Killer machine
The Hockey Prince's Secret Ice Queen
All I wanted was to find a computer genius to process the non-linear dynamic equations for my ecological model. Instead, I found myself cornered by Julian Andrews, the university's hockey prince, trading a public, staged kiss for his academic support. To finalize our "deal," I was dragged to the campus ice rink. The cheerleaders and puck bunnies immediately swarmed him, mocking my plain clothes and treating me like a pathetic joke. Brooke, the head cheerleader, even set up a figure skating competition with a date with Julian as the grand prize. She performed a basic spin, blew him a kiss, and smugly waited for me to fall flat on my face and humiliate myself. His hockey teammates laughed from the sidelines, watching me try to support Julian as he stumbled around the ice like a newborn giraffe. But as I held his warm hand to keep him from falling, I couldn't help but feel something was terribly wrong. Why was a top-tier athlete faking such awful balance? And why did his ice-blue eyes stare at me with such knowing anticipation, as if he already knew about the professional figure skating past I had spent years trying to bury? "Just let go and skate." He whispered, slowly releasing my hand. I took a deep breath, glided to the center of the rink, and landed a flawless double Axel. As the entire rink fell into a dead, shocked silence, I realized I had just exposed not only my own hidden past, but also the biggest secret of the campus god.
Chapter 1 No.1
Sage POV:
"Let me kiss you."
The request was a low, hurried murmur—warm, quiet, and laced with the faintest edge of mortification.
Stunned, I snapped my head up toward the sound.
Julian Andrews filled my vision. He easily towered a head over me, his lean, athletic frame silhouetted against the bright morning glare, casting a long shadow across the cobblestones. Briar University's star forward. Team captain. The athletic department's untouchable golden boy.
Campus rumor had it that Julian was notoriously indifferent, never sparing anyone a second glance.
Behind him, a solid wall of navy-and-gold varsity jackets blocked the brick path. His teammates were whistling, shoving each other, and effectively cutting off my only exit.
The sudden commotion immediately bottlenecked the morning foot traffic. Whispers rippled through the crowd, and within seconds, a dozen students reached into their pockets out of sheer muscle memory, black camera lenses catching the light as they aimed squarely at us.
Julian's sharp eyes tracked the movement, his jaw tightening into a hard, irritated line.
Before I could take a single defensive step back, he closed the distance between us. Leaning down into my space, his broad shoulders shifted in a subtle, fluid maneuver—throwing up an impenetrable physical wall that completely shielded my face from the intrusive glare of the cameras.
His sharp, striking face hovered breathtakingly close. His deep baritone brushed against my ear, lost to the autumn wind, meant for me alone:
"Sorry to drop this on you," he whispered, his pale blue eyes disarmingly earnest, holding a quiet heat that sent a tremor straight down my spine. "The guys backed me into a locker-room dare... but I'm not here to use you as a joke. We can fake it. Angle it so it looks real—whatever you're comfortable with. Just help me get them off my back, and I owe you one."
It was only then that my brain finally rebooted.
What on earth? He's actually trying to kiss me?
A sharp flare of pure absurdity hit me, and my gaze dropped to my reflection in the dark glass door of the adjacent building: an oversized, faded gray hoodie that swallowed my frame whole, soft, thin jeans worn at the knees, bare-faced dark circles carved beneath my eyes from forty-eight hours of non-stop coding, my dark hair hastily twisted into a cheap plastic claw clip, and a pair of oversized, thick black-rimmed glasses sitting heavy on the bridge of my nose, completely hiding my face.
I looked like a refugee from an all-night disaster. How had Briar's golden prince ended up in front of me?
When I looked back up, my breath trapped in my throat anyway. He was too close, his clean scent of winter mint and cedar wrapping around my senses. Having those pale blue eyes staring straight down at me made my chest tighten in a way I really didn't want to acknowledge.
"Clock's ticking, Cap!" Landon howled from the sidelines, hands cupped around his mouth as the rest of the players lost their minds laughing. "Plant one on her, or enjoy the five-AM bag skate!"
