Escaping the Pawn, Ensnaring the Don
"My father sold me to a sixty-year-old monster to clear his gambling debts. So, I made a desperate gamble of my own."
Seventeen-year-old Isabella Rossi has two choices: become the broken plaything of a sadistic mafia Capo, or do the unthinkable. She chooses the latter. Sneaking into a high-end speakeasy, she slips an aphrodisiac into the whiskey of the deadliest man in New York—Damien Falcone, the ruthless Underboss of the Falcone family.
Her plan was simple: steal his seed, secure his protection, and run.
But you don’t drug a predator and expect to walk away.
When Damien wakes up, he doesn’t kill her. Instead, he claims her.
"You intercepted a delivery meant for my enemy. Turns out, it was you. Now, you are my Collateral."
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Chapter 3
Isabella POV
The ride in the gleaming Cadillac was a silent, suffocating nightmare. The tinted windows obscured the New York streets until we pulled up to a heavily fortified brownstone in a quiet, respectable neighborhood. The Falcone Soldier escorted me inside, the heavy door locking behind us with a definitive click.
The interior smelled of expensive whiskey, leather, and an unspoken threat. And there he was.
Damien Falcone.
He stood by a dark mahogany desk, his amber eyes locking onto me with the predatory stillness of a hunting cat. The man I had drugged to escape this exact fate was now my captor.
"You," I breathed, terror and confusion warring in my chest. "What is this? Are you going to kill me?"
He ignored my questions. His cold gaze swept over my trembling frame before he closed the distance between us. His large hand gripped my upper arm, pulling me toward the bedroom. Panic surged through my veins. I thrashed against his iron hold, digging my heels into the floor.
In the violent struggle, my carefully pinned hair came undone. The sharpened metal hairpin I had spent weeks grinding against a brick wall clattered loudly onto the polished hardwood floor.
Damien stopped. He looked down at the makeshift weapon, then back at me. The slight amusement in his eyes vanished, replaced by a terrifying, blank hardness.
"Premeditated defiance," he murmured, his voice a low, dangerous rumble.
He shoved me onto the dark silk sheets of the large bed. There was no sedative to soften the edges this time. He took me with a cold, punishing clarity, stripping away my defenses and asserting his absolute dominance. I fought, but my resistance only seemed to fuel his ruthless intent.
When I lay broken and gasping beneath him, he finally spoke, his breath ghosting over my ear. "I intercepted a delivery meant for Rico Moretti. Turns out, it was you."
He rose, adjusting his clothes with chilling nonchalance. "You belong to me now. You are mine to do with as I please." He looked down at me, his eyes devoid of warmth. "I'll be sending for your father, Silas. He will come here, and he will kneel and kiss my ring at your feet. A man who sells his daughter is lower than the dirt I walk on. My property, however, deserves more respect."
The word *property* echoed in my hollow chest. Desperate to find a single shred of humanity in the monster who had just claimed me, I pulled my torn dress up slightly, exposing my raw, weeping knees.
"Did you know they beat me for what I did last night?" I whispered, my voice trembling as I showed him the wounds from the rock salt.
Damien didn't even flinch. "You deserved it," he said flatly. "Consider it a lesson. You're lucky they got to you before I did. My rules are stricter."
Later that night, the darkness of the bedroom offered no solace. The agony in my knees was a white-hot fire, making it impossible to rest.
"My knees," I whispered into the suffocating silence. "They hurt too much to sleep."
Damien lay beside me, his breathing even. "Then lie there in pain," he commanded coldly. "Pain helps you remember. It will teach you to think before you act."
I survived the night, but my spirit felt fractured. The following evening, I woke up famished. I found Damien sitting in the small, enclosed courtyard, reviewing a thick financial ledger. Unseen guards lingered in the periphery; I could feel their eyes from the shadows.
Damien looked up, his gaze sweeping over my ruined, blood-stained dress. "Go clean up," he ordered curtly, gesturing toward a washbasin in the corner.
