STORY BLURB
Every wolf in Cindermark is born with a living shadow tied to their soul.
Rhea Vale was born without one.
For twenty-two years she has been called cursed, kept at the edges of pack life, endured in silence the way people endure things they cannot explain and do not want to understand. She has learned to need nothing and expect less. She has learned that belonging is not something the world gives freely to girls like her.
Then, on the night of the Moonbond Ceremony, everything she has accepted about her life stops being true.
The most feared Alpha in four territories walks out of the dark and kneels at her feet.
Not to claim her.
Not because fate told him to.
His first words are not a greeting.
They are an apology.
I am seven years too late.
Before he can say anything more, a dying rogue crawls from the tree line carrying a black box sealed with bone and a warning that turns Rhea's blood cold.
The Alpha is already dead.
The box belongs to Rhea. The man who sent it has had her shadow since the night she was born. And the Alpha kneeling before her is carrying fragments of a soul that is not entirely his own, searching for memories he cannot name, certain only that every answer he has spent seven years hunting begins and ends with her.
Rhea Vale has survived twenty-two years of being told she is broken.
She is about to discover she was never broken.
She was hidden.
And the man who hid her is five hundred years old, patient as stone, and already watching.
