Boys Like Him
She loved him until she lost herself.
Now, behind locked doors and shattered glass, she must learn to breathe again.
When she first met Lloyd, he was magnetic and intoxicating. The kind of man who turned every head when he entered a room, who spoke in promises sweet enough to taste. With him, she felt chosen, cherished, and safe.
But safety was an illusion, and love became a weapon.
And slowly, piece by piece, he dismantled her until nothing of the woman she once was remained.
Now institutionalized after a breakdown, she begins to piece together the brutal truth of what really happened in the shadows of their love story. Memories sting like open wounds: the manipulation disguised as tenderness, the apologies that blurred into threats, the desperate hope that tomorrow he'd be the man she fell for again.
Yet beneath the grief and the shame, a quiet rebellion stirs, a vow to reclaim her voice, her freedom, and her life. Because this is not just a story of how she fell apart. It is a story of how she rises.
Haunting, raw, and achingly intimate, Boys like him peels back the glittering mask of a toxic love affair to reveal the kind of darkness that hides in plain sight, and the unbreakable strength it takes to escape it.
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Chapter 2
The box dug into my palms, its corners biting through cheap cardboard as I hauled it up the narrow flight of stairs. My arms trembled with the effort, but it wasn't just the weight, it was the exhaustion of the whole day, the whole move, and the whole new beginning I wasn't sure I was ready for.
"Almost there," Mariah puffed behind me, her voice was half encouraging, half mocking. She was balancing a stack of kitchen pans like a circus act. Her braids stuck to her forehead with sweat, and her T-shirt was darkened with damp patches.
I laughed under my breath, more out of habit than humor. My own T-shirt was clinging to me like a second skin, the August heat squeezing the last ounce of energy from my body.
The hallway smelled faintly of paint and stale pizza, the kind of mix that clung to student housing like an unshakable curse. My new apartment, tiny, overpriced, off-campus, sat at the very end. It wasn't much, but it was mine. No more dorms with girls crying through walls at three in the morning, no more pretending to be okay with constant company, and no more strangers walking in without knocking.
At least, that was the hope.
We dropped the boxes in the living room with twin groans. The place was still half-empty, echoing with every step. Beige carpet. Off-white walls. A little balcony with a view of the parking lot. It wasn't glamorous, but for the first time in years, the silence belonged to me.
Mariah flopped onto the sagging couch I'd rescued from Facebook Marketplace and fanned herself with a takeout menu, then threw me a look. "You happy now, hermit? No one around to bother you."
I rolled my eyes. "Exactly how I like it," and I meant it. The idea of solitude had been the carrot dangling in front of me all summer.
Mariah tilted her head. "You'll be crawling back to the noise in two weeks. Calling me, whining that it's too quiet, lonely, and too much space for your overthinking brain."
I smirked, crouching to tear the tape off another box. "I'll be fine."
Mariah didn't argue. She just shook her head with a smile. I grabbed the last box and pushed back out into the stairwell. My arms were already shaking, but I told myself it was the final trip. One last climb and I'd be settled.
I paused.
Halfway down the hall was a shirtless man leaning against a doorframe with earbuds in and his phone in one hand, he was impossible to miss. Sweat glistened across his chest, and his basketball shorts hung low on his hips. His head was tilted slightly, lips moving like he was rapping under his breath.
I just... froze.
Not because I hadn't seen hot guys before. Campus was full of them, protein shakes and egos, the whole lot. But something about him felt different... Effortless even. Like he wasn't trying to be seen, but the universe made sure you noticed anyway.
I turned too fast, nearly losing my grip on the box. My pulse tripped over itself, loud and useless. The cardboard scraped my forearm, and I hissed under my breath, stumbling the last few steps to my door.
I didn't dare look back.
Didn't need to. I could feel his eyes, or maybe I just wanted to believe he'd noticed me too.
I dropped the box inside, pressing my palm to my chest as I'd just sprinted.
Mariah peeked up from the couch, brow arched. "What's with you?"
"Nothing," I said too fast. "Just... last box."
She smirked, clearly unconvinced. "You look like you saw a ghost- or.... a dick. Which was it?"
"Neither," I muttered, crouching to open the box.
I busied myself with slicing the tape off the box, stacking cookbooks into neat piles I didn't have a shelf for yet.
Mariah let out an exaggerated groan and fanned herself with the menu again. "It's too damn hot in here. My soul is melting." She kicked off her sneakers, legs dangling over the arm of the couch. "And I'm starving. If I don't eat soon, I'm going to chew through one of your precious cookbooks."
I laughed, despite myself, and shook my head. "Go shower. I'll order us something."
Her eyes lit up like I'd offered her a spa weekend. "Darling! I knew I kept you around for a reason." She hopped up, already stripping off her T-shirt as she padded toward the bathroom.
