The Ruthless Heir's Unwanted Obsessive Love

I watched my husband sign the papers that would end our marriage while he was busy texting the woman he actually loved. He didn't even glance at the header. He just scribbled the sharp, jagged signature that had signed death warrants for half of New York, tossed the file onto the passenger seat, and tapped his screen again. "Done," he said, his voice devoid of emotion. That was Dante Moretti. The Underboss. A man who could smell a lie from a mile away but couldn't see that his wife had just handed him an annulment decree disguised beneath a stack of mundane logistics reports. For three years, I scrubbed his blood out of his shirts. I saved his family's alliance when his ex, Sofia, ran off with a civilian. In return, he treated me like furniture. He left me in the rain to save Sofia from a broken nail. He left me alone on my birthday to drink champagne on a yacht with her. He even handed me a glass of whiskey—her favorite drink—forgetting that I despised the taste. I was merely a placeholder. A ghost in my own home. So, I stopped waiting. I burned our wedding portrait in the fireplace, left my platinum ring in the ashes, and boarded a one-way flight to San Francisco. I thought I was finally free. I thought I had escaped the cage. But I underestimated Dante. When he finally opened that file weeks later and realized he had signed away his wife without looking, the Reaper didn't accept defeat. He burned down the world to find me, obsessed with reclaiming the woman he had already thrown away.

I waited eleven years to marry the Syndicate Underboss. But on the final night of the Old Ways, Silas laughed with his men and announced he would never claim me. Instead, he elevated his adopted sister, Serena, to his side. He left me standing entirely alone at the ceremonial altar, letting the whole mafia family mock me with vulture‑like pity. When I tore Serena's dress in a blind rage, he locked me in an underground fighting cage for his soldiers to jeer at, calling it a fair punishment. His mother openly called me damaged goods, and Silas threatened to give my entire dowry and family territories to Serena if I didn't bow down and apologize to her. For a decade, I endured his emotional abuse, only to realize I was just a convenient shield for his sick obsession with his sister. My heart finally went completely dead. I dropped his blood‑ruby engagement crest into the trash and burned eleven years of memories to ash. Then, I invoked the ancient laws of severance right to his face. "I'm breaking the arrangement." When Alessandro, the lethal Warden of the North, arrived with an armored motorcade to claim me as his Queen, Silas finally panicked. He chased my car, pounding on the glass with bloodshot eyes, begging me to come back. I just looked at him with flat, dead calm and rolled up the window.

I believed marrying Hudson Yale, the most ruthless mafia Don in Los Angeles, would keep my daughter safe. That illusion shattered when he suspended me from a steel beam and ordered his men to whip me until my back bled. My only crime was that my six-year-old daughter and I wore white dresses, a color exclusively reserved for his precious niece, Hazel. While I was locked in a dark basement, Hazel tortured my little girl, forced her to jump off a concrete roof, and casually showed me the video of her death. When I screamed in agony, Hudson didn't care. He kicked me down a flight of marble stairs just to protect Hazel. Because Hazel was diagnosed with leukemia, he even issued a Don's Command for me to donate my bone marrow to save her. When I secretly poisoned my own marrow rather than save my daughter's murderer, he allowed his doctors to inject me with necrotic toxins every single day. I didn't understand why his blind loyalty to his niece meant my parents and my child had to die. Why was I forced to sacrifice my own life and dignity for the monster who destroyed my entire world? But Hudson made one fatal mistake. He always dismissed my maiden name, Cole, as just a common civilian coincidence. He didn't know I was actually the biological sister of Callan Cole, the terrifying Boss of the New York Cosa Nostra. Wiping the blood from my mouth, I dialed my brother's encrypted number. "Help me kill them all."

I was a top medical prodigy with a bright future and a loving fiancé, until my mother's heart failed and she desperately needed life-saving treatments. But my own father refused to pay the $12,000 medical bill. Instead, my fiancé kicked me out of our shared home to marry my stepsister Sabrina, and my father used his money to buy her a brand-new Porsche. I later discovered the horrifying truth. My father had deliberately framed my medical mentor, completely destroying my career, just to get a half-million-dollar payout from the Russian mob to clear his gambling debts. He traded my future and my mother's life for a luxury car and a lavish wedding for his stepdaughter. Left with absolutely nothing, I was forced to sell my silence and become a governess for New York's most ruthless mafia Don just to keep my mother alive. Sabrina even sent me a cheap, scratchy bridesmaid dress, demanding I stand behind her at the altar to watch her marry my ex. "You need to stand behind me in a cheap dress and watch me win. Because if you don't, Father will cut off your mother's life support." They thought they had crushed me into the dirt, expecting me to be their submissive victim forever. But they didn't know the terrifying mafia king had already handed me the irrefutable evidence of their crimes. On the day of the wedding, I threw that cheap dress in the trash, put on a custom black haute couture gown, and walked into the grand ballroom on the arm of the Don. ---

Ashley was tied to a rusted iron pillar in an abandoned warehouse, the noxious fumes of gasoline soaking her clothes. Her fiancé Devon and her stepsister Brittany stood before her, revealing a horrifying truth. Devon never saved her from that fatal car crash three years ago; he merely stole the credit. Worse, Brittany smirked and confessed that Ashley's own father had orchestrated her mother's murder. Before Ashley could process the betrayal, Devon callously tossed a lighter. A wall of blistering heat instantly consumed her. Even when Bennett Hawkins, the cold and untouchable billionaire, rushed into the inferno to shield her with his body, they were both swallowed by the explosion. As the fire melted her skin, Ashley died with agonizing hatred. Why did her own flesh and blood want her dead? What dark secret were they hiding about her mother's tragic death? Opening her eyes again, freezing saltwater violently flooded her lungs. She was back at her twentieth birthday yacht party, right after Brittany had secretly pushed her into the freezing Hudson River. Staring at the hypocritical faces of her family pretending it was an accident, Ashley didn't cry or beg. She calmly snatched a phone and dialed 911. "Yes. I need to report an attempted murder."

I spent three years playing the role of the perfect, invisible wife to Dillard Bentley, the billionaire heir of Manhattan. While he graced the tabloids with socialites, I stayed in the shadows of our penthouse, waiting for a man who treated me like a piece of furniture. One rainy night, the facade finally shattered. Dillard came home smelling of another woman’s perfume, and I handed him the divorce papers he never expected. But before the ink could dry, a violent pain ripped through me during a family lunch, and I collapsed in a pool of blood on the pristine marble floor. While I was being rushed to the hospital, Dillard’s mother dismissed my agony as a manipulative trick, and Dillard chose to believe her. He didn't follow the ambulance; he went to a gala to protect his mistress instead. I woke up in a cold emergency room only to be told I had lost the baby I didn't even know I was carrying. Because of the toxic "vitamins" his mother had been force-feeding me, my blood wouldn't clot, and I had to undergo surgery without a single drop of anesthesia. I bit down on a leather strap, feeling every agonizing scrape as they cleared the remains of my child, while my husband laughed at my pain over the phone. "Stop the drama, Erica. Tell her the divorce terms are non-negotiable. I'm busy." He hung up, leaving me to scream in silence. I realized then that the man I had once loved was the same man who let his family poison me. The "vitamins" weren't supplements; they were a death sentence for my unborn child, and he didn't even care enough to show up. Dillard thinks he’s divorcing a penniless nobody, but he’s about to find out that the world-renowned medical genius he’s desperate to recruit is the wife he left to bleed alone. I walked out of that hospital, threw my wedding ring in the trash, and reclaimed my true identity. Dr. N is coming to the global summit, and I’m not there to save the Bentley empire—I’m there to burn it to the ground.