She was no one. He was a king losing his mind. Fate, apparently, does not care about either of those things.

Lyra Vance has survived everything life has thrown at her — a father who disappeared in the night, a mother who worked herself to the bone, years of scrubbing tavern floors and making herself invisible just to get through the day. She is not soft. She is not waiting to be rescued. She has Aris, she has her job, and she has the quiet, hard-won dignity of a woman who has learned to need very little.

Then the Alpha King of the Northern Territory walks into her tavern.

He doesn't ask. He doesn't explain. He says one word — *mate* — and takes her from the only life she has ever known, dragging her into a world of ancient bloodlines, political knives, and a bond she never asked for and cannot escape. King Alaric Thornwood is two hundred years of power and darkness, a man balanced on the razor's edge of madness, and she is the only thing standing between him and the monster he is becoming.

She hates him. She should. He took everything from her.

But here is what no one warns you about the mate bond: it doesn't care what you feel. It only cares what is true. And what is true is that somewhere underneath the cruelty and the fear and the terrible, desperate possession, there is a man who is terrified — of himself, of losing her, of becoming the very thing that destroyed his grandfather and broke his father. A man who lets her best friend through the gates. A man who tells the Council's envoy to get out of his house. A man who knocks.

Lyra knows how to survive. She has always known. But surviving and staying are different choices, and the bond will not let her pretend otherwise.

When the Council exiles Alaric and the madness finally breaks loose, when he disappears into the borderlands and the darkness takes what's left of him — no one goes after him.

No one except her.

The Alpha King's Forsaken Mate is a full-length, slow-burn werewolf paranormal romance with a dual POV, a possessive and emotionally complex alpha hero, a fierce heroine who earns every moment of her HEA, and a love story built not on instalove but on the wreckage of two people who had no business surviving each other — and chose each other anyway.

*For readers who want the darkness and the tenderness. The bond and the battle. The monster and the man.*

Read it now. You will not put it down.