Book excerpt: This was supposed to be her happily ever after... It’s a familiar tale: A kind and beautiful young girl, reeling from loss. A doting father, frantic to bring a mother’s love back into his daughter’s life. And the selfish, cruel woman who insinuates herself into that family?a woman so unfeeling, so cold hearted, that when her new husband dies, she makes the girl a servant in her own home. But who is that evil stepmother, that icy lady of the house? How did she become so closed off that, in the face of a child’s grief, she thought only to seek wealth and power for herself and her abhorrent daughters? Before that fateful ball, before the glass slipper and the prince, there was another story?a story of love and grief, of hope and of dreams dashed. It is the story of Lady Tremaine. Even the coldest of villains are sometimes wives and mothers, women who loved and lost and hoped for something grander for their lives . . . once upon a dream. The latest novel in Serena Valentino’s deliciously devious Villains series introduces the most famed and hated wicked stepmother of them all?but turns everything you know about her on its head.