M. Pike

Wren Strand has spent twenty-six years being the best rigger on any logging crew in Harker's Notch — steady hands, sharp eyes, and no patience for anyone who cuts corners on a mountain that doesn't forgive mistakes. She's never questioned why the old-growth stand at the edge of town has stood untouched for generations, or why her mother flinches whenever Wren asks about the boundary trail.

Then one tree changes everything: a scent she can't place, a stranger's eyes across the tree line, and a fever under her skin that has nothing to do with exhaustion.

She's a werewolf. She's always been one. And the man she can't stop dreaming about is the alpha of the pack on the other side of a boundary older than the town itself — a line kept by trees that remember blood, and that has stopped three packs from tearing each other apart for generations.

The bond between them is real, immediate, and impossible to unmake. Accepting it means defying a peace neither pack can afford to lose. Refusing it means a lifetime of wanting a man she can't have, thirty feet across a line she now has to help defend with her life.

Wren has never backed down from a dangerous job. She's not about to start with this one — even if the mountain, the mill, and every wolf on it are about to find out exactly how far she'll climb to keep what's hers.

Fiadhuin is a werewolf born to run the coastal fog, but she was never supposed to run alone. Stripped of her pack and publicly rejected by her fated mate, Lorcuin—heir to the ruling Tonnaragh werewolf pack—she carved out a brutal, solitary life on the night docks, tracking feral rogues for coin. But when a territorial war threatens to drown the harbor in blood, Lorcuin is forced to seek out the one wolf who knows the smuggling routes well enough to stop the slaughter. Fiadhuin demands a high price for out-hunting the rival alphas, refusing to yield to the man who broke her. Yet, as they are thrust back together in the shadows of the cannery courts, the suppressed mate bond begins to violently reawaken, proving that a rejected claim never truly dies.