Best Horror Novels

Julianna was drowning in a corporate warzone, fighting a massive department deficit while fending off her mother’s relentless matchmaking. Then, a ghost from her past returned to shatter her reality. Eight years ago, Aidan Caldwell walked out of her life without a word. Now, he was back in New York as a ruthless billionaire, and a pitch-black Maybach started stalking her in the dim underground garage. She had no idea the driver hiding behind the obsidian-tinted glass was Aidan. She didn't know he had just choked a confession out of an executive, discovering that her "betrayal" eight years ago was a complete lie. "Stay away from her. The rules are mine now." Aidan had warned his rivals, his sanity tearing at the seams as he watched from the shadows while a creepy coworker put an arm around her shoulder. He shattered glasses and crushed her favorite white flowers in his penthouse, driven by a lethal, obsessive jealousy seeing other men touch what belonged to him. Julianna was completely in the dark, feeling only a heavy, predatory stare pinning her to the cold concrete. When a sudden, heartbreaking scent of cedarwood rolled out of the cracked car window, her brain short-circuited. Why was this terrifying stranger stalking her in the shadows? Desperate to save her career, Julianna recklessly agreed to fake an engagement with a wealthy heir this weekend. But she had no idea Aidan had already rigged her company's crisis, and the predator was about to tear her world apart to claim her back.

I was the fiancée of the Chicago Outfit’s heir, a bond sealed by blood and eighteen years of history. But when his mistress pushed me into the freezing pool at our engagement gala, Jax didn’t swim toward me. He swam past me. He scooped up the girl who pushed me, cradling her like fragile glass, while I struggled against the weight of my gown in the murky water. When I finally dragged myself out, shivering and humiliated before the entire underworld, Jax didn’t offer a hand. He offered a scowl. "You’re making a scene, Eliana. Go home." Later, when that same mistress shoved me down the stairs, shattering my knee and my dance career, Jax stepped over my broken body to comfort her. I overheard him telling his friends, "I’m just breaking her spirit. She needs to learn she’s property, not a partner. Once she’s desperate enough, she’ll be the perfect obedient wife." He thought I was a dog that would always return to its master. He thought he could starve me of affection until I begged for scraps. He was wrong. While he was busy playing protector to his mistress, I wasn't crying in my room. I was packing his ring into a cardboard box. I cancelled my transfer to UCLA and enrolled at NYU instead. By the time Jax realized his "property" was missing, I was already in New York, standing next to a man who looked at me like a queen, not a possession.

Allison was hiding in a dusty small-town garage, working as a mechanic to suppress the lethal, experimental serum freezing her veins. But a call from her estranged, wealthy father shattered her peace. He threatened to permanently freeze her dead mother's trust fund if she didn't return to the family estate immediately. That trust fund held the only key to the truth behind her past and her survival. When she stepped into the sprawling mansion in her faded hoodie, her family treated her like a stray dog. Her stepmother mocked her cheap clothes, and her half-brother called her a piece of trash. Her father tossed a vocational school enrollment form at her, telling her to learn to sew so they could marry her off to anyone desperate enough. Her perfect, porcelain-doll stepsister Gwyneth even deliberately smashed a glass of boiling milk against her own leg. "Why did you push me?!" Gwyneth screamed, crying tears of fake terror to frame Allison. "You vicious bitch! You're just as sick as your mother!" her father roared, raising his hand to strike her. They looked at her with absolute disgust, thinking she was just a stupid, uncultured hick they could easily manipulate and destroy. They had no idea that the girl standing before them was a lethal operative who already possessed all their offshore tax ledgers and darkest secrets. Allison easily caught her father's wrist mid-air, her grip like a steel vice. "I'm not going to a trade school," she whispered coldly, ripping the form into pieces. "I am going to Crestwood Academy." It was time to take back everything that belonged to her, with interest.