

Yasmin Cole loses everything to the stepmother and stepsister who spent years quietly dismantling her life from the inside. Her own father throws her out. She survives years of displacement with one thing intact, which is the intention to come back. When she does, she is ready. The moment she sees her stepsister on the arm of her former fiance Shaun Wyatt, she doesn't flinch. She recognizes it immediately for what it is—the perfect opening. They handed her exactly the weapon she needed to take everything back.

Luna Ashford is a sharp modern forensic scientist who wakes up one day as the princess consort of the seventh prince of the Solmire Empire—wife to Jothan Barnett, a prince the entire court whispers about:brutal, cursed, a man who buries his wives. Her system gives her a clean exit: earn enough intimacy with Jothan and solve the wrongful case shadowing his past, and she goes home. Simple enough. Except the monster the rumors promised turns out to be something else entirely, and the case runs deeper and darker than any file she's ever worked. She came to investigate a prince. She didn't plan to understand him.