Romans Mystery & Histoires Independent Alternate Universe

I booked the island to sleep with a stranger. One week, someone beautiful, nothing that follows me home. After five years alone I'd decided my body was mine to spend. I never made it to the second night. I wake in mud, under stars in the wrong places, six hundred years before I was born. Eleven days later I'm standing on an auction block in a medieval market, barefoot and bleeding, refusing to look at the floor while a stranger checks my teeth. That's when the crowd goes quiet. He's the biggest thing I've ever seen — black and gold, a wolf pelt across one shoulder, more money on his hands than this valley will see in a lifetime. He doesn't bid. He kills the man who does. "Don't thank me," he says. "I didn't save you. I claimed you." Lucien St. Claire is an alpha wolf shifter and the immortal lord of a mountain kingdom where gold is so worthless they line the gutters with it. He's arrogant, possessive, filthy-mouthed — and immovable about one thing. He won't touch me while I'm wearing his collar. Fine. I'll take it off myself. That's how it starts. It isn't how it ends. Two centuries later, in a city of canals and masks, we're the couple everyone wants at their table and nobody dares cross. His name on the banks. Mine on my own door. We had eight good years before it came apart. Now I'm thirty-five, legally dead, standing in a century I don't recognise and ten years late. And somewhere in this city, a billionaire CEO has been quietly buying the world since 2020 — because if he owned enough of it, he'd eventually find what he lost. He's had six years to get ready for me.