Mi Lu

I took a blade for my husband, Marco, five years ago. It saved his life, but the wound to my stomach cost me the ability to give him an heir. He swore it didn't matter. "I only need you," he had whispered. Today, he brought home my replacement. He called her a "surrogate," a university student named Bianca who was meant to secure his family's bloodline. But that night, I found them tangled in our guest bed. I stood in the doorway, a ghost in my own home, and listened to him praise her. "You're so pure," he whispered. "Lia... she's so frigid." The betrayal was a second blade twisting in my old scar. His affair became blatant. He showered her with gifts and forgot my birthday. When she coveted the heirloom pendant my dying mother gave me, he ripped it from my neck and gave it to her. "It's a worthless trinket," he scoffed. That night, she tried to run me over with his Aston Martin. He arrived to find me bleeding in the driveway, and he didn't even ask if I was okay. He just looked at me with disgust, believing her lies instantly. "What the hell have you done now?" he bellowed. "You're not dead, are you?" I laughed then, a hollow, chilling sound. I picked up my suitcase, turned my back on the ruins of my marriage, and made a single phone call. "Dante," I said to my brother, the Don of the Romano family. "It's done. Cut them off."

I found my mate, the Alpha, on his knees. But it wasn't for me, his Luna. He was tenderly massaging the swollen ankle of Isabella, his pregnant, widowed sister-in-law, with a look of concern I had never once received. For months, he had allowed her to live in our private den, letting her disrespect me at every turn. He cooked her favorite breakfast—a meal he knew would make me violently ill—and lied that it was a gift for me. The final betrayal came when I found her wearing my mother's sacred necklace, a sigil passed down through generations of my family's Lunas. When I confronted her, she let it slip from her fingers with a theatrical gasp, shattering my heritage on the marble floor. Something inside me snapped. I slapped her. Seeing his precious, grieving widow struck, my mate didn't hesitate. He slapped me back. The full force of an Alpha sent me crashing to the ground, my hand landing in the broken shards of my past. Lying there, bleeding, I looked up at the man I was bound to and spoke the forbidden words. "I, Selene of the Silvermoon Pack, reject you, Lycan of the Blackstone Pack, as my Mate." Then I sent a single, clear message through the mind-link to my oldest friend. "He hit me. Bring your warriors. I want this place torn down to the ground."

For twelve years, I was the shame of the Silver Moon Pack. A Luna who never shifted, a barren wife who couldn't give Alpha Ivan an heir. I thought my body was broken. But on my thirtieth birthday, I learned I wasn't sick. I was being murdered. Tracking Ivan to a downtown gallery, I expected to catch him in a lie about work. Instead, I saw him playing father to a child that wasn't mine, while his mistress looked on with a smirk. Then, I heard my own father’s voice booming through the thin glass. "If that White Wolf blood of hers ever woke up, she'd destroy us all. Better she dies a sickly Omega." My husband, my Fated Mate, didn't defend me. He just checked his watch. "She smells of death already. The Wolfsbane in her tea will finish her off during the fireworks tonight. Then we can finally replace the mule." My knees hit the floor. For five years, the "medicine" they forced down my throat wasn't a cure. It was poison designed to suppress my Supreme rank. They didn't hate me because I was weak; they were killing me because I was stronger than all of them combined. I drove back to the mansion, my sadness hardening into cold rage. I poured the lethal tea down the sink and picked up the microphone for the Pack Gathering. They were expecting a funeral tonight. I was about to give them a public execution.

I was the orphan the wealthy Sampson family raised as their own. For twenty years, their house was my home, and their son, Brock, was my brother and best friend. My life was perfect, safe, and filled with love. Then Brock brought home Fiona. She was beautiful, charming, and immediately saw me as a rival to be eliminated. She started a war of whispers, calling me a freeloader with an incestuous obsession, a parasite on their fortune. When she deliberately shattered the only locket I had of my dead parents, Brock defended her. "You're acting like a spoiled brat," he told me. My own brother, my protector, chose a manipulative stranger over me, believing her poison. The family that had saved me was being torn apart from the inside. At my graduation party, Fiona cornered me, promising to publicly toast to my "sick obsession" and ruin my family's name. She thought I would crumble. But as she took the stage, I calmly walked over to my father's chief of staff. "Let her speak," I said. "And have security ready."

