He told the whole pack I was wolfless. Broken. Unworthy of standing beside an Alpha. Then he rejected our mate bond in front of everyone I had ever known, and chose my own cousin instead. A rejection isn’t just heartbreak for wolves like us. It’s agony built to kill what’s left of you. I almost let it. But the wolves who found me dying at the border weren’t pack. They were outcasts. Rogues. The kind of wolves Frost Hollow taught me to fear. And when the binding my own father paid for finally broke inside me, I understood why he had been so desperate to keep me small. I was never wolfless. I was never even ordinary. I was something Frost Hollow should have been terrified of. Three years later, I don’t beg anyone for a place at their fire. I command wolves who would burn Frost Hollow to the ground if I gave the word. And when Kade Thorne’s precious alliance crumbles and his enemies finally come for everything he built without me, his council sends an envoy to my territory to beg the new Alpha of the Ashwood Remnants for mercy. They don’t know it’s me. Not until I walk through his gates. Now he’s on his knees in front of the same pack that watched him throw me away, begging for a second chance he has no right to ask for. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to save his pack. I definitely haven’t decided if I’m going to save him.

Ivy Castellan was raised for one purpose: to become the weapon that ends a war. She was seven years old when the Marchetti family murdered her parents. At least, that is the only story she has ever been told. Now, twenty years later, the Castellan family has found their opening. A peace treaty. A wedding. A bride sent into the enemy's house with a blade hidden under her wedding gown and a single order burned into her from childhood: when the moment comes, kill Damian Marchetti. Damian does not want a wife. He wants the war to end so he can finally breathe, so his sister can walk the streets without a bodyguard, so the empire his father died defending does not bury him too. He agrees to the marriage because peace is worth more than pride. He does not expect his new bride to look at him like she is measuring the distance to his heart, or for that same look to undo something in him he thought had died with his father. Ivy has one job. Survive the wedding night. Wait for her moment. Do not feel anything for the man she is going to kill. But every day inside the Marchetti house cracks something open. The husband who was supposed to be a monster keeps showing her mercy she was never taught to expect. The family she was raised to destroy keeps looking more like the family she never had. And the deeper she digs into the war that stole her childhood, the more the story she was raised on starts to rot at the edges. Someone lied to her. Someone she trusted with her whole broken life. Now Ivy has to decide, with a deadline closing in and a blade she may not be able to put down, whether loyalty is something you are born into, or something you choose. And whether the man she married is really her enemy, or the first person who ever saw her and did not flinch.