The Crown And The Collar

Virva has never questioned the quiet life she shares with her grandmother in a cottage at the forest's edge - until the night a hooded stranger kicks in the door, kills the old woman, and sends Virva fleeing into the dark with nothing but a name she's never heard before ringing in her ears.

Captured by mountain trolls, she finds herself chained in the same chamber as a black-and-grey wolf who watches her with eyes far too intelligent to belong to any ordinary animal. When Virva discovers the wolf is actually a cursed prince, bound by the same dark wizard who destroyed her family years ago, she makes a desperate choice: break his collar with nothing but her own freely given kindness, and run.

But freedom only reveals a larger, more terrifying truth. Virva is not who she believed herself to be. She is the lost heir to a fallen kingdom, hunted by a witch-king who will stop at nothing to claim the royal blood that runs in her veins - blood powerful enough to shatter an ancient seal holding back a darkness older than any living memory.

With a wolf-prince at her side, a kingdom of grieving loyalists waiting in the shadows, and a power awakening in her own hands that she barely understands, Virva must choose: keep running, or become the princess a dead kingdom needs her to be.

In this world, curses break not through force, but through something far harder to find - an act of genuine kindness, freely given, with nothing expected in return.