Xiao Wang

I was just the decoration at the gala, the dutiful wife of Chicago's Underboss, Dante Moretti. Then my phone buzzed with a photo of his hand on another woman's thigh, taken inside the venue just minutes ago. I finally snapped, leaking the photo to the press to shame him. Dante dragged me home, pinned me to the sofa, and carved a thin line into my collarbone with a switchblade. "You don't get to leave until I say you're done," he warned. But the real devastation came later. An anonymous video file revealed the truth about my mother's "suicide" ten years ago. She didn't jump. My sister, Sofia, pushed her. And Dante? He didn't marry me for power. He brokered a deal with my father to cover up the murder and took me as hush money. I crashed Sofia's birthday party to expose them, but my father slapped me in front of everyone. Dante grabbed my fresh wound and forced me to my knees. "Apologize to your sister," he threatened, "or I bulldoze your mother's grave right now." I swallowed my pride, bowed my head, and apologized. But Sofia just laughed, pulled out a detonator, and pressed the button anyway. "Oops," she giggled as the explosion rocked the ground. "Happy birthday to me." Watching the smoke rise from my mother's destroyed mausoleum, the old Elena died. I vanished into the night, leaving behind signed divorce papers and my bloodied dress. When Dante finally tracked me down, I wasn't hiding in fear. I was standing next to his mortal enemy, Luca Rossi, wearing a massive diamond ring. I handed Dante a cream-colored envelope. "What is this?" he asked, his hands trembling. "An invitation," I said, my voice ice-cold. "To the wedding of Don Luca Rossi and Elena Vitiello."

Three years after I buried an empty casket for my husband, I found him alive in a grocery store parking lot. He was rubbing a stranger's pregnant belly, smiling a soft smile I had never seen in our years of marriage. My husband, the ruthless Don of Chicago, had become "Arthur," a gentle man with no memory of the empire he ruled or the wife he left behind. To protect his happiness, I swallowed my agony and lied. "I am his cousin," I told his pregnant fiancée, Mia. I brought them home to his estate, enduring the torture of watching him give her the tenderness that used to belong to me. But my mercy was rewarded with cruelty. Dante looked at me with cold, unfamiliar eyes and slapped divorce papers onto the table. "Sign them," he demanded, his voice devoid of emotion. "I want to marry Mia before the baby comes. I want a fresh start." He didn't know I was dying of a heart defect caused by the stress of grieving him. He didn't know I stalled for two weeks not for money, but because I wanted to be buried with his name. I died the morning the deadline arrived, taking the secret of my love to the grave. Ironically, that very night, a bullet grazed his temple during an ambush, unlocking the memories he had lost. He remembered the peach orchard. He remembered our blood oath. He remembered that I was his soulmate. He ran to my brother’s gates, screaming my name, blood pouring down his face, desperate to beg for forgiveness. But my brother just stood there, blocking the entrance to the cemetery with a cruel smile. "She waited for you every single day," he spat. "And you killed her."

My fiancé thought he was manipulating a naive heiress, unaware I had video proof of him plotting to commit me to an asylum. He planned to steal my inheritance with my cousin, but tonight, I' m not signing a marriage license. I' m signing his death warrant. For years, I played the role of the docile, grateful orphan while Holden and Dianne mocked me behind my back. They called me mentally incompetent, laughing as they planned to strip me of my father' s legacy and lock me away. I watched them parade around my birthday gala, smug in their victory, treating me like a fragile doll on the verge of a breakdown. They expected tears. They expected submission. Instead, they got a cold-blooded execution. In front of the entire New York elite, I didn't hand my voting rights to the golden boy who promised to love me. I walked past him and handed the charter to the one man the entire family feared. Hazen Ingram. The scarred, silent "monster" of the dynasty. As Holden screamed and was dragged away by security, I realized something terrifyingly beautiful. I didn't just choose revenge. I chose the only man who ever truly protected me.

