Vera has spent her entire life being told she is too much and never enough — too big, too soft, too hopeful. When the mate bond clicks into place on her eighteenth birthday, binding her to Daemon, the cold and powerful Alpha of the Shadowfang Pack, she believes everything is finally about to change. She starves herself, trains until she collapses, and studies Luna duties until her eyes blur — trying to become someone worthy of being loved.On the night of the Moon Ceremony, before their entire pack, Daemon destroys her. He rejects her publicly, humiliates her in ways that cannot be undone, and throws her out of the only home she has ever known.Alone in the dark forest, packless and broken, Vera runs — straight into the territory of Dante Russo. Lycan. Crime lord. King of the eastern underworld. A man who kills eight rogues in under a minute and then asks if she's hungry.Dante is everything dangerous. He runs a criminal empire from a fortified compound, conducts interrogations in concrete rooms with drains in the floor, and has spent eight years alone waiting for a mate the Moon Goddess never seemed to send. When the bond ignites between them, Vera's first instinct is to reject it — she cannot survive being destroyed again.But Dante does not accept rejection.What follows is not a simple love story. It is the story of a woman learning, slowly and painfully, that her body is not an apology. That hunger is not weakness. That the man who buys her clothes in her actual size, who forces her to eat, who goes red-eyed at the sound of someone calling her worthless — may be a monster, but he is a monster who sees her clearly and likes exactly what he sees.When Daemon reappears and attempts to humiliate Vera in front of Dante's entire world, it is Vera who saves his life — walking into the arms of a beast mid-rampage, and bringing him back with nothing but her presence and her voice.She hasn't claimed the bond yet. She's still too scared. But everyone in that room now knows the truth:Vera may not be his mate yet. But she is the only one who can tame the monster.And the monster? He's already decided she's worth burning the world down for.