Eight long years of biting winter frosts, unspoken regrets, and towering stone walls had kept them apart-two souls bound by a tragic contract and a twisted narrative they never asked to star in. Leiana thought she had finally mastered the art of survival: outsmarting the original plot, dodging marriage traps, and keeping her sanity intact amidst an empire of eccentric royals. But she never calculated the terrifying lengths to which a certain Northern monster would go once he realized his world had stopped spinning. When the fires of a royal rebellion threaten to consume the capital and a dangerously reformed duke forgets every rule of aristocratic decorum just to drag her back to where she belongs, the rules of the game change entirely. The prologue has ended. The true chase is about to begin. Welcome back to the world of blades, buttercups, and reluctant romance.