My boyfriend, a chess prodigy, planned to publicly humiliate me at our graduation. He'd spent three years faking our relationship, even secretly filming us, all to get revenge for a lie he believed about my father. I overheard his entire twisted plan just before it was set to happen. So I fled to Paris, leaving him with the wreckage of his prized antique chess set and a video of me smashing it to pieces. I built a new life, found real love with a kind man named Kolton, and my art began to flourish. I was finally healing, finally safe. Then, one morning, my ex shattered my apartment door, holding a black rose, his eyes burning with a terrifying declaration: "I was wrong. I love you. And I'm not leaving until you're mine again."

My voice was a pathetic whisper. I was on my knees, hands clutching the hem of her dress. My vision was blurry, the room swaying. "Get off me, Ethan," she said, her voice flat. "You' re pathetic." She kicked my hands away. The love I used to see in her eyes was gone, replaced by contempt. Then I heard Liam, my own half-brother, gloating. "Pixel Legacy is ours now, Sophia. And with his signature on that transfer document, there' s nothing he can do." My game. My life' s work. Stolen. And Sophia, my girlfriend, was his willing accomplice. The drug Liam gave me hit hard. I was in agony, slamming my raw knuckles against the carpet. I heard their laughter from the living room. She re-entered, ordered me to stop making noise, and when I begged for a doctor, she locked me in. Later, she and Liam forced more of the poison down my throat, leaving me to dissolve into a black void. When I woke, I was in a hospital. A new intern, Noah, told me he found me unconscious in the bathroom, bleeding. My phone buzzed with an email from Sophia: an "Agreement" to erase me from my own life, stealing everything, leaving me with nothing but a few thousand dollars as a consolation prize. How could she? How could three years of shared dreams crumble into this cruel reality? Was it always a lie? As I lay there, helpless and broken, a cold resolve settled in my gut. I would not die here. I would leave. I would survive this. I would get my own back.

I had given ten years of my life to Scott & Associates, a law firm I built from the ground up, making myself indispensable as their senior paralegal and handling everything from client intake to IT. My boss, Mr. Scott, had promised me a partnership for years, a dream I clung to, along with my significant five-figure Christmas bonus that barely acknowledged my worth. Then, his newly-graduated niece, Madisyn, arrived as "Operations Manager" and immediately announced a drastic, public pay cut, effective immediately. The harassment began almost instantly-forced to clean toilets, fix jammed copiers, and endure petty humiliations while Mr. Scott watched and approved. But the real blow came when I learned Madisyn had slashed my bonus from five figures to a mere thousand dollars, falsely accusing me of laziness to justify her actions. Every shred of loyalty I had withered, replaced by a cold fury at their betrayal and utter disregard for my dedication. They had no idea what they had just unleashed. I didn't just quit; I walked out, knowing my meticulous records would soon expose their financial crimes and tear their entire empire down.

For two years, falling for Andrew Morris was my escape-an immortal like me, I just wanted a simple, mortal love, a normal life. But two days after he promised me a home in the Appalachians, his warm voice turned to ice: "She's the one. Take her." Suddenly, I was on my knees, wrists bound, watching Andrew hold another woman, Jennifer, as the entire town looked on. They had lured me here to be a human sacrifice for their "Forest Spirit," a desperate plea to save their crops. Imprisoned and drugged with a truth root, I watched Andrew try to steal my fortune, only for Jennifer to swoop in, expose their mutual deceit, and brutally slash my face. Pain and betrayal consumed me, an agony amplified by the bizarre echo of my ancient past, and a desperate, drug-addled whisper escaped my lips: "Caleb will know." Hours later, beaten and abandoned on a moss-covered altar, I was ready for death, until the true "Forest Spirit" appeared-not a monster, but the powerful, terrifying being I had spent centuries running from, the very one who had "cursed" me with endless life: Caleb.

On our third wedding anniversary, I left my restaurant early, the scent of success clinging to my whites, a silver locket meant for my wife, Jocelyn, burning a hole in my pocket. But when I found her at her Silicon Valley office, she wasn't waiting for me; she was laughing, head tilted back, with Caleb Blakely, her old flame. My blood ran cold when she introduced me, her husband of three years, as merely a "friend who collaborates on catering events," right after I watched her sign the divorce papers I' d cunningly hidden within a fake contract. Over the next weeks, I watched her prioritize his manufactured crises, accept his cronuts while ignoring our vanishing past, and heard her speak to him with the intimate warmth she hadn't shown me in years. I lay in a hospital bed, shattered from a car crash, while the woman who vowed to be my life partner, was busy celebrating Caleb' s birthday, completely oblivious to my situation. That same evening, standing in the quiet, empty apartment I' d secretly moved my life into, I looked out at the city lights and finally calmly said, "It's over, Jocelyn. We' re over."

