Chapter 1

Because our souls were a one hundred percent match, I married the Supreme Commander of the Werewolf Empire.

After the wedding, he was ice-cold to me.

To make my life a little easier, I got creative in bed. Every single night.

Then today, right in the middle of my best performance yet, straddling Ryan, I got a red alert from the Genetics Bureau:

MATCHING SYSTEM ERROR.

RYAN IS NOT YOUR DESTINED MATE.

The man beneath me had no idea. He just frowned, impatient. "Are you doing this or not?"

I rolled off him and out of bed. "Not. You can go now."

Chapter 1

"You're sure you want to stop?" Ryan's brows knotted hard.

"Very sure." I grabbed my clothes and pulled them on without sparing him a glance.

The towering Alpha wolf king gave me one cold look and said nothing. He scooped up his dark, patterned uniform, the one that stood for the highest power in the Empire, and strode out of the bedroom without looking back.

The second the front door locked behind him, I called the Genetics Bureau's internal line.

"I want an explanation. Now."

"We're so sorry, Miss Chloe. The system found a discrepancy while rebuilding its core data." The voice on the other end was shaking. "Your actual compatibility with Commander Ryan is only eighty percent."

"We've been married two years, and you're only finding this out now?"

"Theoretically, eighty percent is still exceptionally high. It shouldn't affect the quality of your marriage at all..."

"Spare me the theory. What about in practice?"

There was an eerie two-second silence before he forced himself to answer. "In practice, there's someone else whose soul matches yours at one hundred percent. But their file was damaged when the system crashed. We're working around the clock to recover it."

I paced the huge bedroom, so agitated I wanted to smash something. "Does Ryan know?"

"No. The Commander found us annoying a while back. He had our comm channel physically blocked."

I took a deep breath. "Keep it from him for now. I'll handle it."

I hung up, sank onto the couch, and rubbed my temples.

In an empire where werewolves held absolute military power, humans were as fragile as ants. One pinch, and you were done.

Ryan wasn't just a top-tier Alpha. He was Supreme Commander of all three branches of the armed forces.

Making him angry was a slow form of suicide. Or maybe not that slow.

Five years ago, I'd somehow been dropped into this godforsaken world. I'd worked off-the-books jobs everywhere, searching for a way back.

Then the Genetics Bureau showed up at my door and announced I was Ryan's perfect mate.

If I married him, I'd have access to the Empire's deepest secrets, and maybe a clue about spatial jumps. I signed the marriage agreement without a second thought.

But Ryan never touched me.

In this world, a high-ranking shifter marrying a human was already unheard of.

So, to pry information out of him, I shamelessly threw myself at him every day. I even threatened that if he didn't cooperate, I'd hang a banner outside Military Headquarters announcing that the Supreme Commander couldn't get it up.

Cornered, he finally gave in, wearing an expression of pure impatience, and let me do whatever I wanted.

I'd always believed that if I worked hard enough, I'd eventually melt that iceberg.

Now it was all over.

To a cold-blooded man at the top like Ryan, anything less than one hundred percent destiny was nothing at all.

I thought back on two years of acting like I owned him, and a cold sweat broke out down my spine.

The day he found out he'd been played for a fool by a human, he'd probably just snap my neck.