"Have you been fucked?"I choked.Not elegantly. Water went down wrong and I pressed my napkin to my mouth and spent an undignified moment trying to recover while Ares watched me without a single change in expression.I set the glass down. "I beg your pardon?""Have you had sex before." His voice was completely clinical. "Or are you a virgin."The audacity of this man to sit across a dinner table and ask me that with the same energy someone might ask about my scheduling preferences.My chin came up. "Yes."His eyes didn't move from mine. "Yes you have or yes you haven't."Heat crawled up the back of my neck and I hated it. "Yes I'm a virgin," I said flatly. "Is that going on the report too?"-----------------------------------Reign Sinclair was never meant to matter.Born a bastard to the Hybrid Monarch, she grew up invisible at best and a punching bag at worst. No wolf. No rank. No one in her corner. When the Lycan High Council demands a marriage alliance and her stepsister refuses to go, Reign is handed over like something nobody wanted — because to her family, that's exactly what she was.Prince Ares Blackwood is cold, ruthless, and consumed by one truth — hybrids destroyed his family. The last thing he needs is a hybrid bride. But the crown demands it and the clock is ticking. At twenty-four he needs a secured heir before he can claim his throne. One year. One heir. Then she's gone and he never has to look at her again.Except the moment Reign walks through his doors, something primal tears through every wall he's ever built.She's his mate.He'd rather go to war than accept it.What follows is a battle neither of them expected — desire wrapped in hatred, tenderness buried under pride, and a connection the moon goddess herself tied together. He fights it. She doesn't even know it exists. But the pull between them refuses to obey anyone's rules.Then everything burns.Ares rises to his throne. Her father falls from his — exposed, disgraced, executed for the blood on his hands. With the hybrid monarchy dissolved and whispers poisoning his court, Ares makes the one choice that destroys them both. He chooses his crown over her.Reign leaves with nothing.Except she leaves carrying everything.When she returns she is not the bruised, silent girl he discarded. She is something the moon goddess spent twenty years quietly building — powerful, awakened and done surviving. Now he's the one bleeding.He fell first. He fell harder. And by the time Ares Blackwood realizes what he threw away, Reign has already decided she will never be disposable again.He wants her back. She wants him to earn every single piece of her he destroyed.And somewhere in the dark, an enemy older than their feud is rising — one that will force them to choose between pride and survival, between a broken past and a future neither of them dared want.Some bonds can't be broken. Some wounds can't be healed. And some loves will burn the whole world down before they let go.