His Rogue Luna

The midnight wind howling down the jagged granite gorge of the Bitterroot Range carried the sharp, freezing scent of dry pine needles, crushed granite, and falling snow.

Nadia Thorne crouched motionless in the deep blue shadows cast by a fallen spruce on the northern perimeter of Silvercreek territory. Her breath rose into the frozen air in fragile, rhythmic plumes of white mist, vanishing before it could catch the attention of the armed sentries below. Beneath a battered coyote-fur hood, her dark russet curls were tightly woven into a practical combat braid, tucked securely behind the collar of her hardened leather vest. Her honey-tanned skin was smudged with damp chimney soot to dull the gleam of the full moon, but nothing could diminish the predatory glow of her wide, golden-amber eyes.

She was twenty-three years old, and for five merciless winters, she had lived as a phantom. In the superstitious whispered tales exchanged around valley bonfires, she was known simply as the Ghost of the Ridge—the most elusive rogue she-wolf in the Northern Wilds. Mountain folklore painted rogues as mindless, bloodthirsty beasts who had abandoned civilization out of feral madness. But Nadia had not chosen the harsh solitude of the high timber out of savagery. She was an exile by survival, driven by a sacred duty that kept her heart beating through sub-zero blizzards and starvation.

Hidden four miles north in the labyrinthine caverns of Black Pine was her sanctuary: twelve orphaned wolf pups and three crippled elders, the forgotten wreckage of smaller packs crushed and slaughtered by regional tyrants. Without Nadia, they had no one. She hunted deer for their meat, scavenged spruce roots for their tea, and mended their frayed blankets with sinew. But this winter had brought the rot—a vicious, wet bacterial infection of the chest that had turned the breathing of the youngest pups into agonized rattles. Three of the smallest children were burning with fever, their skin paper-thin and clammy.

Spruce bark and elderberry would not save them. They needed veterinary penicillin, distilled sulfur antibiotics, and compressed nutrient oats. And the only place within a three-day trek that hoarded those precious supplies was the heavily fortified southern supply depot of the Silvercreek Pack.

Crouched thirty feet above the depot on an icy rocky promontory, Nadia tracked the two perimeter guards. They were massive, broad-shouldered wolves clad in black boiled-leather tunics bearing the silver wolf-head crest of Silvercreek. They carried heavy steel-tipped crossbows and broadswords, their heavy boots crunching rhythmically in the hard-packed crust of snow as they circled the perimeter of the log storehouse every twelve minutes.