Rejected by My Family, Claimed by the Galactic Commander

I was born wolfless, the defective daughter of the Nichols Pack. My only value was an arranged engagement to Julian Hayes, the powerful Alpha heir my family needed for an alliance. Then my stepsister handed me a glass of champagne at the pack gala. When I woke up the next morning, I was naked in a stranger's bed, covered in bruises and bite marks, with a terrifying Alpha's scent burned into my skin. I had no memory of the night before. Only one certainty remained. I had been drugged. I ran home in the stranger's shirt, desperate for protection. Instead, my fiancé looked at me with disgust, my stepsister took my place beside him, and my father decided I was still useful after all. Not as a daughter. As a bargaining chip. He sold me to Alpha Montgomery, a cruel old tyrant rumored to be seeking a bride. When I refused, my father gave me the one threat I could never ignore. "Marry him, or your brother's treatments stop." For Noah, my dying younger brother, I agreed. I even tried a forbidden purification ritual to erase the stranger's scent from my body. But before the healers could begin, a gray-eyed Alpha cornered me in the hospital and shut it all down with a single command. I thought he was only the Lycan King's ruthless enforcer. I thought the man I had to marry was an old monster waiting in the dark. I was wrong. On the eve of my wedding, my groom called. His voice made my cruel father bow in terror. His words made my blood turn cold. He was not old. He was not weak. He was the stranger from that night. The Alpha who had marked me. The Lycan King himself. And he whispered through the phone, "Tomorrow, you become my Luna. Everything you are belongs to me."

My fiancé, Julian, was the Alpha heir, and our engagement was supposed to unite our powerful Packs. But hours before our grand ceremony, he coldly confessed that he had always loved my best friend, Seraphina. She orchestrated a flawless trap, hiring a drugged Omega and bringing a mob of reporters to "discover" me in my hotel bed. Julian didn't even let me explain. He looked at me with pure disgust, publicly breaking our engagement and letting the media brand me a worthless, cheating whore. Stripped of my title and abandoned by my family, I was left completely defenseless. That same night, a pack of savage Rogues cornered me in an icy alley. They ripped through my flesh, and my desperate screams were swallowed by the storm. As my blood seeped into the freezing pavement, I saw Seraphina in my mind, wearing the gown that should have been mine, holding Julian's arm. Until my last breath, I couldn't accept it. I had devoted my entire life to him and our Pack. Why was my loyalty repaid with such a vicious betrayal? Why did I have to die like a pathetic, wolfless joke just so they could have their happy ending? Opening my eyes again, I was back in the luxurious hotel bed, mere minutes before Seraphina and the reporters were set to burst through the door.

For three months, I thought I was the only woman who knew Fabiano’s soul. Then he saw my face — and decided I was worth less than the check he slid across the table. But it was all a clerical error. When we finally met and he saw my plain face, he realized I wasn't the glamorous mafia princess he thought he was talking to. He immediately severed our connection and forced me to help him court her instead, promising a blank check to save my dying grandmother from loan sharks in return. I swallowed my pride and did everything he asked. When my grandmother suddenly needed immediate brain surgery to survive the night, I crashed his VIP party to cash in his promise. Fabiano wrote the check, but his new princess snatched it, poured red wine all over the paper, and threw it in the trash. "You are a jealous, pathetic leech. You are nothing," she spat, laughing in my face. I stood there with my hand frozen in the empty air, looking at Fabiano. The man who once swore he would burn down the city for me just sat there on the leather sofa, watching in complete silence as my grandmother's only lifeline was destroyed. The foolish warmth I carried for him instantly died. I turned around, walked out into the freezing rain, and got into the armored SUV of his biggest rival. This time, I wouldn't beg for scraps; I was going to build my own empire.

I was exactly three thousand words away from eviction when the heir to the New York underworld smashed my laptop and offered me a job instead of an apology. Dante Vitiello wanted me to write a memoir that would paint him as a saint. I moved into his penthouse, thinking I could keep things professional. But when his arranged fiancée, the daughter of the Chicago Outfit, arrived, she didn't see an employee. She saw a threat. She didn't just humiliate me; she leaked fake evidence to the press, branding me as a federal informant. I woke up in a hospital bed with the word "RAT" plastered across every gossip site. Sofia’s guards were stationed outside my door, blocking even the nurses. I was a liability. A stain on the Vitiello name. I knew how these stories ended. The Prince always chooses the Family. The Alliance is more important than the girl. I was packing my bag, shaking with fear, ready to disappear into the night to save him from ruin. But Dante didn't come to fire me. He walked into the boardroom where his father and the Chicago Boss were waiting for him to beg for forgiveness. He looked at the crown that was his birthright, then he looked at the gun on the table. He didn't kneel. He didn't apologize. He slammed his weapon down, shattering a hundred-year alliance and forfeiting his empire with a single sentence. "Keep the crown. I take the girl."

For three years, I was the one scrubbing the scent of blood from his hands and holding him while he screamed in pain. I was the one who taught Coleton Barron how to walk again after the car bomb nearly took his legs. But the moment he reclaimed his seat as Don, I became invisible. At his recovery gala, he draped his arm around Charly—the woman who fled when he was crippled—and laughed as he told his inner circle I was "just the hired help." It didn't stop at insults. When Charly faked a fall, he shoved me aside with enough force to crack my skull against the pool edge. When a bomb went off in a gallery, he looked me in the eye, saw me trapped under debris, and turned his back to carry her to safety instead. He even held a gun to my head because she lied about me poisoning his soup. His mother threw a check at me, telling me that tools go back in the box when the job is done. They thought I would beg to stay. They thought I was weak. I took the five million and vanished without a word. Three years later, I returned to New York. Not as his nurse, but as the fiancée of the only man Coleton fears. And when he saw the diamond on my finger, the King of New York finally realized he had thrown away his only lifeline.

I was a Vitiello, sold to the Morettis to secure an alliance. For five years, I quietly loved Dante, counting down the minutes until our wedding at St. Patrick's Cathedral. But it ended with a single text three minutes before the ceremony. "Stay at the apartment. Sofia is awake. Don't make a scene." His ex-girlfriend, the love of his life, had woken from a coma with no memory. Just like that, I was erased. For thirty days, I waited in the shadows while Dante played hero to a woman who didn't remember him. He told me he was protecting her fragile mind. But then I found the truth. I stood outside the doctor's office and heard Dante refuse a treatment that would restore Sofia's memory. "If she remembers, she might leave again," Dante told the doctor. "Elena will wait. She's a good soldier. Let me have my fantasy." He wasn't protecting her. He was keeping her broken to feed his ego, banking on my submission. He thought I was furniture he could put in storage. He was wrong. I didn't go back to the apartment. Instead, I dialed a number every made man in New York feared. "Matteo," I said to Dante's lethal older brother, the King of the underworld. "I am done waiting. I want to be a Moretti bride. But not Dante's."