THEIR FAMILIES BUILT A WAR. THEY WERE SENT TO MANAGE IT. NOBODY PLANNED FOR THIS.
The feud between the Voss and Aldric packs is two hundred years old. It was born from a boundary dispute that was resolved in 1854 — a fact both packs buried so deep that even the people paying its price stopped asking questions.
Ren Voss is the secondborn who handles things. He's spent eight years being useful, competent, and quietly furious about everything he's been asked to look past. When his alpha brother ships him off to the Thornfield joint maintenance project — their packs' shared territory, a cold stretch of forest and river where secondborns have been doing the grunt work of peaceful coexistence since 1853 — Ren knows exactly what's happening. He's being managed out of the room.
Zara Aldric is the secondborn who carries things. She's known for three years that the feud her pack maintains is built on a lie. She knows because she found the documents. She knows because the lie cost her something she can never get back. When her alpha ships her off to the same project, for the same reason, Zara arrives first, reorganizes the equipment, and decides she doesn't like the Voss representative before he even opens his mouth.
Their dislike is immediate, specific, and has nothing to do with the official feud. It's the particular friction of two people with completely different working styles forced into close quarters for a month — and the worse problem that those styles turn out to be dangerously complementary.
Over twenty-five days in shared territory, the hostility between them evolves into something neither of them planned and both of them resist. Not because of their packs. Not because of the two-century war they were born into. But because proximity — and honesty — and the specific intimacy of actually working alongside someone rather than performing around them — does what it does.
The feud will still be there when the project ends. So will every political complication, every alpha looking for leverage, every institutional structure designed to keep them on opposite sides.
Neither of them is going to perform something they no longer believe in.
Grab your copy today — because the feud was never the problem.
