"I, Alpha Cassian of the Blood-Moon Pack, reject you, Elara Vance, as my mate and my Luna. You are a weak, useless Omega, and I will not have my lineage tainted by your pathetic blood." He said it in front of everyone. Didn't waver. Didn't hesitate. Like she was nothing — because to him, she was. And then he sold her. To settle a debt he owed to the most feared man on the continent, Cassian handed her over like livestock. No ceremony. No apology. Just chains and a covered cart heading north, toward a fortress in the mountains and a king whose name people said like a warning. King Valerius. The Monster of the North. The scarred Lycan God who had never lost a war and never, as far as anyone knew, kept a prisoner for reasons other than leverage or example. Elara arrived expecting a dungeon. He broke her chains instead. "In this castle, you are not a prisoner. You are a guest. Until you choose otherwise." She waited for the lie inside it. For the cruelty dressed as kindness. For the catch that had to be coming. It didn't come. What came instead was the truth — about her mother, about the bloodline she was never told she carried, about the power sleeping inside her that twenty-two years of the wrong life had never managed to kill. Elara isn't the weak, scentless Omega they told her she was. She never was. And the king who took her as payment has been searching for her for thirty years. The bond that ignites between them isn't the one she spent six years waiting for. It's older than that. Bigger. The kind written into the bones of the world before either of them existed. Now Cassian's pack is rotting. His allies have abandoned him. The woman he chose over his fated mate was never on his side to begin with. And somewhere in the dark, something ancient is hunting the last Sun-Wolf — the woman he sold, the woman he lost, the woman he will never get back. He's coming north to beg. But he won't find the broken girl he put in chains. He'll find a Queen on a throne of ice, with a King at her side who would tear the world apart before he let anyone touch her. Cassian sold a star for a piece of coal. Now he gets to watch her burn.