The Old Moon does not ask permission. Neither does the mark it leaves.
Anca Aldane has spent twenty-eight years being everyone’s neutral ground. As the last Truthspeaker of an ancient Carpathian bloodline, she belongs to all packs and none — bound by a three-hundred-year covenant that forbids her from forming any bond with a ranked wolf. She has built her entire identity on that law. She has never questioned what it cost her.
Then the Old Moon marks her in the middle of an arbitration session, and everything she has ever been sure of starts to burn.
The mark names her as the fated mate of Lucian Sarmis — the scarred, iron-willed Alpha of the most powerful wolf pack in the Carpathian highlands, a man who calls storms from mountain peaks and commands the ancient forest with nothing more than his presence and the weight of eight hundred years of bloodline behind him. The bond between them is legally impossible. The Covenant has forbidden it for three centuries.
But a brutal rogue brotherhood called the Ashveil has been waiting thirty years for exactly this moment. Because a Truthspeaker’s rejected bond doesn’t simply grieve and fade. It fractures open the dormant wolf power sleeping in her blood and generates a surge capable of dissolving every pack covenant in the Carpathians at once. Their leader, Goran, doesn’t need the bond completed. He needs Anca to run.
Every instinct she has trained herself to follow is his weapon.
Forced into sanctuary at Lucian’s ancient mountain stronghold, Anca fights the pull of a bond she cannot legally accept and cannot safely reject — while the man who refuses to pressure her slowly dismantles every wall she has spent her life constructing. He doesn’t want her gratitude. He doesn’t want her compliance. He simply keeps showing up, steady and present and honest, until she realizes that the most dangerous thing about Lucian Sarmis is not his power.
It is that he sees her. Specifically. Completely. In a way she has never once been seen before.
As the full moon approaches and Goran’s Brotherhood closes in, Anca must choose between the ancient duty that built her and the fated pull toward the one man who has ever looked past the role to find the woman underneath. The wrong choice hands Goran everything. The right one requires her to stop running from the one thing she has spent her whole life pretending she didn’t want.
A home.
Marked by the Wild Alpha is a slow burn paranormal romance featuring forbidden mates, forced proximity, an ancient Carpathian world steeped in dark mythology, and a heroine who has been everyone’s steady ground until the Old Moon decides it is finally her turn. Dual POV. Steamy. Complete standalone with HEA.
Readers of Nalini Singh and Ilona Andrews will feel at home in the Sarmis Reach.
→ Scroll up and one-click to begin. The Carpathian highlands are waiting.
