Liora Vale has spent her entire life keeping her head down in the quiet mountain town of Blackpine Ridge. She works double shifts at the diner, lives alone in her mother’s old house, and avoids the deep woods after dark. She has never believed in fate, destiny, or the strange silver pendant her mother left behind. Until the night the howls begin.On the night of the full moon, something follows her through the trees. Something that moves too fast and howls too deep to be any ordinary animal. When a stranger with silver eyes pulls her from the path and orders her to lock her doors until sunrise, Liora thinks the danger has passed. She is wrong. The messages start arriving before dawn. The moon is watching her. So is he. And tomorrow night will be worse.Kael is not human. He is a wolf who has spent years hunting the same secret Liora’s mother died protecting. He tells her the truth she was never meant to hear: her mother was not simply taken by illness sixteen years ago. She was claimed by a powerful pack that has been searching for her daughter ever since. Liora carries the same rare moon-mark in her blood. The same pull. The same danger. And tonight, every unmated wolf of age will run the claiming rites through the Blackpine forests. The scout has already caught her scent. By midnight the entire pack will know she is here.Liora must choose. Run with Kael and risk trusting a man whose loyalty she cannot yet measure, or stay and become the prize the pack has waited years to claim. The woods are already filling with eyes. The howls are growing closer. And the moon that once protected her mother’s secret now hangs over Liora like a spotlight she can no longer escape.As the claiming run begins, Liora discovers that the bond forming between her and Kael is stronger and more dangerous than either of them expected. He was sent to find her. He was never meant to want her. Yet every time the pack closes in, he places his body between her and the teeth that would take her. Every time she tries to deny the pull in her blood, the moon answers with a force that leaves her breathless and changed.In a world where mates are claimed by strength and blood, Liora refuses to be anyone’s prize. She will not be dragged into a life of chains and hierarchy. But the more she fights the truth, the more the truth fights back. Old pack laws demand she be taken. Ancient moon-magic demands she be free. And somewhere in the space between those two forces, a new kind of bond is forming—one that could either save her or destroy everything Kael has sworn to protect.The first howl was only a warning. The second was a promise. By the third, the hunt has already begun.Liora Vale is no longer the quiet girl who served coffee and kept to herself. She is the last moon-marked daughter of a bloodline the packs thought they had erased. And the silver-eyed wolf who found her first may be the only one willing to break every law of his kind to keep her free.In the forests of Blackpine Ridge, under a moon that seems to shine for her alone, one woman will discover what it means to be hunted, claimed, and ultimately chosen—not by the pack that wants her, but by the wolf who refuses to let her go.The night is no longer safe.The moon is no longer silent.And Liora is no longer alone.