They dragged me out of the gutter to be a dead girl. The princess was murdered in secret and buried with no name on the stone. I have her exact face. So the King gave me one choice... wear her crown, or fill her grave by morning. I took the crown. Now I sleep in her bed, answer to her name. And I smile at a court full of people who would kill me the second they learned the truth. The stepbrother who loved her watches me like he can feel something's wrong and he commands every spy and every sword in the kingdom. The silent guard at the gate knew I was a fake before I said a word. He didn't turn me in. He just became the only thing keeping me alive. And the King stood up in front of three hundred people and sold me to a foreign emperor who builds his throne out of dead men. They all think I'm a poor girl who got lucky with a face. They have no idea. The reason I look like her is the one secret that can burn this whole kingdom down. I came here to take the money and run. I'm not running anymore. Theyv'e spent my whole life deciding I was nothing. Now I'm going to learn every secret these walls are hiding, find out who really put that girl in the ground, and make every last one of them pay.

I died with my mother's name on my lips and the face of the man who killed her burned into my memory. I woke up two years later in a stranger's body with gentle hands and no past... just a quiet life, a herb garden, and the kind of peace that feels too clean to be real. I did not know who I was. I did not know what I had lost. Not yet. Then I found him bleeding in the forest. And I made the worst decision of my second life... I saved him. His name is Caius. He is the Alpha of Ironblood Pack, the most powerful and feared wolf in three territories. He is cruel in the way that powerful men are cruel... not with raised voices, but with absolute certainty that the world belongs to him. He looked at me with those cold eyes and he saw a healer. A useful thing. He brought me into his pack like a man bringing home a tool he found on the road. He did not know that I remembered him. Not at first. The memories came back in pieces... a flash of firelight, a sound like screaming, my mother's face. And then all of it, every terrible moment, crashing back in the middle of the night until I had to press my hands flat against the floor just to feel something solid. I know what he took from me. I know exactly what he is. And I am going to take everything from him... his territory, his title, his power, the land he butchered my family to possess. I am going to do it slowly and I am going to do it from the inside. What I did not plan for was him. Not the real version of him... the one that shows up at the healer wing at strange hours with small injuries and no good reason to be there. The one who looks at me like I am something he cannot figure out. The one who, for the first time in what I suspect is his entire life, seems to want to be a better man. He is falling for me. And the worst part, the part I will never say out loud, is that I feel it too. My name is Maren. He does not know that yet. But he will.