A raucous chorus of barks and chest-thumping went up from the team.
A few yards away, two girls heading toward the dining hall froze in their tracks, pointing their phones.
"Wait, who the hell is that?" one of them laughed loudly, zooming her camera in on my face. "She looks like she just crawled out of a dumpster. There's no way Julian's actually kissing her. Post it on Sidechat right now—this is going straight to number one."
The cruel words hit like a splash of ice water, snapping me out of my daze and instantly killing the stupid flutter in my chest.
I hated the attention.
Four years ago, after my family and my former training partner framed me and destroyed my competitive skating career, I swore I would never be public entertainment again. I buried my name, switched majors, and hid behind oversized fleece and thick glasses just to live an invisible life. If I ended up on the campus forums with Julian Andrews, the internet vultures would dox me before noon—and drag up the toxic scandal I had bled to walk away from.
My research was already on the verge of falling apart. I didn't have time for this circus.
I locked my grip around my heavy binders, my knuckles straining white.
"Find someone else for your dare, Andrews," I said coldly, taking a step back to put distance between us, my voice tight with adrenaline. "I'm not interested in being part of your game. Move."
I kept my head down, attempting to brush past him.
"You're Sage Kelley, right?"
The sound of my name brought my boots to an immediate halt.
I blinked up at him, caught completely off guard.
"Professor Beaumont's senior research student," Julian straightened up slightly, his cadence measured and even, carrying an intellectual sharpness that seemed impossible beneath a varsity jacket. "I saw your Havenwood Creek senior capstone proposal sitting on his desk over Sunday dinner."
My heart gave a hard, hollow thud. Professor Beaumont was my academic advisor—and the guardian of the final research endowment my late father had left behind.
Julian leaned in slightly, his voice dropping to a near-whisper against the whistle of the wind. "I spent an hour going over your codebase."
My lips parted. "You... read my proposal?"
"Your simulation keeps crashing because your core fluid algorithm strategy is flawed," Julian murmured, his pale blue eyes deadly sharp. "And Uncle Des mentioned that if you don't deliver a working version by this Friday, the department is pulling your grant—which means you don't clear your senior thesis, and you don't graduate in May."
The hair on the back of my neck stood on end.
Friday was the deadline. If the funding was pulled, the project died, my senior capstone failed, and I would be forced to stay another semester without my degree. Worse, my father's final ecological legacy would be reduced to scrap paper.
I had been panicking over that exact deadline for two days straight, and Julian had just laid it out like it was nothing.
Worse, I couldn't even brush him off. I had heard the rumors about Beaumont's nephew—the CS prodigy everyone in the department talked about. I just had never realized it was him.
"I know how to fix your algorithm," Julian stated plainly, laying his cards on the table, his gaze locking onto mine with an unshakeable, quiet certainty. "Help me get through this bet. In return, I'll rewrite your boundary calculations tonight. Deal?"
SILENT KILLER
A driven passion for revenge, transforms Andrea in to a mid night assassin. The murder of her parents she witnessed haunts her ,she inhreted a curse of extreme strength from her mother . she is determined to devaiour everyone who took her parents to the grave, disgusted as one of the best detectiv
I'm Killer
Previously... sorry, please understand if there is something in the story that is considered scary.🙏🙏 Sinta Amelia is friends with Lembayung Rindu who both love Aditya Bagaskara, a handsome and rich young man, but Aditya Bagaskara loves Dewi Utari, an innocent and simple girl who has succeeded in
Tales of the Thinking Machine
It was absolutely impossible. Twenty-five chess masters from the world at large, foregathered in Boston for the annual championships, unanimously declared it impossible, and unanimity on any given point is an unusual mental condition for chess masters. Not one would concede for an instant that it wa
Mafia Queen: The Killing Machine
His Eyes opened wide Seeing his wife after so long. He felt a sharp pain in his leg when he tried to pull her into his embrace. It wasn't the bullet that hurt him, it was the person standing in front of him holding a gun and surrounded by bodyguards. The words from her were even more hurting, "Get U
The Killer
I want to state right at the start that I am writing this story twenty years after it happened solely because my wife and Senor Buck Johnson insist on it. Myself, I don't think it a good yarn. It hasn't any love story in it; and there isn't any plot. Things just happened, one thing after the other.
