The Wolf Who Waited

The Carpathian Mountains do not forgive, and they certainly do not forget. Beatrice Munteanu returned to the dense, suffocating forests of Romania to study the apex predators that haunt her nightmares. As a wildlife biologist, she believes in cold, hard facts. She believes in data, in science, and in the orderly laws of nature. But the forest has its own laws—ancient, blood-soaked, and hungry. She has been marked by a trauma she buried twenty years ago, a jagged scar on her shoulder that throbs in time with the moon. She doesn't know that the scar is a claim. And she doesn't know that the wolves she tracks are not merely beasts; they are the iron-fisted soldiers of Luca Petran. Luca has been waiting. For two decades, he has watched from the shadows, his patience as lethal as his bite. He is a man carved from mountain stone and violence, possessive to a fault and bound by a destiny that demands Beatrice be his, body and soul. Now, the dormant hunger in her blood is waking, and the