The Werewolf, the Mage, & the Cursed Town

Anna is the most powerful mage to have ever existed… until she's not.

When her guardian calls her for a favor, she drops everything to comply. Determined and focused on proving herself useful, she heads off on a journey that she is completely unprepared for. She is powerful, but inexperienced, stuck in an unfamiliar land where people are attacking each other for a reason that she doesn't understand, and her presence only seems to exacerbate matters. Then again, finding out the reason for the odd behavior of the people in town is exactly why she's here. There's a curse on the land that she's supposed to break, but she can neither identify nor locate the spell and castor, leaving her with nothing but questions and an uneasy feeling that gnaws at her throat.

Alpha Thorne is supposed to guide her, but the charming Alpha wolf is a distraction to her. She finds herself fighting an attraction to the man whose softer side seems to only appear when he’s looking at her, an anomaly because people has only ever looked at her in disgust.

Anna isn't used to the attention from the werewolf and she doesn't know what to do with the man who promises her his heart the first time they meet.

~~~~~ Excerpt ~~~~~

“Is there a reason you've brought me in here?” she asks, feigning ignorance.

He glares at her for all of two seconds before developing the migraine headache. He looks away again swiftly. “You know why I asked you in here,” he gestures at her face. “There's something up with your face.”

She nods. “Yes, it's something that's on my personal files. If you have access to the mages directory, you will find that I am the only mage to suffer from such an ailment. It's really exceptionally rare and very hard to be mistaken for anything else.” Something that has been bothering her since he first tipped his face up to look at her continues to nag at her. Her magic is restless, swirling around inside of her and making her feel like she's in a small rowboat caught in the middle of a storm. When she opens her mouth, a voice that is not her own asks, “What do you see when you look at me?” She leans forward to have the satisfaction of having him pull away from her, doing his best to put some distance between them.

Like all the people she's asked before him, he is compelled to answer, her magic curious about what it's done.

“Faces,” he says in an oddly mechanical voice, his eyes dark and mean. “Faces of the people I've pushed around and used my power to abuse over the years of me working in this job. Women and men who have been made to humiliate themselves in front of me because of the false charges I've laid against them, drugs and counterfeit items I've planted in their bags.”

“Oh my,” she leans back, heart beating wildly because she didn't expect something quite so serious. “That's not at all what I expected,” she admits with a huff.

He comes back to himself with wide eyes and a slightly panicked look, his gaze going to the mirror straight away. “That's not true,” he says immediately. “That's a lie! I've never done— done any of that! She's— she's a witch! She made me say all that!”

“I can't make you do anything unless I have all my spells and honestly, compelling someone to lie is much, much harder than making them tell the truth,” she says. She should really stop talking while she's ahead, especially with the man panicking already because that's all it takes for him to launch himself at her, throwing himself over the table with his hands outstretched, like he means to grasp her neck with his fingers and wring her neck until she suffocates.