She was supposed to be a quiet, obedient outcast.For fifteen agonizing years, twenty-one-year-old Aurora was systematically poisoned with wolfsbane by her foster family—keeping her wolf dead silent, her body soft and plus-sized, and her spirit docile. To her abusive foster father, Beta Victor—the tyrant who seized power twenty years ago when Emperor Alaric was murdered and Empress Aurelia vanished—Aurora was just a useless pawn to be body-shamed and pushed aside.Then came the ultimate betrayal. Her fiancé, Tristan, and her cruel stepsister, Victoria, set a sick, humiliating trap to frame Aurora with a filthy rogue—planning to ruin her honor and toss her out like trash.Instead of breaking, Aurora snaps. Driven by pure survival, she escapes the trap and makes a reckless, dangerous choice to reclaim control over her own life—fleeing straight into a luxury hotel room and offering herself to a pitch-black, lethal stranger.She had no idea the man in the dark was Valen Cross, the feared, ice-cold Alpha King.Valen is in town secretly hunting Beta Victor to avenge his fallen king. But he’s also haunted by a ragged slip of paper in his pocket—a few cryptic lines he personally copied from a faded, ancient stone sitting untouched in the imperial ruins: “Look not to the swift, nor to the powerful, but to the place where all refuse to look—nested in heavy, unyielding clay, upon her chest, the royal crest.”Captivated by her raw defiance and lush curves, Valen crashes her public mating ceremony, tearing Aurora out of Victor’s claws and dragging her into his world of blood and shadow. But when a jealous rival’s deadly scheme shatters Aurora’s poisoned system, her dormant wolf violently erupts with royal purple eyes—a divine mark unseen for three hundred years.With a sixty-day death sentence ticking down, a twenty-year web of imperial lies unraveling, and a fierce, forbidden pull drawing them together, a ruthless Alpha living for revenge and an outcast fighting for her worth must stand as one.Can Aurora uncover the truth of her stolen past and step into her terrifying power, or will the secrets of the Masked Dawn destroy them both before the empire can rise?