Lycan King’s Regret: Punished the Wrong Daughter review

First-impressions review: based on the free opening chapters (1–3) and the official synopsis. We will update the score once we have read further.

The premise of Lycan King’s Regret: Punished the Wrong Daughter is all in the title, and the opening chapters deliver it without wasting time. By the end of chapter two, the girl her family threw away has a royal mark on her neck.

The wrong daughter

Arabella Toussaint is the Beta’s daughter in name only. Since her mother died she has cleaned the house with a mop in her hands, taken beatings from her stepmother Vikki (a fireplace poker is her “favourite weapon”), and turned eighteen a week ago without anyone noticing that she never got a wolf. Then a messenger arrives: her half-brother Victor is accused of killing the Lycan King’s sister, Princess Anika, and the King wants Rick Toussaint’s daughter as a slave until her death.

The daughter he means is Vanessa, who is promised to Dante and expects to be his Luna. It takes Vanessa about a page to notice the King never said which daughter, and her father agrees with a shrug: “We never punished you for killing your mother, Arabella.” That line makes clear how this family sees her.

An escape plan that fails

Arabella’s best friend Maya has been begging her to run, and the two plan to leave that night. Vikki and Vanessa catch her packing, take the money she has saved and beat her unconscious. The next day they dye her snow-white hair black, cover the bruises and the scar near her temple, and send her in looking like the Beta’s favourite daughter. The plan is still to run tonight.

Lucien

Chapter two switches to Lucien Volkov, the Lycan King, and his beast Zorro, who smells “butter croissants and lime” and starts shouting “Mate!” the moment he walks into the packhouse. Lucien wants none of it, since he will not take a mate from the pack of his sister’s killer, and he smashes the snack plates to make the point. When Arabella finally stands in front of him, he sniffs her, says “Interesting,” and bites her neck in front of everyone. “Now she won’t be able to run away.”

It is abrupt and very possessive, and the story knows it: Arabella is angry that he marked her without asking. Chapter three plays out the fallout. Vanessa goes from begging to stay home to screaming that the King should have been hers, the pack witch places Arabella under an Alpha command to keep quiet about her past, and the chapter ends on a good hook: two hours into the drive, the King phones the chauffeur and Arabella is told to walk the rest of the way.

What could be better

The family are cartoonishly cruel, with no shading on Vikki or Vanessa so far, and the hero’s first act is a non-consensual mark, which will put some readers off. The text on CrushRead also has visible clean-up problems: stray phone-screen timestamps like “12:41” and garbled characters sit in the middle of sentences, and the pack is spelled both “Blackthorne” and “Blackthorn”. The story is ongoing at 175 chapters. We have also left the reader score off for now: there are only a handful of ratings on CrushRead so far, too few to mean much.

Who should read it

If you like abused-heroine werewolf romances where the scapegoat turns out to be the King’s mate (and the opening hints that she has a hidden power of her own), this opening sets things up quickly and ends each chapter on a hook. Readers who want a gentler hero should wait to see where Lucien goes.