The Alpha Rejected Me, So I Built My Own Kingdom

"An omega cannot lead this pack."

On the night of the Choosing, Lena Veyra is certain the Moon will give her to Alpha Theron — the man she's loved in secret since she was sixteen. Instead, he walks past her, in front of the whole pack, and chooses her stepsister as his Luna.

The rejection ritual should have killed what little wolf the wolfless orphan had left. Instead, bleeding out alone in the cursed Ashlands, Lena's skin begins to glow silver — and a voice older than the kingdoms whispers her name from behind the moon.

She was never wolfless. She is the last of the Celestial line — a bloodline the Three Kingdoms slaughtered generations ago out of pure terror, suppressed inside her since she was seven by the stepmother who's been quietly feeding on her power ever since.

Rescued by Kael Nightshade — the glacial Lycan King who hasn't felt a mate-bond in two centuries and feels one, violently, for her — Lena learns the truth in pieces, each worse than the last. The king who wants her is the son of the man who signed her people's death warrant. The warlord hunting her is the executioner who murdered her mother. And Soren, the warm Southern King who sees her as an equal and never once tries to cage her, may be the only safe love she'll ever be offered.

But Lena refuses to be any king's prize. She walks into the dead Ashlands and begins to build her own kingdom from the bones of the old one — and uncovers the deepest secret of all: Celestials have no fated mates. They choose. Every destiny she was ever promised is a lie. So whoever she loves, she'll have chosen — and so will the empire she crowns herself to rule.

Through war, betrayal, a pregnancy that makes her the mother of the most hunted child alive, and a revenge years in the making, the kitchen girl becomes a Sovereign Alpha. But the Purge that destroyed her people never truly ended — because the first Celestial King was never killed.

He was sealed. And the cracks her awakening left in his prison are about to bring him home.

"You rejected a kitchen girl. Now kneel to a queen — and no king gave me this crown. I dug it out of the ground with my own hands."