A Tether of Ash

Fate chose them. He unchose her. Now the frozen North will burn for what comes next.

Eira has spent twenty-three years learning to want nothing. A foundling healer in a starving wolf pack, she knows exactly what she is worth: a useful pair of hands, and nothing a soul would fight to keep.

Then the fated bond her people outlawed generations ago wakes between her and Torsten, Greywater's heir. The one wolf she can never have. He is promised to a bride whose grain will keep the pack alive through the winter, so he does the unforgivable. In front of everyone, he Rejects her. And the bond does not sever. It goes dark, a fire put out in a room she still has to live in.

But a dead bond is not a gone one. Hunted by the Wardens who put bonded wolves in the ground, thrown back together by the cold and the killing on the mountain, Eira stops waiting to be chosen and walks into the snow to find out what she truly is.

He will have to kneel and hand her back her own name. The only question left is whether she still wants it.

Some wounds do not unsay themselves. Some bonds you take back only from strength.

Tropes: rejected mate to second chance • fated mates • forbidden bond • grovel • slow burn • wolf shifter • hidden bloodline • standalone happily ever after in a connected series.

Content note: Fantasy romance for adults. Open-door, medium-high heat, with foregrounded consent. Contains a deliberate, later-reckoned-with betrayal by the love interest, grief and loss, and graphic creature violence. A full content-warning list appears in the front matter. HEA guaranteed; series threats carry into Book 2.