What do you do when the man you were sent to as a political offering turns out to be the one person in the world who actually sees you? Nikita Mercer has learned to survive on very little.
No wolf. No family. No illusions about what she is worth to the pack that kept her alive out of guilt rather than love. For two years she has moved through her days like a ghost - present, purposeless, and careful never to want anything she cannot afford to lose.
When her Alpha offers her to the most powerful supernatural being alive - the Lycan King - as the last political currency the dying pack has left, Nikita does not fight it. A girl with nothing left to protect has very little reason to refuse.
She expects cold. She expects indifference. She expects to be processed like the transaction she is and forgotten.
She does not expect Declan Volkov.
He is everything the stories promised - ruthless, immovable, a king so powerful that grown Alphas choose their words carefully in his presence. He did not ask for an offering. He does not want the complication. What he gets is a young woman who walks into his throne room, looks directly at him, and does not flinch.
It is the most interesting thing anyone has done in his presence in years.
Neither of them is looking for this. Neither of them is equipped for it. He has been alone long enough that alone has started to feel like a personality. She has been invisible long enough that being seen feels more dangerous than anything else this king could do to her.
But the bond between them does not negotiate.
And when the truth about Nikita's past begins to surface - about her wolf, about the night she lost everything, about the carefully constructed lie she has been living inside - it will shatter everything she believed about herself.
Including the belief that she was ever beyond saving.
"The story begins here. Are you ready to meet them?''
