The Prince I Met in Another World

Candice Cheung, twenty-eight, a high school math teacher with an unshakeable gift for mental arithmetic, goes to sleep in his futon and wakes up in a royal palace, in the body of the twenty-first prince of the Butterfly Country: a background character from the otome game he knows by heart. In the script, this prince has one job - die midway through the war of succession so the heroine can be comforted. Cheung has read that first page twice. He knows exactly how it ends.

So he makes a plan worthy of a bookkeeper. Get hired by the Severus Eyre, a bounty guild of charming strays, and stand beside the one man the story cannot work without: Lance Thurwolf, the guild's guarded, ill-tempered, unfairly handsome chief, who pressed a dagger to Cheung's throat on night one and ordered him to keep his distance. Cheung means to nudge the plot toward Lance's happy ending, find the heroine, and live to see it.

The heroine never comes.

What comes instead is a bruise on Cheung's wrist in the shape of small, even teeth - a wolf's mark, the kind that reads as mine in a language every wolf alive understands - and a smuggled shepherd's book that explains it plainly: a wolf marks what it does not intend to eat. It marks what it intends to keep. Each full moon turns the terrifying employer into an enormous grey wolf, and one locked cellar, one lamp, and one recited times table later, master and bookkeeper strike a pact with terms: supper, sums, and company at exactly one wolf-length, every moon, no exceptions.

Then Cheung breaks into the Grand Temple's Star Vault and reads the traveler records - returned, kept, spent - and finds the heroine's disposition dated two years before his own arrival. The Church found her first. The Grand Rite that crowns kings has been burning fallen travelers for three centuries, and the war of succession is no war at all. It is a harvest.

What follows is a rescue conducted entirely in paperwork: a guild of bodyguards, cooks, carpenters, and one professional thief stealing the Church's rite-key from under a cardinal's canopy; a bookkeeper reading a three-hundred-year harvest aloud in the middle of a coronation; a fire unmade with arithmetic; and a door between worlds left standing open, with a soup count and a census beside it, where nobody burns and every arrival is entered under a brand-new word - asked.

But an open door invites the north. An old debt comes calling - a regent uncle, eighty hired wardens, a succession trial on lake ice - and Cheung follows his wolf into a country that keeps its law in notched sticks, where reading the sums out loud is the deadliest weapon in two worlds.

Full moons, found family, a slow fade-to-black romance between adults, and an audit sincere enough to be a love letter: this is the story of a self-confessed lazy man, a wolf who does not share, and a pact that ends with one amendment - disposition kept, no review, no expiry, entered as permanent.