Six years. Six years of love, loyalty, and quiet sacrifices while I healed from miscarriage after miscarriage. My husband, Kael, was my rock always there, always proving his love with gentle words and steady presence. Until the night, he looked me in the eyes and said: "I never loved you. Not really. I want your younger sister as my second wife." My own family nodded in agreement. They had known. They had always known I was never enough. I stayed silent through the pain, the humiliation, and the wedding I was forced to witness. But when his perfect new life begins to crack and he comes crawling back, begging me to return "for the family's sake," I finally understand: I was never the problem. I was simply the placeholder. Now? I'm choosing me. And they will all watch me rise from the ashes they created.

"Do not expect a husband, Woman. I have no room in my chest for a heart- only the King's law." I flinched, my eyes filling with fresh tears at the cruelty of his words. "My Lord, I only-" "Be silent," he spat, not even looking at me. "You are no wife. Only a burden I must now carry across the kingdom." He gripped my upper arm with a painful force, his strength bruising and indifferent, as he dragged me toward the towering, battle-scarred warhorse. "If you have any dignity left in you, stay downwind and out of my sight. Looking at you is a chore I no longer wish to endure."

Fire and ice were never meant to survive together.Maeve O'Connor never expected to find her fated mate at a diplomatic gala-and definitely not the most terrifying Alpha in existence. Bjorn rules the frozen North with brutal efficiency. He wears the pelts of enemies he's skinned alive, speaks a language she can barely understand, and has a presence that makes wolves twice her rank submit. When the mate bond slams into them both, he gives her four days to prepare for her new life in the Arctic.In the land where only the strong survive, fire and ice will either forge something unbreakable-or destroy each other trying.