**Cook, clean, study, repeat. Cinderella is exhausted.**
After years of misery thanks to the plague, her city is recovering at last. But recovery has a price, and it may be more than Cinderella’s willing to pay. She thought winning a scholarship to the best school in the city would lift her family out of poverty. She never expected it to ruin her life. Now she has to make an impossible choice – support her family or protect herself?
**Commoners are replaceable. Mages aren’t. That’s just the way of things.**
Weslan’s not the best mage student in the city, so when his old friend convinces him to skip school, he’s happy to oblige. Too bad his friend has something far more sinister in mind. A mysterious threat is brewing in their city and it seems that some mages now think nothing of endangering commoners. As one of the city’s elite mages, Weslan shouldn’t care. So why can’t he stop thinking about that beautiful common girl with light-green eyes?
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This **12,000-word novelette** is the prequel to *Fated: Cinderella’s Story*. Read it before or after *Fated* , the first book in the *Destined* series, to catch a glimpse of the intersecting lives of Cinderella and Weslan two years before Cinderella’s story begins. The *Destined* series is a collection of overlapping fairy tale retellings, all set in the same magical world.