My name is Ava Green, and I have a secret gift: anything I touch turns to gold when my emotions run high. After 500 transformations, I earned a wish, and on the glowing silk sheets of a night filled with love, I used it to make my husband, Mark Sterling, CEO of the planet' s largest tech company, Innovate Global, along with universal acclaim. The next morning, the news exploded: Mark was the new CEO. But at his first press conference, he introduced his "fiancée": not me, his wife of three years, but Dr. Emily Hayes, his childhood friend. My world shattered as he paraded her, while proclaiming I "knew my place" as his "good luck charm" and the "woman on the side." How could he betray me so completely, after all I' d given him? He thought he had me trapped, controlled by threats to my family. He had no idea that beneath my feigned compliance, I was twisting my gift, transforming every ounce of my humiliation and pain into a dark, potent curse.

My 21st birthday gala was supposed to be a dream: my custom Tiffany gown, a perfect fiancé, a future as the Vanderbilt heiress. But a horrifying premonition shattered it, a vivid nightmare where my cousin Chloe stole my dress and my spotlight, while my fiancé Liam and even my own brother, Ethan, betrayed me. They' d condemn me to a forced marriage with Dimitri Volkov, a Russian oligarch' s volatile son, leading to my complete ruin and tragic end. I woke with a gasp, determined to defy destiny. My first moves were bold: humiliating Chloe publicly, slapping Liam, and forcing a groveling apology from Ethan. But my initial triumph was short-lived. Chloe, with Ethan's complicity, concocted a fake pregnancy to ensnare him, while Liam, desperate for family alliance, joined their despicable plot. Together, they orchestrated the slow poisoning of my beloved father, Harrison Vanderbilt, seizing control of his empire and pushing me towards the very Volkov marriage my vision foretold. How could my own kin commit such monstrous acts? The crushing grief for my father morphed into a cold, burning fury. They thought they had broken me, defeated me into quiet submission. They were wrong. Unknown to them, my father had armed me with a secret dossier and a network of loyalists. As I boarded the jet to Monaco, I was no longer a Vanderbilt heiress being shipped off; I was a predator, unleashed.

I leaned against the old warehouse frame, my body aching and face swollen from the fight with my family. I' d given up everything for Chloe, ready to start a new life with her. But the workshop wasn't quiet; it blazed with obnoxious music, laughter, and champagne bottles. Chloe was there, too, stunning in a sparkling dress, laughing with the very society people she claimed to hate. Then she saw me, and her laughter didn't stop; it only twisted into a slow, cruel smirk. "Look what the cat dragged in," she purred, her voice cold. My brother, Marcus, stepped forward, his smug smile sealing my dread. This wasn' t Chloe' s workshop; it was rented. My entire relationship, my grand sacrifice, was just a bet. A monstrously cruel game, orchestrated by Chloe and my own brother, to see if "golden boy" Ethan Cole would actually throw away his life for a girl he thought was a poor, struggling mechanic. Her friends roared with laughter as they unveiled the prize for their wager: a perfect, gleaming vintage Shelby Cobra, the legendary car I had always dreamed of. Humiliation burned hotter than any physical pain, scorching every inch of my being. "You… you lied about everything?" I rasped, the words choked with disbelief and a crushing sense of betrayal. How could the woman I' d loved, my own blood, orchestrate such a depraved, public spectacle? Was I truly that naive, that blind to believe in such a perfect lie? I stumbled, broken, back out into the night, their mocking laughter echoing like a death knell in the empty street. But as I walked away from the ruins of my life, a chilling realization ignited within me: this wasn't just my humiliation; it was their first move, and now, I was ready to play.

She didn't know whether her choice was right or not, but she had been cornered into the dead end. Three years ago, Vicky left without saying anything to Lincoln. Having been looking for her crazily for half a year, he finally gave up. If not for her daughter, she didn't want to have anything to do with him for the rest of her life, but fate had another plan. The first day they met again after years, she spent a wild night with him. Only by then did he realize that he had never forgotten her. But she still chose to leave him the next day, yet he would never let her go this time.

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.

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.

