# The Villain Wore My Wedding Ring**She saved his life. He's been planning hers.**Seraphina Hale spent six years at the bedsides of the dying, and Adrian Cole was the one patient who lived. Gentle, widowed, and impossibly rich, he rose from his "final illness" and swore he owed her everything. They married. For eight months, she believed she had saved a good man.Then she goes looking for a pen and finds a second wedding ring in his study.It's identical to hers: same platinum band, same pale sapphire. Inside, an engraved name is scraped almost flat. *Eleanor.* Beneath Seraphina's own name, the ghost of the same letters is waiting. It is the same ring, worn by one woman, scrubbed clean, and given to another.Her search leads to a jeweler who vanishes in a fire, a doctor who declared her husband cured before the lab results came back, and a guest book in which every wife is marked *concluded.* Eleanor lasted eleven months, Clara ten, and Isabelle nine, and each wife was a caregiver with a dying relative. Adrian doesn't hunt women. He hunts the ones who save him, because gratitude makes them loyal, and loyalty makes them blind.Seraphina is also pregnant, and her husband knew before she did. Her dying mother's care is paid for entirely by his money. Every camera, phone, and servant in Cole Manor reports to him, and his latest message reads: *Smile for the east camera.*So she smiles.Seraphina chooses to play the devoted wife while she gathers proof. Adrian chooses to let her believe she's winning, because she is the first wife he has ever wanted to keep. What follows is a long, seductive game of love and deception between two people who may each be lying, and who may each be telling the truth about the one thing that matters: neither can walk away.Because the deeper she digs, the less clear it becomes who the real villain is. Is Adrian the hunter, or the bait? Who chose the wives, and who gave the order? And what do you do when the man you're trying to destroy is the only one who has ever looked at you as though you were worth the light?

THE LUNA WHO LOVED HER EXECUTIONER *He was sent to end her. Now he's the only thing keeping her alive, and she's the only one who knows what he really is.*On the night Alpha Rowan Hale dies, the Silverfang Pack names his Luna as the killer.Seraphine Auclair kneels in the rain before four hundred wolves, and the man chosen to execute her is Dorian Blackthorn, the Enforcer who has never once spared a condemned life. His blade touches her throat. The mate bond snaps into place between them, hot and impossible.Dorian cannot kill her. He drugs her, tells the Council she is dead and hides her inside his fortress. She hates him for it. Then she begins to need him.**But Seraphine has a secret that would end them both.**She did kill Rowan. He had been poisoning Luna after Luna for years to keep his power, and she was next. Dorian doesn't know. And she is certain that the moment he learns the truth, he will finish what he started.Locked in Blackthorn Hollow, Seraphine is a prisoner with soft walls. The bond lets her feel Dorian's heartbeat, his guilt and his fear, and lets him feel hers. She cannot lie to him without agony: a lie in his presence sends needles through her ribs and blood from her nose.So she learns the art of the *almost*. She refuses to answer, because refusing costs nothing. She tells half-truths, because the bond cannot tell the difference between silence and honesty, only between truth and lies.Then the letters start.A note in Rowan's handwriting turns up on her table: *Do not let him near you. He is not what the pack believes. He is theirs.* Beneath it, in fresh ink from an unknown hand: *Ask him how many Lunas he has buried.*Someone is moving through the Hollow, a hooded presence that smells of cold ash, slipping past the wards and guards as though the fortress belonged to them. Soup arrives laced with poison. The border wards drop for eleven seconds, opened by a smear of Dorian's own blood. Cassius Thorne, Rowan's ambitious Beta, rides in with a Council writ and a dozen hunters, and Seraphine hides inside the walls while he searches room by room.And Dorian, who has trusted the Law his entire life, opens the Council's case file and finds the first crack. No healer ever examined Rowan's body. And the writ condemning Seraphine is dated **a full day before the Alpha died.Seraphine's wolf has been half asleep for years. She tires on stairs. She flinches at raised voices. She was never weak, she was **made** weak, by a poison called greymoon that Rowan fed her in four drops a night, an hour before bed, with a smile and a hand under her jaw if she hesitated.When Cassius forces Dorian to take a silver wound as "surety" for his mate's privacy, the blade is coated in greymoon. Seraphine has to tell the truth, and the bond, for once, lets her. Dorian learns what the poison is. He learns what she has been through. And he learns that she knew its name by smell.Then the pieces begin to fit together, and every one of them cuts.The poison appears again on a Council assassin's blades, thicker, a crown dose meant to kill in an hour. It appears on an arrow lodged in Dorian's sister Ines. It appears in a water pitcher delivered by someone inside the Hollow. And in a hollow dagger grip, Seraphine finds a vial labeled in the handwriting of the healer Odalys: *For R.H. Fourth. Seven drops.*Someone planned to poison Rowan too.Dorian opens his own ledger and finds a name: Luna Isaura of Greywater, executed by his blade four years ago. A healer's note describes gray fingernails and trembling hands. That is not fever, that is greymoon. Four Alphas had sat at her trial. Four Lunas are now dying of the same thing.And someone has written in the margin of Dorian's private ledger: *Two is not the number. Look at the ninth year.*A Council assassin climbs the cliff wall to find the missing ninth-year ledger. When Dorian corners him, the man smiles through his scarf and says what he was sent to say: that the Luna executed in the ninth year was Seraphine's mother.Seraphine had known from the first week. She has known since she was seventeen, when she watched her mother kneel in the snow. She never told Dorian, because she knew what it would do to him.The assassin dies by poison before he can say more. But he leaves behind a note in Maren Voss's own hand: *The Luna is NOT to be harmed. Bring her to me breathing. She will lead us to the rest.*Rest of what?Seraphine and Dorian strike a truce built on honest silence. She will not lie to him, and she will say plainly what she cannot say. He will not demand the cup, her mother's name or the name on the vial. They hunt this together, a conspiracy neither of them can see the edges of. Dorian trains her to fight. Torin, his loyal second, guesses most of her secret and says nothing. Ines arrives wounded and furious, with a Council wanted-notice in her fist: **WANTED ALIVE.