The Bride They Feared, The Queen They Crowned

Bella Elmer is the legitimate daughter of her house. Her half-sister Lisa takes her betrothal and her dowry, and her fiancé arrives in his wedding robes to announce that he will marry Lisa as his lawful wife and take Bella as a concubine seven days later. Bella volunteers instead to go north in a princess's place and marry the Khan of Bexar, who is said to be an eighty-year-old tyrant. She carries a knife into the bridal chamber. The man who comes in is not old at all. He is Marcus Keagan, the young war god she glimpsed riding past that afternoon, and he asks her, laughing, whether she means to murder her own husband. Marcus already knew who she was: years earlier she saved his life, and he asked for her by name. Titled a princess, Bella returns to her family home with an imperial decree in hand and takes back everything that was stripped from her. When Lisa and her former fiancé are sent north as envoys, they have to kneel. Bella and Marcus then work together against the plots aimed at them, open trade routes, and turn from household scores to governing.