The Dragon Who Claimed His Sacrifice

"She was sent as a sacrificial meal. She returned as his Queen."

Every twenty-five years, the kingdom of Ardent marches a noble daughter to the frozen boundary to appease the bloodthirsty monster of the Ashen Mountains. When the silver chalice fills with blood and names disgraced baron’s daughter Aurelia Vale, she refuses to bow to tradition. Abandoned in the mist to be devoured, she prepares to die with a sewing knife in her fist. Instead of an executioner's jaws, she meets Draven Thorne. The ancient dragon shifter transforms into a devastatingly handsome man whose first words aren’t a battle cry, but an insult: “You’re late. I was hoping you’d be less disappointed.” The terrifying beast doesn’t eat his brides. For five hundred years, Draven has shielded every woman sent to him, guarding them from a corrupt human monarchy built on a catastrophic lie. The sacrifices were never meals for a dragon, they were living human fuel harvested to recharge the magical cage binding Draven to his peaks. As an ancient shadow entity wakes in the deep earth and the royal court plots her family’s ruin, Aurelia discovers an even more dangerous truth: she is not just an offering. She is his mate, the reincarnation of the First Queen who originally bound his heart. When the kingdom sentences Aurelia to death, the Dragon King will break his wards, cross the continent, and burn an empire to ash before he lets them take her again. To save both their peoples, the beast who claimed her will face the ultimate test: surrender millennia of godhood just to spend a fragile mortal lifetime by her side.