After her pregnancy test, my decade became a joke.

I took the fall for Seraphina Thorne on murder charges, vanishing overseas for ten years.

Those ten years, I lived in shadows, unseen, like a rat in a sewer.

On that snowy winter night before I left, Seraphina held me, promising she'd protect our family's legacy and wait for my return, ready to marry me with all the pomp and circumstance we deserved.

Over the decade, using the family's core secrets I’d entrusted to her, she transformed from a marginalized outcast to the Queen of the city’s underworld, known as “The Thorn Queen.”