I watched her go, rolling my eyes at her dramatics but smiling all the same. Mariah was... one of a kind. The kind of person who could make a room feel lighter just by stepping inside. She was loud where I was quiet, reckless where I was careful, but she understood me in a way most people never tried to. She got that my social battery ran out fast, and sometimes I disappeared into myself without warning. She didn't judge me for it. She just... let me be. That was the gift of Mariah.
The shower sputtered to life a moment later. I sighed and peeled off my sweat-soaked T-shirt, dropping it on the couch. The air conditioner was still dead, the landlord promising it would be fixed before the week was out. Until then, I'd be living in a sauna.
Down to my lace bra and shorts, I knelt in front of the last open box, pulling out the neat stack of cookware I couldn't survive without. The metal clinked softly as I lined everything up, arranging and rearranging until it felt right.
I grabbed my phone and queued up BTS songs, turning the volume just high enough to drown out the muffled singing drifting from the shower. The beat filled the space, giving me something to move with as I worked.
I placed the last stack of books on the bedside table when I remembered the takeout. If I didn't order now, Mariah would kill me. A few taps later, confirmation blinked on my phone screen, and I tucked it away, satisfied. One less thing spinning in my head.
I was so absorbed in folding sweaters into neat, color-coded rows that I almost didn't hear Mariah's footsteps padding out of the bathroom. She hummed, towel-drying her hair, when a sudden knock rattled the door.
Mariah's head snapped up, eyes sparkling like trouble. "Ooo, your neighbors are so nice. Did they bring the pies already?" She cackled before I could answer, padding straight for the knob.
"Mariah, wait..." I started suddenly feeling a pit in my stomach, though I couldn't name why. It wasn't dread exactly, but it was enough to make my pulse trip over itself as I turned toward the door. She pulled it open, grin first.
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9.1
I stood alone at the marble altar, the silence of the temple pressing against my eardrums.
It was my Mating Ceremony, but the groom was missing.
My phone buzzed with a notification: a livestream of my mate, Alpha Cain, skipping our union to welcome my sister, Eris, home.
In the video, he held her like she was fragile glass, captioning it: "True power recognizes true power."
When I returned to the Pack House, humiliated, I wasn't met with an apology.
I was met with a slap from my mother.
Eris, feigning a powerful "Alpha Aura," claimed my mere scent was poisoning her.
To "save" her, my family locked me in my room.
But the true betrayal came when I overheard their hushed whispers through the door.
"Use Vera," my mother said, her voice chillingly practical.
"She recovers fast. We can drain her blood weekly for Eris. She can stay as a servant to raise Cain and Eris's pups."
My blood ran cold.
They didn't just neglect me; they planned to harvest me like livestock.
They thought I was the weak Omega they exiled to the North years ago to peel potatoes.
They had no idea that in the North, I wasn't a servant.
I was Commander V, a warrior forged in ice and blood.
I reached under my bed and pulled out my black tactical duffel.
"Screw the meatloaf," I whispered.
I wasn't just leaving. I was going to war.
9.2
Jacqueline Blackburn, a desperate Ivy League tutor, walked into the sleazy Veridian VIP club just to save her job.
But her billionaire client, the ruthless Christian Montgomery, mistook her for a cheap escort, blowing cigar smoke in her face and treating her like trash.
When she furiously turned to leave, a drunk former client attacked her in the hallway, tearing her white dress open and pinning her by the throat.
She fought back, stabbing the man's hand with a pen, only for Christian to emerge from the shadows and brutally crush the attacker's bleeding hand under his heel.
Instead of letting her go, Christian draped his heavy suit jacket over her exposed skin, trapped her in his dark suite, and forced her to sign a suffocating contract.
"You have exactly ninety days, or I will personally ensure you cease to exist in my city."
She thought she could just keep her head down, teach his nephew, and survive.
But she didn't understand why this terrifying underground tyrant was suddenly so fixated on her.
Why did he use his immense power to isolate her, publicly claim her at a billionaire gala, and track her every move?
When she received a chilling midnight text demanding she pack her bags and move into his sprawling estate by 8:00 AM, the terrifying reality set in.
She hadn't escaped the wolf. She had just walked directly into his cage.
7.3
Clara came home from a fourteen-hour board meeting to the sound of a piercing scream in the playroom.
When she rushed in, she found her husband, Chadwick, kneeling on the floor in a panic.
But he wasn't looking at their five-year-old son, Leo, who had a massive bleeding welt on his forehead.
Instead, Chadwick was trembling as he held the nanny's daughter, Autumn, who barely had a microscopic scratch.
"She needs ice. And antibacterial ointment," Chadwick snapped, carrying the nanny's daughter away and leaving his bleeding son behind.
From that moment, the nightmare only escalated.
