The Luna Assassin

"I, Albert Rice, next alpha of the Moonlight Guardian pack, reject you, Taylor Sterling, as my mate."

He says it with her wrists pinned above her head, smiling the whole time. He has spent years making her life a cage of cuts, chemicals and closed doors while hiding the one truth that would have set her free: that they were fated. When he is done with the words, he and his friends carry her to a lake at the edge of no man's land, and this time they mean to finish it.

But the water knows her name.

Instead of taking her last breath, it takes her side. It cradles her, changes her, and sends her back to the shore with a strange new strength that answers to her hands and a promise burning on her tongue. Waiting in the trees is a stranger with storm-grey hair and hard hazel eyes, a man who heard her scream for revenge from miles away and liked the sound of it. He offers her a guild, a deck of assassins where only the best of the best survive, and a title to grow into. She takes all three and never looks back.

Years later, a newcomer walks through the pack doors with red-ringed eyes, a forged identity and a smile that makes alpha-blood run cold. The pack calls her Natalie Green. The assassin world calls her the Queen of Spades. The men who threw her away do not recognize the woman she became, and that is exactly how she wants it, right up until her cover mission tangles with the family she thought she had lost and every buried truth starts clawing its way back into the light.

Then there is him: a Scottish mercenary with a silver tongue who was paid to watch her and cannot stop looking at her instead. She knows what he is. He knows what she is. Neither of them will say the word that would bind them, because wanting your true mate is a dangerous business when your hands are trained to kill anything that gets close. The pull between them builds with every stolen glance, every touch that lingers a beat too long, every night spent too near a fire neither of them will feed, until the tension burns hotter than the vendetta and something has to give.

Taylor Sterling was never the girl who got saved. She is the storm the pack invited in. Her list is short, her patience is shorter, and the lake that refused to drown her is done waiting too. Every name on it has slept easy for the last time.

Dark, funny and slow-burn to the very last ember, The Luna Assassin is a werewolf romance about a rejected Luna who stopped waiting for a hero and became the weapon instead. Revenge brought her home. Love might keep her there, assuming she does not burn the whole pack down first.