My breath hitched. *Clean up.* Another demeaning order to make my body presentable for his use. Humiliation burned my throat, but survival demanded compliance. I walked hesitantly to the basin and, with trembling fingers, began to unbutton the front of my dress.
A chair scraped violently against the stone.
Damien exploded in a sudden, quiet rage. "What the hell are you doing?" he snarled, his voice a low, lethal growl.
He slammed the ledger shut, his eyes flashing with a fierce, almost pathological possessiveness as he glared at my exposed skin, then shot a murderous look toward the shadows where his Soldiers stood. He closed the distance and shoved past me, his jaw clenched tight.
"I said wash your hands for dinner, you idiot."
He stormed back inside, leaving me standing half-undressed in the courtyard, flushed with shame and a sudden, sharp realization of the dangerous game I was trapped in.
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7.2
Title- A Name Without A Past
Author- Abraham Tejiri Onojighofia
Genre: Psychological Suspense Romance / Crime Thriller
Tagline: Memory lies. Danger doesn't..
Larry awakens in an abandoned hospital with no name, no past, and no memories-except one. A woman's face. Her voice. Her presence. The single image floating in the hollow wreckage of his mind is so sharp, so undeniable, that he knows she matters. He doesn't know who he is, but he knows he must find her.
Moments after he escapes the hospital, someone tries to kill him.
Driven by instinct and the one memory he trusts, Larry follows the fragment of recognition until it leads him to Ella Morgan, a composed and fiercely intelligent homicide detective. But instead of relief, he's met with confusion. Ella has never seen him before. According to her, he is a stranger.
But danger arrives before either of them can walk away.
A sudden attack convinces Ella that Larry is not lying-someone wants him dead. And the attempt on his life mirrors the recent string of unsolved murders she is investigating. Against policy and against her better judgment, Ella takes him under temporary protection. Immediately, unsettling cracks begin to appear in her certainty.
Larry recognizes places connected to the case.
He reacts to threats with a trained instinct he can't explain.
And his fragmented flashbacks seem tied to secrets Ella wasn't supposed to uncover.
As they race to piece together his missing identity, a darker truth begins to emerge. Larry's amnesia is no accident. Evidence points to a covert operation, a covered-up crime, and powerful enemies determined to bury the truth permanently. His erased memory may hold the key to a conspiracy that reaches into the police force, the city's elite-and Ella's own past.
With each step closer to the truth, the connection between them deepens. Larry feels drawn to her with an unshakable certainty that defies logic, while Ella fights the pull of a man who may be the missing link to her most dangerous case yet.
But as Larry's memories begin to return, so does a chilling realization:
Ella wasn't just a face in his mind. She was the last person he tried to protect before everything went dark.
Now, the enemies hunting Larry have turned their sights on her.
In a deadly race against a faceless adversary, Larry and Ella must unravel the past he's forgotten before it destroys them both. Because the silence Larry woke up with isn't empty-it's hiding a witness, a secret, and a truth someone is willing to kill to keep buried.
And the closer the truth gets, the more dangerous remembering becomes.
7.1
He doesn't believe in love.
He believes in ownership.
Lucien Vale built his empire the same way he destroys his enemies-quietly, strategically, without mercy. To the world, he's the youngest billionaire in Europe. To those who cross him, he's something far darker.
They call him The Devil in a Suit.
When struggling art conservator Amara Rossi unknowingly restores a painting tied to one of Lucien's most dangerous secrets, she becomes collateral in a war she never saw coming. To protect her-and control the damage-Lucien does what he does best.
He claims her.
What begins as a contract meant to silence her turns into an obsession neither of them expected. Amara refuses to be owned. Lucien has never been denied.
But behind Lucien's cold precision is a man forged by betrayal, raised in violence, and taught that love is a weakness exploited by enemies. And behind Amara's defiance is a woman who has spent her life surviving powerful men.
Their chemistry is volatile. Their power dynamic intoxicating.
Their connection? Terrifyingly real.