The Luna's Killer
I stand before the pack members, condemned by whispers and stares that cut deeper than any blade. Branded a killer, but I am no murderer. Yet, their accusations cling to me like a shroud, suffocating every shred of hope within me. "I'll never reject you, Ivanna, but I'll make your life hell." His w
The Killer Obssession
"Who is the traitor to you?" I kindly asked the three men kneeling in front of me, I know them. they are the traitors in my company‚ even if I know the truth I want to ask them first, so it won't be boring. "No one to speak?" I raised the gun I was holding and pointed it at the man in the middle.
My Mate, My Killer
“I was looking for a man named Zarion, but I ended up here.” Most of them gasped when I uttered Zarions’ name. “Don’t mention that name because it’s cursed!” someone hissed. My brows furrowed at her reaction. “Why? "He's the Alpha of this pack. He was banished because he didn't want to take the posi
Kissed by the Killer
Description; Kissed by the Killer When danger wears a handsome face and betrayal hides behind every smile, how far would you go for love-and revenge? Violet Valley Virgilson, a bold and brilliant billionaire CEO, thought she had control over her life... until the night a deadly gangster and her f
The Alibi Killer
As a film producer, late nights editing were normal, usually accompanied by the comforting thought of my daughter, Olivia, home from her film club. But then the phone rang, and a police officer's chilling words sliced through my world: "It' s about your daughter, Olivia." She was found brutally be
Serial Killer In Love
Sting, a heartless and brutal killer falls for Sofia an orphan who detests him after finding out he killed a man who was like a father to her. Sting is a gang member who is given assignments to kill big business men and clears their bank account. He meets Sofia through Red who is also a gang member
KILLER book 1
*MATURE SCENE ALERT* 18+ His lips claimed every inch of my body, leaving red beauty marks on my skin that was his perfect way to claim me, to make sure that everyone knows I was his, only his own. He traced the scars on my body and then looked at me like he needed some kind of permission. "Hold me
The Unborn Killer
An abandoned warehouse. A woman was lying on a surgical table. Blood was dripping out of the clean cut made on her belly. The blood had formed a small puddle near the foot of the table. The only sound that echoed in the silent night was of a dull thud, when a drop of blood fell on the
Loved A Machine: The Mafia Queen's Awakening
Five days before my wedding to the most feared Mafia Don in New York, I breached his private server. I didn't find cartel intel. Instead, I found a custom AI bot programmed to auto-reply to my text messages. Beside it rested unencrypted chat logs with his childhood ward, Serena. The messages were
Love Killer: Tricky But Seductive
They were both like black roses, blooming in the dark, and wafting a unique fragrance across anyone that crossed their paths. Bloodthirsty, ruthless, heartless. But she gradually lost herself, all because of the thing called love. She turned around, taking off her mask and shocking everyone presen
Love Rekindled – Her Killer Husband
As Katrina walks down the aisle to marry Aaron, the man once married to her late sister, she finds herself torn between her desire for revenge and her growing emotions for him. Convinced that Aaron was involved in her sister's death, Katrina sets out to destroy him, only to find that his kindness an
Fated to My Father's Killer
"You can't escape me, Aurora. You are mine!" The Alpha King's roar echoed through the palace walls. But Aurora just tightened her grip on the blade hidden beneath her cloak. She would never-never-give herself to the monster who murdered her father. Even if the Moon Goddess cursed her to be his mate.
Secrets of a Killer Father
My daughter, Molly, lay frail in the hospital bed, her future hanging by a thread. The doctor's words were stark: an incredibly expensive experimental therapy was her only hope. My ex-husband, Matthew, stood by, his charming facade crumbling as he refused to pay, citing "scam" and "natural remed
