The night I wore the white dress, I lost everything.
Caden's voice rang out across the whole pack, clear and cold under the full moon. *I reject you, Mara Voss. A Blank has no place in my pack.* The bond snapped like a wire pulled too tight — I felt it in my teeth, in the backs of my eyes. But I didn't cry. I refused.
The same night, deep in the forest where I had nowhere left to go, something found me. A man with gold-lit eyes and a body temperature that had no business being that warm. Kael Draeven, the Wolf King. The most powerful being in our world. His first words to me were, *I've been looking for you.*
Right. Sure. My ex-fiancé dumps me in front of everyone, and now the king is looking for me. What a week.
He offered me three days in his palace. A deal, he said — not a command. I told myself I only agreed because I had nowhere else to sleep. That was mostly true.
What I found inside those walls: cold stares, whispered nicknames I won't repeat, a forbidden east wing no one would explain, and a rumor about a woman Kael once loved who vanished without a trace.
What I didn't expect: the way his hand felt when it closed around my wrist, like a current running under the skin. The heat that shot through me when I touched a wax seal I didn't recognize. And the thing he said, quiet and certain, that cracked the ground under everything I believed about myself.
There's no such thing as a Blank.
If that's true — then what have I been all along?
