Leanora Tanouye

I woke up from surgery with a jagged scar on my side and a missing kidney. My fiancé, Dante Moretti, the Capo of the Chicago Outfit, hadn't saved me from an illness. He had harvested me like spare parts to save his mistress, Sofia. "She pays the tithe," he had told the surgeon coldly while I was paralyzed by anesthesia. For ten years, I was his loyal shadow. I managed his legitimate empire, took bullets for him, and even aborted our child three years ago because Sofia threw a tantrum about bloodlines. I thought my absolute loyalty would eventually earn his love. But when the Cartel held us both over the edge of a bridge days later, Dante didn't choose me. He tackled Sofia to safety and watched as I fell backward into the freezing black river. He thought I drowned. Or worse, he assumed I was a dog that would eventually swim back to its master, no matter how hard he kicked it. He was wrong. I dragged myself out of that water, but the woman who loved him died in the depths. Seven days later, I didn't return to the Moretti penthouse. I walked straight into the headquarters of his mortal enemy, Enzo Falcone. "Do you still want to marry me?" I asked the man who wanted Dante’s head on a spike. Enzo didn't hesitate. "I will burn the city down before I let him touch you again." Now, Dante is crawling at my gates, paralyzed and ruined, holding a medical box containing my stolen kidney. But he forgot one thing: I don't want it back.

My husband, Austen, was the handsome, stable anchor in my life as a fashion influencer. His one flaw? He was hilariously bad with a camera. Or so I thought, until a viral photo exposed him as Chiaroscuro, a legendary photographer who vanished years ago for his muse, Isolde. On our anniversary, while I was secretly pregnant, he abandoned me to save her comeback show. He called not to check on me, but to demand I ship him my $15,000 camera-a gift from him-for her use. "It's wasted on your little influencer shoots anyway," he said, his voice flat. His words hit me as I sat alone in a clinic, having just lost our baby. He hung up. The dial tone buzzed in the silent room. I wasn't just a placeholder; I was a tool. I looked down at my phone, where the number for my lawyer was already saved, and pressed call.

On the night of our fifth anniversary, my husband left me standing on the shoulder of the Montauk Highway in a blinding thunderstorm. His red taillights didn't even hesitate as they faded into the rain. He abandoned me there because his ex-girlfriend, Isabelle, called to say she heard a scary noise in her basement. I stood in my soaked silk dress, shivering not from the cold, but from the realization that this was the ninth time. He had missed my gallbladder surgery to support her at a polo match. He had missed my grandmother’s funeral to fix her flat tire. But the truth was far crueler than simple neglect. Weeks later, after I survived a terrifying elevator accident that left me with a permanent limp, I overheard them talking at a gala. "The bet was for nine goodbyes, Marcus," Isabelle laughed, clutching his arm. "I bet you that I could make you leave her nine times before she finally snapped. And look at that. I won." My marriage wasn't a tragedy; it was a game. A wager between lovers who used my pain as a scoreboard. I didn't cry. I didn't make a scene. I went back to our penthouse, packed my sketchbooks, and vanished into the night without a word. Five years later, Marcus found me in a small coastal town in Maine. I was no longer the waiting wife. I was a celebrated sculptor, and I was holding the hand of a man who treated me like a treasure, not a toy. Marcus stormed into my studio, demanding I come home. My new husband stepped between us, calm and unyielding. "You're trespassing," he said. "I'm talking to my wife!" Marcus yelled. I finally turned around, looking at the man who had destroyed me, and smiled. "Ex-wife," I corrected softly. "And you're late. About five years too late."

The antiseptic smell of my deathbed couldn't mask the stench of betrayal. My wife, Emily, played the grieving spouse, her tears a performance, her whispers to her lover, Daniel, charting my demise. "He's not going to make it through the night. I'll be free soon, my love." That name, Daniel Sterling, a family friend I admired, shattered my world faster than my failing heart. My final sight was Emily's beautiful, lying face, cold and irritated by my inconvenient death. Then, blinding light. I gasped, sucking in real air, not in a hospital, but my old bedroom, decades younger, strong, unblemished hands. It was real. I was back. Memories of my first life flooded me: the loveless marriage, the quiet sacrifices, the children who weren't mine. Then, the pivotal memory from this timeline, the one that started it all: a party, too much to drink, Emily crying, pregnant, my naive proposal driven by a sense of duty, a lie. She was already carrying Daniel's child, using me as a shield to protect his budding career. The bedroom door creaked open. "Ethan? Are you awake?" It was Emily, radiant and innocent, carrying breakfast, her hand reaching for my forehead with the same feigned care from my deathbed. I flinched from her touch. "Emily," I said, my voice cold, "We need to talk about the wedding." Her smile faltered as I flatly stated, "I don't think we should get married." Her crocodile tears flowed, "I love you, Ethan!" she whimpered. "Don't," I warned, her words now poison. She played her trump card, placing her hand on her stomach. "I'm... I'm pregnant, Ethan. It's your baby." I almost laughed, knowing the truth this time. "Emily has always been like a sister to me," I announced, loud enough for our families downstairs to hear. "I'll always care for her." Her face, pure unadulterated panic, confirmed it. The game had just begun, and this time, I was making the rules.

