Luna Graced

She was rejected in front of her entire pack.

No warning. No reason. Just Ralupus Cairn's voice in a ceremony circle, cutting the bond before it could form, and a crescent scar appearing on her chest like a brand — the mark every wolf on the continent recognized as proof she was not wanted.

Amaroka Vel-Tharn had two choices. Fall apart where she stood, or walk north.

She walked north.

Vargholm is not a welcoming place. Its Alpha, Skjoldolf Dravek, built his pack from wolves that every other territory threw away, and he runs it with the particular discipline of a man who has already lost something he could not afford to lose and has no intention of repeating the mistake. He does not want a rejected Luna on his border. He does not want complications. He does not want whatever it is that moves through the air between them every time she gets too close.

What he wants and what the Moon Goddess has designed are two very different things.

Because the scar on Amaroka's chest is not a rejection mark. It is a seal. And inside that seal, locked in her bloodline since the murder of her grandfather two generations ago, is an authority so old and so immense that half the continent has spent fifty years making sure it never woke up.

It is waking up.

Radulf Stenvarg has been tracking the Vel-Tharn bloodline for years. The old-blood council has been managing the threat of it for longer. And now that Amaroka has found the one Alpha whose pack legitimacy is the exact counterweight the mandate needs to fully express, everyone who built their power on the assumption that the old authority was dead is converging on a single northern territory with a single objective.

End the bloodline. Before it ends their order.