The Alpha's Rejected Hybrid

Mira Thorne has spent six years being nobody. A scentless omega servant in the kitchens of Silvermoon, she chews her ration of silverweed, keeps her eyes down, and prays no sniffer hound ever catches the truth written in her blood: that she is the last of the Veilmark, a werewolf hybrid the treaty of the Sundering swore out of existence. At the Alpha heir's betrothal banquet, a hound screams her name anyway.

Kade Silvermoon saves her from the blades, then makes her his prisoner, his student in pretense, and his claimed mate before two hundred witnesses. The old law is cruel and specific: a hybrid is a curse to be burned, a claimed mate cannot be taken without challenge, and a false claim sends both liars to the pyre. One moon. That is all the time Mira has to become a believable Luna, or die.

But the lie is the least of her problems. An envoy from the North demands her blood. The rogues across the river are chanting her mother's name. A hidden prophecy says the last of the Veil will end the twenty-year war, or set the world on fire trying. And every answer Mira digs up uncovers a worse question: why her mother really died, which Alpha of Silvermoon ordered a house of healers burned to ash, and why the man keeping her secrets has been paying for them since he was seven years old.

Kade is cold, controlled, and far more dangerous than the court believes, and the boy underneath the armor once hid her in a laundry basket when she was too small to remember. Selene Voss, the heir's jilted betrothed, knows where every skeleton in Silvermoon is filed and will sell one to Mira for the price of a shared enemy. Sorrel, her mother's sword-sister, has spent twenty years sharpening grief into a blade. And Fenrir Ashfang, the Alpha of the North, claims that Mira's blood was promised to him a thousand years before she was born.

Hunted by treaty law, court intrigue, and her own rising fire, Mira does the one thing no servant, prize, or weapon is ever allowed to do: she chooses. She claims her bloodline out loud, takes the empty seat of the Veil, and rides north to a ruin that is not a ruin, where a door older than the packs stands free in a courtyard, held shut by chains of light, by a false death, and by a mother who let the whole world bury her.

The door is thinning. Something on the far side puts its mouth to the gap and blows. And the song that holds it shut needs more voices than one.

To save the north, Mira will have to finish a mating rite begun on a lie, unmake a false grave, and teach nine quarreling packs the oldest covenant they ever forgot: no one holds the door alone.