The call came on a Tuesday, the day before my wedding. My fiancé, David, was dead, killed in a gang shootout. My world shattered; I was five months pregnant, and the grief choked me so completely I tried to take my own life six times. Why was this pain so absolute, so suffocating, when his mother' s eyes were dry and his twin brother, Mark, couldn' t even be bothered to come home for the funeral? Then, late one night, I heard hushed voices from the study-David' s mother and a voice that was undeniably David' s. "You can't keep this up, David," she said. My blood ran cold. "She's strong, Mom. She'll get over it," David' s voice replied, callous and cruel. He wasn' t dead. He had faked his death to be with Olivia, his brother' s wife, claiming she was too "fragile" to handle the truth of losing Mark. Every tear, every desperate attempt to die, had been for a lie. The grief burned away, replaced by an icy fury. My pain wouldn' t vanish; it would transform into fuel. I picked up my phone, scrolled to a name I never thought I' d call-Ethan Thorne, David' s biggest rival. "Mr. Thorne, this is Sarah Miller," I said, my voice shockingly steady. "Your offer… for a hundred-million-dollar dowry to marry me. Does it still stand?"

I was Ava, the unsung architect behind InnovateNext, the tech empire my husband Ethan now helmed. For eight years, I' d been his devoted wife, sacrificing my groundbreaking career and protecting his fragile ego by taking the blame for our infertility. Our Connecticut home was a picture of domestic bliss, a testament to our seemingly perfect life. Then came the ping. A casual link from a friend, unfurling a private Instagram story, shattered everything. There was Ethan, supposedly headlining a conference in San Francisco, but geotagged in SoHo, New York. He stood beaming in a luxury baby boutique, arm around Chloe, a young intern, her belly unmistakably round. The look on his face – pure, unadulterated joy – was a stranger to me. My frantic call to him went to voicemail, followed by his immediate lie: "In a keynote session. Can't talk." Within hours, I faced Chloe in a lavish SoHo loft, perfectly tailored to the desires Ethan had always denied me. She smugly revealed their three-year affair, flaunting how Ethan mirrored "my Pinterest boards" for her, not me. Her final, cruel blow: "He feels sorry for you... A man needs a woman who can give him a family. He needs a woman who is soft, not one who is... capable." The profound betrayal was a punch to the gut, erasing a decade of loyalty and self-sacrifice. My heart didn't break; it turned to ash. All my years shielding his insecurities had been for a man who saw me as merely "capable," not a woman worthy of love or a family. But from that ash, something sharp and cold ignited. Revenge. I wasn't just leaving him. I was going to dismantle every empire he built on my back. The war had just begun.

Ethan Miller, an architect adrift in the shadow of his formidable wife, Isabella Vance, found his fragile existence shattering around him. His public humiliation began when Isabella outbid him for his deceased father's cherished vintage watch, only to immediately gift it to her sleek young lover, Julian Thorne. This cruel public spectacle was merely a prelude to Isabella's escalating emotional warfare. She held his ailing sister, Sarah, hostage with the threat of cutting off her life-saving experimental treatment, using her as leverage to solidify Ethan's subservience and tolerate Julian's constant presence. Julian, an utter villain, brazenly destroyed Ethan's father's watch and framed Ethan for a violent attack, all while Isabella blindly defended her lover, even sanctioning Ethan's physical assault. The ultimate devastation came when Julian, with Isabella's unwitting complicity, orchestrated Sarah's tragic death during experimental surgery. In a final act of horrifying rage and injustice, Isabella, unaware of Ethan's long-held secret protecting her own infertility, summarily aborted their last, desperate chance at a child. Left with nothing but the unbearable grief for his sister, the incomprehensible loss of his unborn child, and the sting of profound betrayal, Ethan wrestled with the unfathomable depths of his wife's cruelty and blindness. How could the woman he'd once loved, who had once saved him, become such a monstrous architect of his destruction? But out of the ashes of his shattered life, a new resolve burned: Ethan meticulously gathered damning evidence against Julian, orchestrating his own 'death' to escape Isabella's suffocating control. He shed his old identity, transforming into Marcus Thorne, finding a new purpose and unexpected love, while Isabella, confronted by his evidence, embarked on her own path of chaotic revenge and desperate atonement.

