My family sold me to Damian Vale to bury a debt no one would explain. The contract had three rules. Three years. Separate lives. And never, ever open the east wing. My husband is cold in daylight and burning by midnight—cruel one hour, watching me like a starving man the next. Then I found the portrait in the east wing. A bride with my face. Painted a hundred years ago. I thought I married a monster. I married something far older—and it has loved me before.

They poured the gasoline while I was still breathing. My husband held the match. My sister held my hand — so I couldn't run. I died in that fire, listening to them laugh about the inheritance my father left me. Then I opened my eyes. Three years earlier. The morning of the engagement gala. Everyone I love and everyone who killed me — still alive, still smiling, still thinking I'm the fool who'll sign her fortune away for love. This time, I know how the story ends. This time, I'll be the one holding the match. But there's a man across the ballroom watching me like he's seen a ghost — the one man I rejected in my first life. The one man who shouldn't know I died. So why is he looking at me like he's been waiting three years for me to come back?

My husband crowned his mistress while I bled out on our packhouse floor. His last order was to bury me under the kennels. Then I woke up. Three years earlier. On our wedding morning. This time I know every betrayal before it comes. I know the mistress is a witch. I know my death was a harvest. And I know the rival Alpha they want me to fear is my true fated mate. They took my life once. This time, I take their crown.

Pregnant and mateless, I was dragged to the border and thrown into the blizzard for a crime I didn't commit. My alpha chose his new Luna. The pack watched me crawl into the snow to die. The enemy found me first. One year later I walk back through those gates in Bloodmoon black, as the Lycan King's second, with a secret in my arms and a list in my head. They threw away a weak omega. They'll kneel to the wolf she became.

Every full moon for twelve years, Luna Maeryn bled for the Hollowmere Pack. Not in battle. Not for glory. In secret, inside a shrine no one else entered, she opened her palm and fed the ancient wards that kept the Varkoth — the rogue confederation that nearly destroyed them — sealed beyond the border. Her Alpha never knew. The pack never thanked her. And when Alpha Corvan Hale scented a second mate at the ridge memorial and crowned Ilsabet Renn — the golden war hero's daughter every young wolf already worshiped — he expected Maeryn to smile, step aside, and be grateful she wasn't rejected outright. So she smiled. She stepped aside. And she stopped bleeding. Now the ward-stones are cracking. The Varkoth are stirring for the first time in twelve years. And the only woman alive who can seal the border is the one Corvan just told the pack he didn't need anymore. He'll beg before moonfall. Whether she listens is another matter entirely. "You replaced me, Alpha. Now show me what your pack is worth without my blood in its walls."