She was taken to settle a debt. She never expected to become the answer to one far older.
When Saoirse's clan chieftain breaks a three-hundred-year-old supernatural accord, she pays the price. Seized from her ancestral home in the dead of night by the fearsome Alpha of the Ashveil Pack — the warlord the highland clans call the Alpha Beast — she expects brutality, cold stone walls, and nothing more.
What she does not expect is the devastating pull of a fated mate bond that ignites the moment his hands close around her wrist.
Aldric has built his entire existence on iron control. As a descendant of the First Wolves — an ancient bloodline that predates the Moon Goddess's covenant — his wolf is larger, darker, and more dangerous than any shifter alive. He took the clan woman as legal collateral, not as a mate. But the bond does not ask permission. And the ancient curse slowly consuming his bloodline will not wait.
She is his captive. She may be his only salvation. And she is beginning to wonder if the chain between them runs both ways.
With a clan war smoldering at Gravenhold's gates, a blood moon approaching on a deadline neither of them can stop, and a two-hundred-year-old curse threatening to devour the man beneath the beast, Saoirse must choose between the clan that raised her and the Alpha who refused to break her — even when he had every reason to.
He never asked for her heart. She never planned to give it. The bond had other ideas.
