“I was born without an Inner Wolf. To the highborn Hopkins Pack, that made me a genetic defect, so my biological mother abandoned me in the lawless borderlands for eighteen years. But suddenly, she sent an elite hit squad to drag me back. She demanded I take my precious sister's place in a mating alliance with a notorious, deformed monster from Shadow Ridge. When I refused to be their sacrificial lamb, they decided to break me. They threatened my adoptive mother, the only person who ever truly cared for me. They even delivered a severed female hand in a bloody wooden box to my doorstep, warning me that if I didn't submit to the beast and act as their spy, my mother would be butchered piece by piece. They thought my lack of fangs and claws made me weak, a pathetic stray they could manipulate at will. They had no idea that in the black markets, I was known as the Phantom Healer-a ghost who traded miraculous cures and lethal neurotoxins. "I told you if you touched her, I would burn this pack to the ground." I whispered those words as I splashed bone-melting acid across their chief enforcer's face. Instead of running from the monster Alpha, I cured his lethal poisoning and struck a fake marriage deal with him. Because beneath his terrifying iron mask, he wasn't a cripple at all, but a devastatingly handsome apex predator who was more than happy to help me slaughter my old pack.”