For four years, I traced the bullet scar on Chace’s chest, believing it was proof he would bleed to keep me safe. On our anniversary, he told me to wear white because "tonight changes everything." I walked into the gala thinking I was getting a ring. Instead, I stood frozen in the center of the ballroom, drowning in silk, watching him slide his mother's sapphire onto another woman's finger. Karyn Warren. The daughter of a rival family. When I begged him with my eyes to claim me, to save me from the public humiliation, he didn't flinch. He just leaned toward his Underboss, his voice amplified by the silence. "Karyn is for power. Ember is for pleasure. Don't confuse the assets." My heart didn't just break; it incinerated. He expected me to stay as his mistress, threatening to dig up my dead mother’s grave if I refused to play the obedient pet. He thought I was trapped. He thought I had nowhere to go because of my father’s massive gambling debts. He was wrong. With shaking hands, I pulled out my phone and texted the one name I was never supposed to use. Keith Mosley. The Don. The monster under Chace's bed. *I am invoking the Blood Oath. My father’s debt. I am ready to pay it.* His reply came three seconds later, buzzing against my palm like a warning. *The price is marriage. You belong to me. Yes or No?* I looked up at Chace, who was laughing with his new fiancée, thinking he owned me. I looked down and typed three letters. *Yes.*

I'm a moaning mess as Antonio slams into me from behind. His hips hit me hard, and each deep thrust sends shockwaves through my body. My breasts bounce with every movement, my eyes roll back, and I moan his name without control. The pleasure he gives me is overwhelming-I can't hold it in. I feel my walls tighten around his thick length. The pressure builds fast, and then- I explode around him, my orgasm tearing through me. He groans loud and deep as he releases inside me, his hot seed spilling into me in thick pulses. Just when I think he's done, his grip shifts. He turns me over and lays me flat on the bed. His dark eyes stare into mine for a moment, filled with raw hunger. I glance down- He's still hard. Before I can react, he grabs my wrists, pins me down, and pushes himself inside me again. He fills me completely. My hips rise on instinct, meeting his rhythm. Our bodies move together, locked in a wild, uncontrollable dance. "You're fucking sweet," he groans, his voice rough and breathless. "I can't get enough of you... not after that night, Sol," he growls, slamming into me harder. The force of his words and his thrusts make my body shake. "Come for me," he commands, his voice low and full of heat. And just like that, my body trembles. Waves of pleasure crash over me. I cry out, shaking with the force of my orgasm. "Mine," he growls again, louder this time. His voice is feral, wild, like a beast claiming what belongs to him. The sound sends a shiver down my spine. *** Solene was betrayed, humiliated, and erased by Rowan Brook, the man she once called husband, Solene is left with nothing but her name and a burning hunger for revenge. She turns to the one man powerful enough to destroy the Brooks family from within: Rowan's estranged and dangerous uncle, Antonio Rodriguez. He's ruthless. A playboy who never sleeps with the same woman twice. But when Solene walks into his world, he doesn't just break the rules, he creates new ones just for her. What begins as a calculated game quickly spirals into obsession, power plays, and secrets too deadly to stay buried. Because Solene isn't just anyone's ex... she's the woman they should've never underestimated. Can she survive the price of revenge? Or will her heart become the next casualty? And when the truth comes out, will Antonio still choose her... or destroy her?

I stood outside my husband's study, the perfect mafia wife, only to hear him mocking me as an "ice sculpture" while he entertained his mistress, Aria. But the betrayal went deeper than infidelity. A week later, my saddle snapped mid-jump, leaving me with a shattered leg. Lying in the hospital bed, I overheard the conversation that killed the last of my love. My husband, Alessandro, knew Aria had sabotaged my gear. He knew she could have killed me. Yet, he told his men to let it go. He called my near-death experience a "lesson" because I had bruised his mistress's ego. He humiliated me publicly, freezing my accounts to buy family heirlooms for her. He stood by while she threatened to leak our private tapes to the press. He destroyed my dignity to play the hero for a woman he thought was a helpless orphan. He had no idea she was a fraud. He didn't know I had installed micro-cameras throughout the estate while he was busy pampering her. He didn't know I had hours of footage showing his "innocent" Aria sleeping with his guards, his rivals, and even his staff, laughing about how easy he was to manipulate. At the annual charity gala, in front of the entire crime family, Alessandro demanded I apologize to her. I didn't beg. I didn't cry. I simply connected my drive to the main projector and pressed play.