My wedding night was supposed to be a dream. I stood there, stiff in my white lace dress, looking forward to forever with Ethan. He was the man I'd loved since girlhood, our families and friends had just celebrated our union. But the dream quickly turned into a nightmare. In our honeymoon suite, he coldly declared, "This was a mistake. I don't love you." He spoke of annulment, "false pretenses," and just tossed me aside like yesterday's trash. Five years passed in the shadow of that brutal humiliation. I rebuilt my life, slowly, finding quiet happiness as the secretly married wife of US Senator Alex Sterling. But fate, or perhaps cruelty, intervened. A chance encounter in a bookstore brought Ethan and his current fiancée, Brittany – my former intern – back into my life. They relentlessly mocked me, scorned my simple life, then falsely accused me of theft. The public spectacle escalated into physical violence as Ethan dragged me into a back room, intent on disfiguring me with a letter opener, all while Brittany smirked. Trapped, bruised, and bleeding, I faced the man who had shattered my world once before, now determined to destroy me completely. How could he still hold such power, such venom? Why did he refuse to believe my truth, even when my dignity lay shattered on the floor for all to see? Just as despair threatened to consume me and the sharp point of the letter opener hovered inches from my face, a commanding voice split the chaos: "Get your hands off my wife!" My husband, Senator Alex Sterling, strode in, a force of nature, ready to reclaim his Sarah and exact a righteous fury.

As Ava Moreno, a Queens girl with a mountain of medical bills, my sustainable design for the Phoenix Tower was my magnum opus, ready to redefine NYC's skyline. This was the breakthrough I'd poured my soul into, my chance to save my ailing mother whose MS was relentlessly worsening. Suddenly, in a packed boardroom, Julian Sterling’s aide, Liam Astor, launched a vicious public attack. He stripped me from the project, twisting my past into insidious rumors of "ethical ambiguities" and "gold-digging" from my college days. My career, my reputation—everything I’d built—imploded in an instant. The fallout was brutal. My former colleague, Veronica Bell, shamelessly took over, later sabotaging my design, while my old boss, Marcus Finch, tried to blackmail me. Forced into desperate measures, I faced humiliating propositions from powerful men like Councilman Thompson, revealing the city's predatory underbelly. All the while, my mother's experimental treatments demanded astronomical sums, plunging me deeper into a financial abyss. Why did this keep happening? Was I destined to be a victim, my talent overshadowed by relentless slander? Every act of "help" from Julian Sterling, the enigmatic billionaire I’d known since college, felt like a transactional noose, further cementing my public image as his "kept woman." But as I faltered under the weight of it all, a fierce resolve ignited. I would not break. For my mother, I would accept this "blood money," navigate this gilded cage, and fight. My journey into the cutthroat world of power and compromise had only just begun.

Daria had been promoted to the role of the CEO's secretary but it left her feeling confused. She was so happy that her career was taking off but what she didn't know was that she had unwittingly stepped into a romantic trap. On her first day in her new role, she encountered a challenging situation. She walked into her boss's office to find him tussling with a woman. While trying to help him, she ended up accidentally stabbing him with a cactus. She couldn't understand why an average girl like her was chosen for this important role in the first place and now she was terrified that she would lose her new job on the first day itself. What would happen when she learned the truth? Where would their story go?

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'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.