Here's the translation of your text into English: "In order to avenge the Zleanding family that was wiped out, I became a tool for Prince Cody. He sent me to the regent's residence, and I helped him seize the throne. With the help of love witchcraft, I became the only woman to climb into Regent Tobias's bed since the death of his wife. Tobias couldn't live without me, and he followed my every word and action. As I spent day after day with him, I discovered that the back garden of the Marsh Residence was imprisoning many Zleanding women. In an attempt to bring his deceased wife back to life, he poisoned them to extract resurrection witchcraft. I wanted to take them away, but on the day I obtained the antidote, my identity was revealed to the public. Tobias hated me, yet he loved me because of the witchcraft. Caught between love and hate, I ended his life and left Egoding with those girls who had been imprisoned for half their lives, to rebuild our home."

On my wedding day, my father sold me to the Chicago Outfit to pay his debts. I was supposed to marry Alex Moreno, the heir to the city's most powerful crime family. But he couldn't even be bothered to show up. As I stood alone at the altar, humiliated, my best friend delivered the final blow. Alex hadn't just stood me up; he had run off to California with his mistress. The whispers in the cathedral turned me into a joke. I was damaged goods, the rejected bride. His family knew the whole time and let me take the public fall, offering me his cousins as pathetic replacements-a brute who hated me or a coward who couldn't protect me. The humiliation burned away my fear, leaving only cold rage. My life was already over, so I decided to set the whole game on fire myself. The marriage pact only said a Carlson had to marry a Moreno; it never said which one. With nothing left to lose, I looked past the pathetic boys they offered. I chose the one man they never expected. I chose his father, the Don himself.

My marriage to Joshua Caldwell was a prison sentence. I was a Hartman trophy, sold to the powerful family who had destroyed mine. Then I discovered he was cheating. His mistress was pregnant with the child he denied me, and he was stealing my secret song lyrics to build her career. When I confronted him, he called me a spineless liability and threatened to destroy what was left of my family. To make matters worse, a one-night stand with a stranger turned out to be with my husband's brother, Anthony Caldwell-the Don of the city. He knew all of Joshua's secrets and used them to trap me in a twisted game, seeing me as nothing more than an asset. They both thought I was a broken doll they could control. I wrote a song for his mistress, a beautiful execution with a single, impossible note I knew would destroy her voice. She sang it, and now her career is over. Now the Don has summoned me to Chicago, not knowing the woman he thinks is his asset is the one who just burned his brother's world to the ground.

At my boyfriend's poorest moment, I suddenly broke up with him. Later, he became a Don in the Mafia and married me by any means necessary. Everyone said he loved me to the bone. But every night, he brought different women home, deliberately trying to provoke me. I asked no questions, shed no tears, and never disturbed his trysts with his mistresses. He went crazy with rage instead, kissing me fiercely and demanding, "Why aren't you jealous?" He didn't know I was sick. Dying. While he was furiously taking his revenge on me, I was slowly walking toward death.

Tomorrow was my wedding day to Jason Brennan, the heir to a powerful Mafia family. My family, the Falcones, had even taken in an orphaned girl, Elena, treating her like my own sister. But in my nightmare of a past life, I choked on my own blood, poisoned by the arsenic Elena slipped into my food every day. As I lay agonizingly close to death, Jason stood over me with a cold laugh, holding Elena in his arms. "We just needed the Falcone wealth, Bella. And the docks." Then came the gunfire. I was forced to watch them slaughter my father and my brother, tearing my family out by the roots. After my death, Elena even spread vicious rumors that I was a barren spinster, twisting their foul betrayal into a tragic tale of noble sacrifice to completely destroy my legacy. The metallic tang of my own blood was so real I could still taste the ash. I didn't understand why the girl my family sheltered for eight years would repay our charity with such venom. And I understood even less how the man who swore to love me could orchestrate my brutal murder without a shred of hesitation. Bolting upright in bed, drenched in cold sweat, I realized I had returned to the night before my wedding. This time, I wouldn't just cancel the engagement. I would hand their treason directly to the Mafia's most terrifying Enforcer, and watch them burn.