Chadwick ordered Clara to cook a three-hour meal for the nanny's kid, threw away Leo's favorite toys because Autumn sneezed, and even secretly took the nanny and her daughter on Leo's promised Disney trip.
The final humiliation came at the Met Gala.
Right before their sponsor speech, Chadwick received a frantic call from the nanny claiming Autumn was having a panic attack.
He abandoned Clara in front of hundreds of flashing cameras, sprinting out of the ballroom.
Clara stood completely alone, the humiliation eating through her veins like acid.
She couldn't understand how a father could call the nanny's kid his "little princess" while watching his own son cry.
Why was he treating his own flesh and blood like garbage just to play savior to another woman's child?
Suddenly, the blinding camera flashes were blocked by a massive shadow.
Erasmo Chase, the heir to New York's largest financial dynasty, stepped out of the darkness and shielded her.
"A man like that is unworthy of your grief, Ms. Best," he whispered, pressing a silk handkerchief into her trembling hand.
Looking at the sharp profile of the powerful man beside her, Clara's shock hardened into a lethal, cold fury.
She was going to dump her family's shares, crash the board, and make Chadwick lose absolutely everything.
7.5
Kaitlyn Barton POV:
After three years building my family's hotel empire abroad, I came home to New York, expecting a warm embrace from my childhood fiancé, Edwin.
Instead, he greeted me with a warning. He told me to be gentle with his new girlfriend, Kacy, painting me as a villain before I even knew her name.
At my own welcome-home party, he let her stage a dramatic fall and then publicly blamed me for it, his eyes burning with a hatred I'd never seen.
He cradled her in his arms as if she were a fragile doll I had broken.
"Happy now, Kaitlyn?" he snarled, shattering twenty years of our shared history in front of everyone we knew.
In his eyes, I was no longer his love, but a monster he needed to protect his new flame from.
As he stormed out, my phone buzzed. It was a text from Everett Rowe, the man who had quietly loved me for five years.
"If you are truly ready, I will marry you. Right now. Just say the word."
My fingers moved on their own.
"Yes," I typed. "I'll marry you."
The moment I stepped back onto New York soil, a city I had once shared completely with Edwin, he greeted me not with a hug, but with a warning about his new girlfriend, painting me as the villain before I even knew her name. Three years abroad, cultivating my family's hotel empire, had prepared me for many business battles, but nothing for the cold, calculated betrayal that awaited me at home. He had replaced me, and then twisted our shared history, turning me into the aggressor he now needed protection from. This was not the reunion I had envisioned, nor the Edwin I remembered. My heart, which had swelled with anticipation, now froze into a solid block of ice.
7.2
SYNOPSIS:
"I spent ten years scrubbing your floors, Greene. Tonight, you'll scrub mine."
Elara Vance has always been the pride the Republic until she ran away from home, fell in love with Greene Jones, a man who treated her like dirt and discarded her like she was never the girl the entire Republic feared because of her strong dominating pheromones.
Now she's back after twelve years to serve revenge to Greene Jones like a hot dish in a way that he will pay for every act meted out on her for twelve years. But things wasn't going to go as planned as she meets Silas, the handsome bulky head of her father's security but a recessive omega of her past that she has totally forgotten but now wears a new stance as her bodyguard, recognized by the entire republic as an Alpha, and her perfect chosen mate, Calvin; ruining the comeback and revenge she planned out for herself and now she has to think about saving and claiming her mate, Silas while navigating and protecting the seat meant for her.
The real question becomes; will Calvin ever allow her take all it took him twelve years to build?
THEME: The true definition of power. Is it found in the biological dominance of an Alpha, or in the resilience of an Omega who survived in the lion's den?
7.2
Allie Patterson poured fifteen years into her husband Grayson’s tech startup, living in a cramped San Jose apartment. Every penny, every late night coding session, was for their shared future, built on his constant claims the company struggled, always on the verge of its big break.
Then, a grant deed arrived: a stunning $4.2 million Atherton villa, paid in full, listing Grayson and an unknown Kacey Schmidt as joint tenants.
Her coffee mug shattered as Allie’s world imploded. Driving to the mansion, she found Kacey in silk pajamas, flaunting a massive pink diamond and, beneath it, Grayson’s grandmother’s heirloom ring – the one he’d tearfully claimed to have lost years ago.
Kacey purred, "He's in the shower. We were so tired last night."
The words were a serrated knife, twisting, confirming years of lies.
Humiliation and rage burned out, leaving a terrifying, absolute silence. All her sacrifice and trust were a cruel, elaborate joke, orchestrated by the man she loved.
Allie calmly took photos, then gave herself one minute in her beat-up car to mourn. When it passed, her tears stopped, replaced by cold, calculated murder in her eyes. She typed a text to Grayson:
"Come home early tonight. I have a surprise for you."