Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 44703 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 44703 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
91.3% compatibility.
Two years.
And it still hadn’t been enough.
Alexei understood what that would have done to her. Not just the heartbreak—heartbreak healed, eventually, even the worst of it. But the conclusion she would have drawn from it. The quiet, merciless logic of a girl who had been told by science itself that she and this boy were meant to be together, only to discover that even destiny had a price tag and she wasn’t worth meeting it.
In the preter world, where compatibility scores carried the weight of fate and fated bonds were treated as sacred, being rejected by one’s match was not merely a personal tragedy.
It was a public verdict.
It said: I was weighed against everything that science and faith and blood could promise, and I was found wanting.
For the one who was rejected, the message was crueler still.
Even destiny wasn’t enough to make someone stay.
ALEXEI KNEW WHAT THE world would say when it learned of his choice.
That the Prince of Atlantis had lost his mind. That years of solitude had finally corroded his judgment beyond repair. That choosing a rejected human mate was not merely a scandal—it was a repudiation of every standard of preter nobility, every expectation that came with a bloodline older than most civilizations.
The Blood Oval would have opinions. L’Alliance would have concerns. The tabloids—both human and preter—would have a field day that lasted approximately forever.
And Billy Stein, the boy who had thrown away a 91.3% match because his parents told him to, would wake up one morning and discover that the girl he’d discarded was now engaged to someone whose bloodline predated his entire species.
Alexei considered this.
He found it deeply, immensely satisfying.
But that wasn’t why he was doing this.
If it were only about politics, about scandal, about making a statement that the Prince of Atlantis answered to no one’s expectations but his own—any number of women would have served. There were princesses and heiresses and daughters of Blood Oval members who would have accepted his proposal before he finished speaking it. Women of impeccable supernatural lineage who would have brought alliances, territories, and political capital to a union with the last of the Atlantean stallion shifters.
Any of them would have been the rational choice.
None of them were Zia Morgan.
THE COURTYARD HAD EMPTIED.
The enchanted flowers in the oak trees had dimmed to a soft, sleepy glow, their colors settling into muted golds and lavenders as the magic wound itself down for the night. Staff moved between tables, clearing crystal and linen. Ada had finally been steered away from all remaining breakable objects and was sitting cross-legged on a stone bench at the far edge of the terrace, showing something on her phone to a bemused-looking Caro waiter who was clearly too polite to walk away and too fascinated to want to.
The night was quiet.
Alexei closed the file.
He did not need it anymore. He had not needed it for a long time. Every word, every number, every detail was already inside him, as fixed and permanent as the memories of Atlantis itself.
He thought of the photograph. The dark hair tucked behind one ear. The brown eyes that held intelligence and bruising in equal measure. The smile that asked for nothing and expected even less.
And he thought of what he was about to do to that smile.
Because Alexei was many things—patient, strategic, willing to play a long game that most people couldn’t even perceive—but he was not gentle. He had never been gentle. Gentleness required a kind of recklessness with one’s own power that he could not afford, not when his power was the kind that could break things without meaning to.
He was going to enter this girl’s life. He was going to take the quiet existence she had built for herself in the aftermath of a boy’s cowardice, and he was going to dismantle it. Not out of cruelty. Out of certainty.
She was his.
She had been his since the moment a number appeared on a screen and every rational argument he had ever made for solitude lost its weight.
Whether she knew it yet or not.
Whether she wanted it or not.
Alexei Lykaios rose from the table and walked into the darkness of the Celestini estate’s gardens.
But if anyone had thought to look closely—truly closely, past the stillness and the aristocratic mask he wore like a second skin—they might have noticed something in his pale eyes that had not been there before.
Something that looked, against all reason and all probability, like hunger.
Not the predatory kind.
The kind that ached.
CHAPTER ONE
THE THING ABOUT STARTING over is that nobody tells you how boring it is.
Like, seriously.
Books and movies make it look like this big dramatic moment. You cry in the rain, you cut your hair, you move to a new city, and then a montage plays where you’re jogging at sunrise and laughing with new friends and ordering coffee with the confidence of someone who has never been dumped by text message.