The Monster Prince's Wife

Tina knows how this story goes. She read it in her other life, on the far side of an impossible gulf: a romance novel called The Beast and the Lady, set in an empire where a goddess's curse marks one unlucky heir in every generation. In the book, the bride promised to the cursed prince throws herself into a lake on her wedding day rather than touch him.

Then Tina wakes up as that bride.

Her new husband is Ken, the prince the whole capital calls a monster — silver-haired, red-eyed, written across with the black inscriptions of a goddess's anger. Courtiers cross themselves at his name. His own father dares not show him warmth. Tina has read the ending; she knows what the story was supposed to do to him. What she finds instead, behind the door of a neglected palace, is a cursed young husband who hides bread crusts under his plate, apologizes to the mushrooms when he cannot make himself swallow them, and is more frightened of her than of the curse eating him alive.

In her first life she was nobody: no magic, no destiny, no heroine's face. What she has is a stubborn heart, a spoiler's knowledge of the plot, and a very good kitchen. So she stays. She cleans house, starting with the servants who stole from him. She wins over an Emperor who has not been called father in years. She cooks food from a country that exists on no map of this world. Slowly her so-called monster learns to sleep without nightmares, and slowly she stops telling herself that she is only keeping the heroine's place warm.

But the curse has a history a thousand years deep, and history has teeth. There is a scheming branch of the imperial family that wants the throne. There is a church that built its power on the curse it pretends to fight. And there is a goddess sealed away in fire — a girl who was lied to and betrayed by everyone she ever trusted, except, once, a friend whose face Tina now wakes up wearing. When the Door of Darkness opens and the price of saving everyone finally comes due, the world learns what Tina was always willing to pay. The man who comes out of that valley carrying her curse is not the boy she married. He is grown, and beautiful, and hollowed out, and he looks at her changed face without a flicker of recognition — while his body, that treacherous thing, still moves of its own accord to stand between her and every threat that comes near.

This is the story of a marriage that began as a funeral and refuses to end as one. Of a wife who chooses her monster knowing exactly what he is, and a prince who keeps her against all his reasons, all his grief, and the whole fear of an empire. Full of slow-burn tension, kitchen warmth, political knives, and one very patient goddess, The Monster Prince's Wife is a fantasy romance about the moment the beast stops being one — told by the woman who was never the heroine, and never wanted to be.

She promised not to let go. She keeps her promises slowly, but she keeps them.