Vera spent two years believing her wolf was dead and her worth was less than nothing. When her mate rejects her in front of the entire pack and claims another woman instead, she runs into the one place every pack mother warns her children about: the forbidden, feral territory of the Lycan King. Alaric Vega doesn't want a mate. He can't afford one. His bloodline carries a curse that turns him into something even he can't control, and anyone who gets close to him pays for it. But the moment his claws pin a broken, rejected Omega to the forest floor, the curse inside him goes quiet for the first time in his life — and one word rises out of nowhere, the word every true bond begins with. Mate. To survive a royal court that wants her erased, Vera has to become his queen: first as a lie to protect them both, then as something neither of them can walk back from. Because she isn't the powerless nobody the world believes she is. She's the last daughter of a bloodline his own family slaughtered twenty years ago, and the only key to breaking a curse that's already killing him by inches. The throne was never the prize. She is.