Because the devil doesn't fall in love.
He possesses.
And when Lucien realizes he would burn empires for her, the question isn't whether he can keep Amara-
It's whether she can survive being claimed by him.
7.8
She once called him her husband.
Now, she calls him a devil.
After catching her husband in his ex's house one too many times, she walked away,pregnant, broken, and done.
Four years later, fate laughs when she runs into him again, more powerful, colder, and dangerously obsessed.
He wants her back, but not for love. For revenge. For reasons buried beneath his arrogance and her silence.
But as she fights the pull between hate and desire, she learns something terrifying
The devil she runs into might not be the same man she divorced.
He's darker, hungrier... and this time, he's not letting her go.
7.9
Ten minutes. That was how close I was to handing my fiancé the keys to a three-hundred-million-dollar empire built on my code.
But when I walked into the office, his mistress was sitting in my chair, spinning the pen I bought him for our anniversary.
Caleb didn't even look up. He told me the investors wanted stability, not a pregnant woman. He called our unborn child a "liability" and ordered security to escort me out of the building I paid for.
I went home to pack, only to find a burner phone hidden in the closet. The texts were brutal. He called me an "incubator." He said once the deal was signed, he’d take the baby and dump the "nerd."
When he caught me with the phone, he didn't apologize. He dragged me by my hair and threw me into the soundproof panic room to keep me quiet until the deal closed.
"Caleb, please! I'm bleeding!"
I pounded on the steel door until my hands were raw. But he just locked it and went to eat pizza with his mistress.
Alone in the dark, on the freezing concrete, I felt the life inside me slip away. He hadn't just stolen my company; he had killed my child.
He thought I was broken. He thought I was just "the help." But he forgot one thing: I built the security system he was trying to sell.
Three days later, I rolled my wheelchair into his victory press conference, flanked by his biggest rival.
"Do you trust your new code, Caleb?"
"Because I wrote the backdoor. And I just opened it."
8.1
On my wedding day, the wedding planner looked at me with pity in her eyes.
She told me the groom had called with a last-minute request. He wanted the name on the floral arch changed from "Elena" to "Sofia."
Five years of loyalty to Dante Romero, and I found out he was planning a "secret" ceremony with his mistress an hour before ours.
He claimed she was dying of cancer. He said it was her final wish to be a bride, and that as a good mafia wife, I should understand. He swore it was just charity.
But I had seen the texts where he called me "furniture."
I had watched him step over my body when I fell down the stairs at a club, just so he could leave with her.
And this morning, I watched Sofia walk into the hotel lobby wearing *my* custom French lace wedding dress, smirking as she clung to his arm.
Dante thinks I'm crying in the bridal suite.
He thinks I will sit in the front row of his "fake" wedding and wait for my turn like a dutiful puppet.
He is wrong.
I wiped my tears and picked up my phone. I didn't cancel the wedding date. I just changed the location to the ballroom next door.
And I changed the groom.
As Dante says his vows to his mistress, I am walking down the aisle to meet the only man the Romero family fears.
The Reaper.
9.5
On her second wedding anniversary, Andrea Reed discovers the ultimate betrayal.
Her husband wants a divorce. Her stepsister is his mistress.And the family empire she protected is nothing more than a prize they've been plotting to steal. Before she can fight back, Andrea is pushed off a cliff-pregnant, broken, and filled with regret.
But death isn't the end. She wakes up five years in the past. Her father is alive. Her inheritance is still in her hands. And the man who killed her is smiling like he's in love.
This time, Andrea won't be naive. She plays the perfect fiancée while secretly collecting evidence, turns traps into public humiliation. She lets her enemies destroy themselves from within.
And when a powerful, dangerously enigmatic billionaire-Samuel Kingswell-crosses her path again, Andrea realizes something even more terrifying than betrayal: In her first life, she chose the wrong man.
In this life, she will choose power and revenge, make them beg before they fall. Because this time, the woman they tried to kill is no longer a victim.
She is the hunter.