White Wolf Rising

The Rosewood Pack left a white cub bleeding on a hillside twelve years ago. What came back is not what they buried.

Madelyn Lowell survived that night because a vampire princess broke every law of two peoples to carry her home. Aaliyah cooks pancakes she cannot eat and works hospital shifts she will one day have to explain, and she never says the obvious out loud: her daughter is a rare white wolf with impossible orange eyes, hiding behind colored contacts in a school where the future Alpha makes her life hell. Hank and his circle already know what silver does to her skin. Nobody is coming to save an abomination. Madelyn has twelve years of evidence.

Then Caroline bowls into first period like weather — black-clad, crowned in attitude, utterly unimpressed by the pack that runs the school. When Hank shoves Madelyn into the lockers, Caroline promises to rip his throat out, and every wolf in the hallway drops, because the new girl is royalty: the princess of all wolfkind. She is also the reason a vanilla-and-lilac scent and one electric handshake set Madelyn's heart slamming. The mate bond has chosen for both of them. Caroline has known since the parking lot, and she is too much of a coward to say so.

Hank's jealousy has teeth. Stripped of his birthright and humiliated in front of his own pack, he comes back with a wolfsbane needle and a locked trunk, and he delivers Madelyn to the one place she was never meant to see again: Rosewood, the pack that left her for dead. In a pitch-dark cell she meets a runaway wolf pup who can speak to her mind to mind — impossible, until it isn't. In the same dark she kills a stranger whose eyes are orange exactly like hers. Both discoveries break her heart in different ways: the pup is the little sister she never knew, and the dead man is her father.

War follows the white wolf home. It comes through the hospital walls while Madelyn is still too weak to stand, and when Alpha Lakota falls in the battle he started, the pack bond snaps and re-forms around the last person anyone planned for, and Madelyn hears the words that end her old life: You're the Alpha now. She has no training. Her own wolf has gone silent. She has a hospital full of enemies, a pack of strangers waiting for the abomination queen to fail, and a captured princess running out of ways to stay alive. What she also has is a vampire mother who taught her to count her breaths, a best friend with a stolen jeep and no brakes, and a stubbornness the north is about to learn the hard way.

Some wolves are born to lead. Madelyn was left for dead and got back up, and every scar she carries is a lesson somebody else paid for. The Frost Festival is coming, the contacts are coming out, and the hillside that took everything from her is about to hear the whole north rise to answer her howl.