His Unwanted Wife, The Hidden Genius

I gave Alpha Colten Shields everything-my pack's alliance, my loyalty, my body, and the child growing beneath my heart. In return, he gave me silence. When labor tore me open, our mind-link was dead. The emergency bell had been cut. The doctors were gone. The only person who entered my delivery room was my sister, Heidi. She locked the door. With a sweet smile, she told me the truth: Colten had never loved me. He had loved her all along. I was only the price of a treaty, and my unborn pup was the obstacle standing between them and the future they wanted. Then she drove a wolfsbane-coated silver dagger into my pregnant belly. Colten arrived just in time to watch me die. He didn't save me. He didn't grieve. He only held my murderer in his arms and whispered the words that burned themselves into my soul. "Your purpose is served, Fae. Thank you for the alliance." I died cursing them both. But the Moon Goddess was not finished with me. When I opened my eyes again, I was back four years in the past-one week before my mating ceremony, one week before I became Colten's doomed Luna, and one week before Heidi set her first trap. This time, I know every lie before it is spoken. Every betrayal before it strikes. Every secret they tried to bury beneath my blood. They thought I was a wolfless Omega, weak enough to break and easy enough to erase. They were wrong. This time, I will not be their victim. I will be the nightmare that comes for them first.

I sat in a room waiting for my fiancé to set our wedding date, but instead, I received a video of him bleeding in a clinic. He wasn't there for me; he was paying the price for a blood-diamond purse he’d bought for a Mafia Princess named Lucia. I had spent five years living in the shadow of his underground fights, constantly fearing the day he’d come home in a body bag. Today, he’d emptied our wedding fund to buy Lucia an armored car, leaving me with nothing but the chilling realization that I was merely a placeholder. When I confronted him, he dismissed my pain, swearing it was just a debt of honor. He laughed off my threats to leave, convinced that my heart was too soft to ever truly walk away. I watched as he prioritized Lucia's shrill demands over our future, his arrogance blind to the fact that my patience had finally turned to ash. I had survived his brawls and his lies, but I was done being collateral in a game I never asked to play. How many times could I forgive a man who traded my life for another woman’s vanity? Why had I stayed so long, waiting for a man who didn't even know how to protect his own future? I walked into the Syndicate clinic, not to nurse his wounds, but to reclaim my passport. I didn't look back as I signed the papers to disappear into a high-security black site in Iceland. I was finished with Ciro, the soldier who fought for everyone except the woman waiting for him in the dark.

I was the eldest daughter of the powerful Kirk family, sent away to a Swiss sanatorium to recover from my supposed mental illness. But my stepmother, Johnie, never intended for me to get better. She sent her personal cleaners to drag me onto a plane back to Washington D.C. In my past life, I didn't know they were assassins. I was forcefully injected with heavy sedatives and locked in a secret torture chamber inside our luxury estate. My stepmother and cousin skimmed my inheritance while watching me suffer. They framed me as a crazy addict, and my own father, a sitting Senator, turned a blind eye to protect his political career. "Her political value is gone, just get rid of her quietly." That was the last thing I heard my father say before I was brutally slaughtered by my own family. Until my last breath, I couldn't understand why they hated me so much. Why did my father let them force those pills down my throat? Why was my life worth less than my stepmother's public image? Opening my eyes again, the freezing sensation of lake water filling my lungs vanished. I was back in the VIP room of the St. Moritz Sanatorium in 2023. It was the exact morning before the cleaners walked through my door with uncapped syringes. This time, I wouldn't just survive. I was going to cut the throat of the Kirk family.

My mate, Alpha Santino, brought another woman into our home. She was a pregnant Omega, the widow of his fallen Beta, and he swore to protect her above all others. He gave her my seat of honor, left our bed cold each night to soothe her feigned nightmares, and ignored me completely. I was the Luna of the Blackstone Pack, but I was becoming a ghost in my own life. The final betrayal happened in my own bedroom. She stood over my vanity and deliberately shattered my mother's sacred moonstone necklace, the last piece of my family I had left. When Santino burst in, he didn't see my heartbreak. He saw only her fake tears. "What did you do to her?!" he roared, his voice laced with the Alpha's Command, a sacred power he used to crush my will. Then, for her, he did the unforgivable. He raised his hand and struck me, his mate. In that instant, the love I had desperately clung to turned to ice. The man I had sworn my life to had not only betrayed me but had defiled the sacred bond the Goddess herself had blessed. As the pain of his betrayal ripped through me, something ancient and powerful awakened in my blood. I rose to my feet and spoke the words that would destroy his world and begin mine. "I, Alessia Bianchi, reject you, Santino Moretti, as my mate."

On our wedding night, my Fated Mate, Alpha Cedric, left our bed to care for his mistress. He told me our marriage was just an obligation. But the real betrayal came months later on a rooftop. When Rogues demanded a trade, Cedric didn't hesitate. He chose to save Jayden because of her "heart condition," handing me—his pregnant wife—over to the killers. "You are stronger," he said as he pushed me toward them. I fell from the building. I survived, but our unborn pup didn't. Instead of comfort, I woke up to handcuffs. Cedric believed Jayden’s lies that I staged the kidnapping for attention. He threw me into the dungeon, shackling my wrists with silver cuffs that burned my flesh, while Jayden poisoned my food with wolfsbane. He stripped me of my title and dignity, never realizing that the "fragile" woman he protected was the true monster. He didn't know about the glowing rune on my chest counting down the seconds I had left. He didn't know I was the legendary White Wolf, and my time was up. On my final night, I asked for one last ride on the Ferris wheel where we first met. At midnight, as Cedric rushed back to the amusement park, he didn't find a body. He found only my empty clothes and a text message on the seat. "Don't look for me, Cedric. I'm giving my wolf back to the moon." As he watched the security footage, he finally saw me dissolve into stardust and ascend to the sky, leaving him alone in a world that suddenly felt too quiet.

For fifteen years, my husband Bennett refused to let me get pregnant. "My blood is a curse, Kelsey," he would say, gripping my hand with terrified intensity. "It kills the women who carry it. I won't risk you." I believed him. I mourned the children we never had just to stay alive for him. Then he brought Aria home. He claimed she was a distant cousin in trouble. But from the shadows of the ballroom, I watched him caress her swollen belly with a tenderness he never showed me. When I confronted him, the mask fell. "You provide the image, Kelsey," he said coldly. "She provides the bloodline. Do not make a scene." To teach me a lesson in obedience, my horse's reins were sabotaged. I woke up in the hospital with a fractured leg, only to learn he had ignored my emergency calls to hold Aria’s hand during a routine ultrasound. Lying in that sterile bed, the truth hit me harder than the fall. There was no curse. He had medically gaslighted me for a decade, stealing my fertility with a lie, just to replace me with a mistress he called "cousin." He thought he had broken me. He thought I would fade quietly into the east wing. Instead, I wiped my tears and planted listening devices in his office. He wanted a legacy? I boarded a train to Paris, leaving behind a bomb that would burn his entire world to ash.