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.

I was three days away from marrying the Underboss of the Fazio crime family when I unlocked his burner phone. The screen glowed toxic bright in the dark next to my sleeping fiancé. A message from a contact saved as 'Little Trouble' read: "She is just a statue, Dante. Come back to bed." Attached was a photo of a woman lying in the sheets of his private office, wearing his shirt. My heart didn't break; it simply stopped. For eight years, I believed Dante was the hero who pulled me from a burning opera house. I played the perfect, loyal Mafia Princess for him. But heroes don't give their mistresses rare pink diamonds while giving their fiancées cubic zirconia replicas. He didn't just cheat. He humiliated me. He defended his mistress over his own soldiers in public. He even abandoned me on the side of the road on my birthday because she faked a pregnancy emergency. He thought I was weak. He thought I would accept the fake ring and the disrespect because I was just a political pawn. He was wrong. I didn't cry. Tears are for women who have options. I had a strategy. I walked into the bathroom and dialed a number I hadn't dared to call in a decade. "Speak," a voice like gravel growled on the other end. Lorenzo Moretti. The Capo of the rival family. The man my father called the Devil. "The wedding is off," I whispered, staring at my reflection. "I want an alliance with you, Enzo. And I want the Fazio family burned to the ground."

I was meant to study law. Instead, the law sold me. My father's debts sold me into a contract marriage with Dante Moretti, the heir to a mafia empire who hides behind a billion-dollar legal empire. To the world, he's the polished, untouchable CEO. Behind closed doors, he's ruthless, demanding, and dangerously irresistible. I swore I'd outsmart him that I'd serve my time and win my freedom. But every kiss feels like a trap, every touch like a dare, and every secret I uncover pulls me deeper into his world. And the longer I stay, the harder it is to remember: Am I his prisoner... or his bride?

I was the Chicago Outfit's princess, and Luca and Matteo were my sworn protectors. We had mixed our blood at ten years old, promising that nothing would ever touch me. But that oath turned to ash the night Sofia Ricci aimed a Roman candle at my chest. The firework slammed into my shoulder, igniting my silk dress instantly. As I rolled on the concrete, screaming while the flames ate into my skin, I waited for my boys to save me. They didn't. Instead, I watched through the smoke as they rushed to Sofia. They wrapped their jackets—the ones meant to shield me—around the girl who had just set me on fire, comforting her because the "kickback" had scared her. They let me burn to keep her warm. When I woke up in the hospital with permanent scars, they brought me a letter of apology from her and defended her "accident." They even cut their palms to pay her debt, ignoring the fact that I was the one in bandages. That was the moment Elena Vitiello died. I didn't scream. I didn't beg. I simply packed my bags and defected to the one place they couldn't follow: the arms of Dante Moretti, the lethal Capo of New York. By the time they realized their mistake and came crawling back to beg in the rain, I was already wearing another man's ring. "You want forgiveness?" I asked, looking down at them. "Burn for it."

My husband, the Outfit’s most feared Consigliere, stood up and buttoned his suit jacket. He had just convinced a jury that Sofia Moretti was innocent. But we both knew the truth: Sofia had poisoned my mother over a spilled martini on her Valentino dress. Instead of comforting me, Dante looked at me with cold, dead eyes. "If you make a scene," he whispered, gripping my arm until it bruised, "I will bury you in a psychiatric ward so deep even God won't find you." To protect the Family alliance, he sacrificed his wife. When I tried to fight back, he drugged me at a gala. He let a private investigator take photos of me, naked and unconscious, just to have leverage to keep me silent. He paraded Sofia around our penthouse, letting her wear my dead mother’s shawl while I was banished to the staff quarters. He thought he had broken me. He thought I was just a nurse’s daughter he could manage. But he made a fatal error. He didn't read the "committal forms" I handed him to sign. They were divorce papers, transferring his assets to me. And the night of the yacht party, while he toasted to his victory with my mother's killer, I left my wedding ring on the deck. I didn't jump to die. I jumped to be reborn. And when I resurfaced, I made sure Dante Russo burned for every sin.