The Royal Princess

Annabelle Burke was born royal, but she has never once acted like it. Princess of the Royal Pack, daughter of the King, sister to the strongest Alpha the territory has ever produced — and utterly unimpressed by any of it. What she wants is simple: the traditional tour across the region's packs, one stop at a time, until her wolf scents out the mate the Moon Goddess promised her. Werewolf rule number one says she will know him the second his scent hits her nose. Nobody warns her about rule number two: the universe has a sense of humor.

She finds him exactly where she least expects to. Alpha Jonathan White leads the Sunset Guardian Pack, and one breath of her vanilla-and-lavender scent stops him cold at his own front door. But instead of the reunion her whole life has been built around, he looks her in the eye and rejects her — flat, final, with a Luna already picked out for his pack and a reason he refuses to share. The bond does not care about his reasons. It drags her through his worst nights from across the territory and turns the rejection into a wound no doctor can treat.

Then the world gets worse than one broken heart. The castle is attacked. Her parents fall. The crown she never asked for settles onto her head before she feels ready for it, and every scheming pack, every hungry Council member, and every enemy her family ever made now knows exactly where the Royals bleed.

Surviving means trusting the mate who threw her away. Because Jonathan is done pretending — the rejection was a mistake wrapped in a secret, and he means to spend the rest of his life taking it back, if she will let him. What follows is a slow, deliberate burn: apology by apology, touch by touch, until the princess who swore she hated him is the one pulling him through her door and locking it. The doors stay closed. Whatever happens behind them belongs to them alone.

Being Queen turns out to be the least of her problems. There is a kidnapping that teaches her how far her people will go to bring her home. There is the Royal Mark, a brand burned into traitors by Royal hands, the kind of punishment that turns a friend into a warning. And there is a riddle, delivered by a witch and decoded in a dead man's book, that points at the last thing she ever expected: He is your child.

Because Annabelle is carrying the next generation of Royals, and she is not the only one who knows it. A trusted councilman is playing a longer, colder game than anyone suspects. A rogue alpha wants the one thing rogues always want — power that does not belong to him. And a renegade witch will walk through fire to get his hands on a baby destined to be born too strong.

The crown taught Annabelle that everyone she loves wears a target. Motherhood teaches her what happens to whoever reaches for it. Family first. Burn the rest.