he has been looking for that locket since he was twelve, that his mother described it to him in bedtime stories, or that the crest inside it belongs to the Whitefang pack, the oldest in the Cascades, healers who could close wounds that would kill other shifters and sense sickness before it took root. Clara has spent her life not knowing what runs in her blood. Martha Whitethorn, the healer she has come six miles to beg, trained under her mother.
Her timing is the problem. She arrives at the gate the same day Eleanor Cross's scouts are seen on the eastern ridge, and James decides he is not sheltering her, he is containing her. His own people argue about which kind of threat she is, and one of them already knew the scouts were coming three days before anyone else in the settlement did.
What Eleanor Cross wants is an object James's father made. Aldric Blackthorn forged a collar in the year before he died, its face stamped with an inverted Whitefang crest, built to drain an alpha's power and funnel it into whoever wears the matching bracelet. It has one limitation, and it is the reason a Whitefang healer's daughter walking out of the rain is worth more than she can imagine: the collar only works on a wearer of that bloodline.
This is the opening book of a shifter romance trilogy about a pack of twelve huts and three goats that is barely holding on, an alpha who burned his own hands on purpose, and a woman who came for one night of a healer's time and found out what she is. It ends with the door beneath the old territory still shut. The heat is closed-door.