My adoptive family, the Castillos, treated their biological children like royalty, but used me as a disposable pawn. To secure a mafia alliance, they forced me to take my beautiful sister's place and marry Don Damien Moretti, a man rumored to be a ruthless, bloodthirsty monster. They thought they were sending me to my execution. At our engagement banquet, my mother and sister deliberately gifted me a cheap, counterfeit gown to humiliate me in front of New York's elite. When I publicly exposed their lie, my father demanded I apologize. My mother even raised her hand to slap me in front of everyone. "You are a vicious curse! You ruin everything!" They eagerly waited for the Don to execute me on the spot for embarrassing them. I had spent years secretly saving their company from bankruptcy and supplying the underground experimental drugs that kept my brother's mafia career alive. Yet, they threw me to the wolves without a second thought, disgusted by my very existence. But they didn't know that just an hour before the banquet, I had saved a bleeding, masked stranger in a dark alley-who turned out to be Damien Moretti himself.

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.

When Jimena, a young single mother with a dark past and a violent ex she's desperate to forget, crosses paths with Alessio Fanucci, a dangerous mafia heir, her world is turned upside down. All she wanted was to get by working as a maid at the Fanucci mansion and to keep her distance from the three infamous Fanucci brothers as much as possible. Things take a turn when the oldest brother and heir, Alessio, breaks off his arranged engagement with his ex and urgently needs a new one. Alessio, cold, ruthless, dominant, and not someone anyone talks back to, sees the quiet Jimena as nothing more than his pawn. Meanwhile, she sees Alessio as nothing more than another monster she needs to escape. As they spend more time together, the lines between fake and reality begin to blur, and they discover they have more in common than they initially thought. Tensions rise when Jimena's ex returns, threatening her new comfortable life and the secrets she’s been withholding. He is out for revenge and is determined to go to any length for it, even if that means forming an alliance with the Fanuccis' enemy, who happens to be the family of Alessio’s ex. With a war, untold truths, and feelings at stake, will Jimena’s newly formed bonds keep standing, or will everything around her crumble?

Three days after my fiancé publicly dumped me for my stepsister, the Supreme Don issued a command that silenced the entire estate. I wasn't being cast aside. I was being sold to Damien Russo. The "Broken Don." A crippled, scarred monster rumored to have murdered his last two wives. My adoptive mother, Elena, didn't cry for me. She smirked. To her, I was finally being disposed of. She was so confident I was walking to my death that she decided to loot my corpse before I even left. She forged documents to steal my entire inheritance—my biological mother’s trust fund—to pay for my stepsister’s lavish wedding to my ex. "She won't need money where she's going," my stepsister laughed, wearing a dress bought with my stolen funds. They thought they were sending a lamb to the slaughter. They thought I was too weak, too stupid, and too afraid of the monster to fight back. But they made a fatal mistake. With my aunt’s help, I didn't just find the proof of their embezzlement; I found a weapon. I’m not running from the monster. I’m going to marry him. And when I hand him the evidence that the Herrera family stole from his bride, he won't be my executioner. He will be my vengeance.

I replaced my twin sister in a marriage contract to the ruthless Mafia Don, Donovan Blackwood. For three years, I was a ghost in his home, silently enduring his coldness while he flaunted his mistress, Chloe. On the very last day of our contract, Chloe staged an accident. Donovan didn't hesitate. He forced me to drain my blood to save her life. Then, to prove his loyalty to her, he drove me to the cliffs and pushed me into the freezing ocean. He even locked me in a cellar infested with spiders—my deepest phobia—because she lied and said I threatened her. He thought he was punishing the spoiled, arrogant Isabella. He didn't know he was breaking Ava, the woman who had silently memorized his allergies and waited up for him in the dark every single night. When I finally took my fifty million dollars and vanished, I left behind nothing but the divorce papers and a photo revealing the truth. He tore the city apart, destroying my family to find me, only to realize he had tortured the wrong woman. Now, he is standing on my porch in the pouring rain, staring in horror at the simple wooden ring on my finger given to me by another man. He falls to his knees, begging for a chance to love the wife he tried to destroy. I look at him, feeling absolutely nothing. "It's too late, Donovan," I say, locking the door. "You killed her."

Becoming a bride to settle a debt was never part of my dreams. Yet, my stepbrother's betrayal and a trap party turned my life upside down, shattering my illusions of a joyful marriage. Now, I'm faced with the harsh reality of being married to a ruthless Mafia boss, Alessio Marino. Can I trust his promises, or will my situation be worse than the abuse I endured from my stepbrother? With love stripped from my wedding vows, all I can do is cling to hope for God's mercy and summon the strength to navigate this perilous new life.