I was the spare daughter of the Vitiello crime family, born solely to provide organs for my golden sister, Isabella. Four years ago, under the codename "Seven," I nursed Dante Moretti, the Don of Chicago, back to health in a safe house. I was the one who held him in the dark. But Isabella stole my name, my credit, and the man I loved. Now, Dante looked at me with nothing but cold disgust, believing her lies. When a neon sign crashed down on the street, Dante used his body to shield Isabella, leaving me to be crushed under twisted steel. While Isabella sat in a VIP suite crying over a scratch, I lay broken, listening to my parents discuss if my kidneys were still viable for harvest. The final straw came at their engagement gala. When Dante saw me wearing the lava stone bracelet I had worn in the safe house, he accused me of stealing it from Isabella. He ordered my father to punish me. I took fifty lashes to my back while Dante covered Isabella's eyes, protecting her from the ugly truth. That night, the love in my heart finally died. On the morning of their wedding, I handed Dante a gift box containing a cassette tape—the only proof that I was Seven. Then, I signed the papers disowning my family, threw my phone out the car window, and boarded a one-way flight to Sydney. By the time Dante listens to that tape and realizes he married a monster, I will be thousands of miles away, never to return.

I died on a Tuesday. It wasn't a quick death. It was slow, cold, and meticulously planned by the man who called himself my father. I was twenty years old. He needed my kidney to save my sister. The spare part for the golden child. I remember the blinding lights of the operating theater, the sterile smell of betrayal, and the phantom pain of a surgeon's scalpel carving into my flesh while my screams echoed unheard. I remember looking through the observation glass and seeing him-my father, Giovanni Vitiello, the Don of the Chicago Outfit-watching me die with the same detached expression he used when signing a death warrant. He chose her. He always chose her. And then, I woke up. Not in heaven. Not in hell. But in my own bed, a year before my scheduled execution. My body was whole, unscarred. The timeline had reset, a glitch in the cruel matrix of my existence, giving me a second chance I never asked for. This time, when my father handed me a one-way ticket to London-an exile disguised as a severance package-I didn't cry. I didn't beg. My heart, once a bleeding wound, was now a block of ice. He didn't know he was talking to a ghost. He didn't know I had already lived through his ultimate betrayal. He also didn't know that six months ago, during the city's brutal territory wars, I was the one who saved his most valuable asset. In a secret safe house, I stitched up the wounds of a blinded soldier, a man whose life hung by a thread. He never saw my face. He only knew my voice, the scent of vanilla, and the steady touch of my hands. He called me Sette. Seven. For the seven stitches I put in his shoulder. That man was Dante Moretti. The Ruthless Capo. The man my sister, Isabella, is now set to marry. She stole my story. She claimed my actions, my voice, my scent. And Dante, the man who could spot a lie from a mile away, believed the beautiful deception because he wanted it to be true. He wanted the golden girl to be his savior, not the invisible sister who was only ever good for her spare parts. So I took the ticket. In my past life, I fought them, and they silenced me on an operating table. This time, I will let them have their perfect, gilded lie. I will go to London. I will disappear. I will let Seraphina Vitiello die on that plane. But I will not be a victim. This time, I will not be the lamb led to slaughter. This time, from the shadows of my exile, I will be the one holding the match. And I will wait, with the patience of the dead, to watch their entire world burn. Because a ghost has nothing to lose, and a queen of ashes has an empire to gain.

When I was eight, Dante Moretti pulled me from the fire that killed my family. For ten years, the powerful crime boss was my protector and my god. Then, he announced his engagement to another woman to unite two criminal empires. He brought her home and named her the future mistress of the Moretti family. In front of everyone, his fiancée forced a cheap metal collar around my neck, calling me their pet. Dante knew I was allergic. He just watched, his eyes cold, and ordered me to take it. That night, I listened through the walls as he took her to his bed. I finally understood the promise he’d made me as a child was a lie. I wasn't his family. I was his property. After a decade of devotion, my love for him finally turned to ash. So on his birthday, the day he celebrated his new future, I walked out of his gilded cage for good. A private jet was waiting to take me to my real father—his greatest enemy.

