The Wolf You Feed

Cleo Hartley came to Coldwater Bend to count wolves, not to save a town. A great-aunt she barely knew left her a shuttered field station and forty years of notebooks, and a stretch of wilderness with something in it that is tearing hikers apart. The whole valley agrees on who to blame: Ronan Kade, the grim, shut-down alpha whose small pack lives rough on the north ridge and frightens everyone who has never once spoken to him.

The trouble is that Cleo reads tracks for a living, and nothing at the killings matches a healthy wolf. It matches something broken, something driven out of its own mind, and it does not match the man she keeps being told to fear. The more he growls at her to leave the mountain, the more certain she is that he is the only honest creature for fifty miles. Because his kind cannot claim her, or take one single thing, unless it is freely given. Fate can point him at her all it likes. It cannot make either of them say yes.

The one who can force a bond is the one who has been doing it for years. The beloved old Warden who keeps the peace, who three packs would follow anywhere, has been breaking wolves into the very monsters he hunts, and loosing them, and laying the bodies at the door of the one pack too poor to fight back. They think Cleo is only the outsider with a notebook. They have no idea she has already found the pattern in the dead, and that the one thing that can end a Warden is not a bigger wolf. It is evidence any tracker can check, laid before the packs he lied to.

The Wolf You Feed is a standalone fated-mates shifter romance with a guaranteed happily-ever-after. For adult readers.