The Rejected Wolf

Briony Marsh has spent nineteen years being invisible—an omega at the bottom of the pack, scrubbing floors and surviving on stale bread while her beautiful sister Celeste basks in admiration. When the Moon Goddess unexpectedly binds her to Prince Dorian, she dares to hope her misery might finally end. She's wrong. Prince Dorian is already in love with Celeste, and he sees Briony's divine selection as a cosmic joke to be corrected. Forced to publicly surrender her bond or watch her sister exiled, Briony makes her first real choice in a lifetime of none: she agrees—but only on her own terms. The bond is severed, yet something lingers. A phantom thread. A wound that lets her feel Dorian's emotions—his triumph, his cruelty, and beneath it all, a cold, constant fear of the one man he can't control. Alpha Ronan. The scarred monster of the northern mountains. A brute rumored to have killed his mates. A man even the Prince is afraid of. Traded to Ronan as a disposable bride, Briony arrives at his frozen fortress expecting pain and a slow death. Instead, she finds silence. Space. A man who doesn't touch her, doesn't speak to her, and watches her with storm-cloud eyes that miss nothing. He's cold. Distant. Impossible to read. But when she dares to make him good coffee and bring a dead garden back to life, small cracks appear in his stone facade—cracks he fights to keep hidden. As the phantom bond feeds her Dorian's growing desperation, Briony discovers the truth: she carries the blood of the first Keepers, an ancient lineage tied to the mountain itself. The Goddess didn't make a mistake. She chose Briony to wake a power that could heal a dying land—or let it fall. But Dorian's territory is crumbling, and he'll do anything to reclaim what he threw away. When he demands Briony's return to "restore" the bond and save his people, Ronan's response is swift and brutal: She is my soulmate. My little wolf. Touch her again, and I will bury your kingdom under the mountain. Now Briony faces an impossible choice—use her awakening power to save the pack that rejected her, or build something new in the north: a sanctuary for outcasts, misfits, and anyone who's ever been told they're nothing.

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