Iron Vale - The Healer's Awakening
(2026)(The fifth book in the Iron Creek Bears series)
A novel by Wolf Specter
For thirty-two years, the bear inside him slept. His husband loved the man it left behind.
Elias Vane has spent his life being careful.
Corporate attorney. Devoted husband. Adoptive father. The man his clan trained, from the age of six, to suppress what he was — because his father's family did not consider that thing welcome. He buried his bear when he was a child. He built a life around its absence. The life worked.
For a while.
Now, at thirty-eight, the bear has woken up. And the marriage Elias built around its silence has to learn how to hold what is coming.
He has been granted twelve days alone at Iron Creek before his husband and son arrive. Twelve days for his bear to settle into ground. Twelve days to figure out who he is going to be when Daniel walks through the cabin door and looks at him.
Daniel did not marry a bear. He married a man who was kind and contained and certain — and he can feel, the moment he crosses the threshold, that the man he married is no longer entirely there. He does not know yet if he can love what is taking that man's place. He does not know if he wants to learn.
But other people, in the wreckage of the old Vane clan, have been waiting for someone with Elias's blood to remember what the line was supposed to be. They are not asking him to lead. They are asking him to exist as the heir, so that the question of leadership can be answered without him. One of them is not asking nicely. And the letter in Karl Reiner's pocket has been waiting thirty-six years to be delivered.
Some inheritances cannot be returned. Some marriages cannot survive untransformed. And some bears, once they wake, do not sleep again.
A mature, slow-burn MM paranormal romance about marriage, inheritance, and discovering who you are when the thing you spent your life hiding finally walks into the room.
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Elias Vane has spent his life being careful.
Corporate attorney. Devoted husband. Adoptive father. The man his clan trained, from the age of six, to suppress what he was — because his father's family did not consider that thing welcome. He buried his bear when he was a child. He built a life around its absence. The life worked.
For a while.
Now, at thirty-eight, the bear has woken up. And the marriage Elias built around its silence has to learn how to hold what is coming.
He has been granted twelve days alone at Iron Creek before his husband and son arrive. Twelve days for his bear to settle into ground. Twelve days to figure out who he is going to be when Daniel walks through the cabin door and looks at him.
Daniel did not marry a bear. He married a man who was kind and contained and certain — and he can feel, the moment he crosses the threshold, that the man he married is no longer entirely there. He does not know yet if he can love what is taking that man's place. He does not know if he wants to learn.
But other people, in the wreckage of the old Vane clan, have been waiting for someone with Elias's blood to remember what the line was supposed to be. They are not asking him to lead. They are asking him to exist as the heir, so that the question of leadership can be answered without him. One of them is not asking nicely. And the letter in Karl Reiner's pocket has been waiting thirty-six years to be delivered.
Some inheritances cannot be returned. Some marriages cannot survive untransformed. And some bears, once they wake, do not sleep again.
A mature, slow-burn MM paranormal romance about marriage, inheritance, and discovering who you are when the thing you spent your life hiding finally walks into the room.
Genre: Paranormal Romance