The King's Second Heart
She was his weakness. They never knew she was his secret.
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For four years, Elowen Vayne carried the weight of a marriage that was killing her. They called her sickly. They called her a poor excuse for a Luna. They never asked why a healthy young noblewoman wasted away in her own house — and she never told them, because she didn't know.
Her husband Alpha Doran Blackwood knew. He had paid a hedge-witch to bind his wolf debt to his wife's body, dumping years of unpunished sin into the woman the pack pitied. Every cruelty he committed, Elowen carried. Every life he took, she paid for in fevers and nightmares she could not explain.
When Doran finds his fated mate — beautiful, ambitious Selene — and rejects Elowen in front of the entire pack, the binding shatters. Everything Doran forced her to hold comes roaring home to him, and everything that was hers comes home to her.
She collapses in the courtyard. The pack laughs.
Then the Lycan King arrives.
King Vaelor of Velmoria has spent twenty years on a throne that was never supposed to be his, ruling in the long shadow of his older brother — Crown Prince Castien, murdered the night of his coronation. He is the most feared man in the kingdom. He has never loved a woman. He came to Ironbough Pack to find the source of a dark binding his witches had been tracking for two years. He found a half-dead noblewoman in the dirt with two heartbeats and his dead brother's eyes flickering behind her own.
He carries her home without a word.
Will she survive long enough to become herself? And when she does, will the Lycan King kneel for her — or fight her for the crown?