Tamsin Vale has run Stonepeak’s outer settlement clinic long enough to know an ordinary morning from an extraordinary one. The wolf who stumbles through her door at dawn, injured and refusing to give his name, makes this one extraordinary before she’s even finished stitching his wound. Rowan has until sundown. His former pack’s harsh law punishes injury as weakness, and he fled rather than wait to learn exactly what that punishment would cost him. He’s come to petition for sanctuary under Stonepeak’s own framework, the very one this world’s founders once built to answer exactly this kind of cruelty. But sanctuary requires a sponsor with real standing in the pack, and Tamsin has neither the time nor, technically, the authority to offer it, not until the fated bond announces itself in the middle of an emergency neither of them has time to properly process. What follows is a single, impossibly full day: a healer with no formal standing suddenly sponsoring the most urgent petition this council has heard in years, a search party closing in before sundown, and two people forced to prove that an inconvenient, unchosen bond doesn’t undermine the truth of what’s actually at stake. Claimed Before Sundown is a clean, closed-door fated mates novella set within the same connected world as this author’s full-length Stonepeak Pack series, but it requires no prior reading and delivers a complete, satisfying story in a fraction of the time. No explicit content, no cliffhanger, no loose threads left dangling by the time the sun finally sets. What readers can expect: A complete, satisfying bond story compressed into a single urgent day A heroine who steps into a role she never expected and doesn’t regret Genuine institutional stakes even at novella length, resolved fairly and completely Clean, closed-door romance with zero explicit content A quick, standalone read requiring no prior series knowledge The same connected world as this author’s full-length titles, in a fraction of the time Grab your copy today and see how much can change between one dawn and the sundown that follows it.