The Cursed Alpha's Secret, livre ebook

Gideon Croft's boot meets the bottom step and the pain in his right hip sings up through his ribs. The pack house door groans on its iron hinges and twenty-three faces turn toward him, elders in mismatched chairs around the hearth, and Rowan leaning on the mantel with a grin that never reaches his eyes. *With an alpha who can't run a full patrol without limping back like a dog with a stone in its paw?*
Gideon puts him back in his place with the alpha voice. It costs him. The scar that runs from his ear to his chin twitches, something hot and metallic floods his mouth, and only Lydia Croft, the pack healer, knows why. A rogue hit him with dark magic three years ago. It is not a wound. It is a poison, it is in his blood and in his wolf, and it is winning.
That same night, a wolf crosses the southern border alone. No pack scent on her. She is asking for sanctuary.
She gives the name Maggie, says Silver Creek up in the Virginias, exiled for insubordination, three weeks on the road. Each detail is fitted to the last. Lydia takes one breath of her and her eyes go wide before she can stop them.
Her real name is Calla Vance, and she is the last of a pack that burned three years ago. She has the scar from collarbone to elbow to show for the night she got out. She did not come to Croft Hollow for shelter. She came for whoever destroyed her family, and the dates keep pointing back at this pack's own patrols.
Neither of them planned on the bond: a thin green line on her wrist, a second heartbeat under his ribs, and the one thing the curse goes quiet around. It is also the thing that makes them both worth taking.
Tad Boone's enforcers camp two miles inside the border. A pack ledger puts Rowan Croft on the Vance border three days before the massacre. And when Boone finally says it out loud, it is worse than a raid. *I hired the rogue. There's a difference.*
There is a witch in a swamp shack, a bond cut clean through, and a hand opened over a blade to put it back.
Croft Hollow comes out the other side of a curse, a betrayal and a war - and then a leaf still wet with swamp water arrives at the south gate, written on in green ink. *Your bond with the Vance wolf is a powerful artifact.* Three weeks to the Blood Moon Gala.
A shifter romance of pack politics, an old massacre and a borrowed name - closed-door, with a hidden curse, an identity that cracks a piece at a time, and a close that sets the board for what comes next rather than tying it off.