Black Moon Rising

Layla has never belonged in the Shaldon pack. While her brother Hank trains to become a warrior, she hides in color, because a brush in her hand is the only place her broken pieces hold still. The females of the pack call her cute. Her father calls her a waste. And beneath the paint that never leaves her hands, she hides scars she cannot name, and the memory of the woods, of the night her wolf crept into the darkness of her mind and never came back out. All Layla wants is to stay small, stay invisible, and stay safe.

Then a trip to the training grounds changes everything. A dark stranger with winter-blue eyes looks down at her and calls her his mate. Francis is the Alpha of the Alba Rosa pack, the most feared young Alpha of his generation, the same wolf who has made her brother's life miserable at the training camp, and, impossibly, the face Layla has been painting for months. She named him the Black Moon long before she ever knew he was real.

He is nothing like she painted. In public he is ice: cold commands, hard expectations, a rule that every wolf must train or break. In private he is something far more dangerous to her heart: a poet who is ashamed of his own words, a son still bleeding from the mother who abandoned him, an Alpha who gently washes the touch of strangers from his mate's trembling hands because contact itself terrifies her, and who never once laughs at her for it.

Slowly, he teaches her that being wanted does not mean being used. Slowly, she teaches him that a pack can be led by something gentler than fear, that a Luna with paint-stained hands can win over a hundred warriors without ever baring a claw. For the first time since the woods, Layla's buried wolf begins to stir. For the first time in his life, Francis wants to keep something instead of crushing it, and everything he cannot say aloud he pours into a worn leather journal he would rather burn than let anyone read. Piece by piece, against every rule of his brutal world, the cold Alpha and the broken painter build something that looks, against all odds, like a home.

But stolen kisses in sunrise clearings cannot mend what was broken years ago. The nightmare Layla buried is still waiting out there in the dark: a monster who calls her by another woman's name, and who considers her a thing that was stolen from him. And the longer she hides the truth from her mate, the closer she drifts to losing him, and to losing herself. Silence kept her alive once. Now it is the one thing that could destroy her.

Hunted by memory and sheltered by her mate, Layla must finally choose who she is: the girl who froze in the woods, or a survivor who will fight. Francis swore no one would ever touch her again. To keep that oath, both of them will have to stop running, and learn that endings, like sunsets, can be beautiful too.