I was the Architect who built the digital fortress for the most feared Don in New York. To the world, I was Brendan Wiggins’s silent, elegant Queen. But then my burner phone buzzed under the dinner table. It was a photo from his mistress: a positive pregnancy test. "Your husband is celebrating right now," the caption read. "You are just the furniture." I looked across the table at Brendan. He smiled and held my hand, lying to my face without blinking. He thought he owned me because he saved my life ten years ago. He told her I was just "functional." That I was a barren asset he kept around to look respectable, while she carried his legacy. He thought I would accept the disrespect because I had nowhere else to go. He was wrong. I didn't want to divorce him—you don't divorce a Don. And I didn't want to kill him. That was too easy. I wanted to erase him. I liquidated fifty million dollars from the offshore accounts only I could access. I destroyed the servers I had built. Then, I contacted a black-market chemist for a procedure called "Tabula Rasa." It doesn't kill the body. It wipes the mind clean. A total hard reset of the soul. On his birthday, while he was out celebrating his bastard son, I drank the vial. When he finally came home to find the empty house and the melted wedding ring, he realized the truth. He could burn the world down looking for me, but he would never find his wife. Because the woman who loved him no longer existed.

I was the "Caged Canary" of the underworld, a biological asset designed to merge two crime families. My fiancé, Bryant Barnes, didn't love me. He loved the power I brought, and he loved his mistress, Kalia. The night Kalia broke into my penthouse and stomped on my hand, crushing the bones and my fashion career, Bryant didn't help me. He told the police she was my guest and warned me not to embarrass him with a cast. That was just the beginning. When Kalia lied about feeling unsafe, Bryant dangled me off a balcony. When she faked a kidnapping, he locked me in an industrial freezer for six hours until I turned blue. And when I fell into the marina, he swam right past me to save her, leaving me to drown in the freezing water. He destroyed my body and my dignity for a woman who was stealing my designs and faking a pregnancy. He thought I was just a broken obligation he could discard. But he made a fatal mistake. He didn't make sure I was dead. I dragged myself out of the water and made a call to his greatest rival. On the night of our grand merger, I walked onto the stage wearing royal blue instead of white. I rolled up my sleeve to reveal the scars he gave me, looked him dead in the eye, and grabbed the microphone. "I hereby terminate my engagement to Bryant Barnes. And I am proud to announce my betrothal to the true King of this city."

I stood alone at the center of my art gallery opening, clutching a glass of warm champagne, while the guests whispered behind their hands. My husband, the Capo of the Chicago Outfit, wasn't there. A breaking news alert on my phone explained why. It was a high-definition photo of Dante shielding his mistress, Isabella, from the rain. He was touching her with a protective possessiveness he had never once shown me. Then came his text: "Isabella needed me. Go home." That was the moment the cage door unlocked. I didn't go home to cry. I went to his office the next morning with a stack of papers disguised as "gallery insurance forms." While Isabella sat on his desk, mocking me for being a boring housewife, Dante was too annoyed to read the fine print. He just wanted me gone so he could get back to her. He signed the divorce decree. He signed the asset dissolution. Most importantly, without looking, he signed the irrevocable relinquishment of parental rights. I walked out with my freedom, but fate had a cruel sense of humor. That night, I stared at a positive pregnancy test. I was carrying the Sovrano heir he had always demanded. And he had just legally signed away his right to ever know his child. I fled to the Swiss Alps, vanishing into the snow to raise my baby away from his world of blood and bullets. I thought I was safe, until six months later. Dante hadn't just sent men to look for me. He had burned his own shipping empire to the ground, destroying his status as King, just to prove he would trade it all for the wife he threw away.

For nine years, I was the perfect mafia wife. I laundered Marcus Thorne’s money through my design firm, smiled at his dinners, and ignored the lipstick stains on his collars. I believed in the Omertà of our marriage. I thought my loyalty was my armor. I was wrong. On the night of our anniversary gala, a car lost control and barreled straight toward us in the parking lot. Marcus didn't look at me. Not once. He lunged for his mistress, Izzy, tackling her to safety behind a concrete pillar. I was left standing in the open. The impact threw me like a ragdoll. I lay bleeding on the cold asphalt, my body broken, watching through the haze as my husband frantically checked his mistress for scratches. "My ankle," she whimpered. Without a backward glance, he picked her up and carried her to his limousine, leaving me to bleed out on the pavement. He didn't leave me because he panicked. He left me because I was just a shield he used to protect what he actually loved. As darkness crept in, a shadow fell over me. It wasn't Marcus. It was Julian Croft, his sworn rival. I looked at the empty spot where my husband should have been and made a choice. "Get me to the hospital," I rasped, staring into the eyes of the enemy. "And then help me burn his empire to the ground."