Fall From Grace, Rise To Reign
For six years, Lainey devoted herself to Jeremy, earning only ridicule from their social circle.
Everything changed when she overheard him tell his lover, "She's nothing but a lapdog."
Heartbroken, Lainey found solace with a supposed escort.
People thought it was a ploy to win Jeremy back, but Lainey only scoffed. "He's just a housekeeper's son faking his status. Without me, he's nothing."
Then everyone realized she was the real powerhouse, owning both elite society and the underworld.
Jeremy begged in vain; Lainey never looked back.
Her new man, supposedly a gigolo but secretly high society's elite, kissed her before Jeremy. "Your ex is pathetic."
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Chapter 1
"So what now, you don't even know what to do next?" Lainey White murmured, a daring curve to her lips.
Night had settled in, and a light drizzle traced quiet rhythms against the car windows.
She tipped his chin up with two fingers.
The man caught her wrist, his gaze turning molten.
An hour earlier.
Clutching a band, Lainey had been ready to make a commitment to her boyfriend Jeremy White-only to overhear him pouring his devotion out to his true love, Erin Carter.
That was when she finally understood that despite her status and six years of chasing the housekeeper's son, she had never claimed a place in his heart. She had only been his convenient amusement.
Six years of longing and loyalty meant nothing more than a punchline to him.
Back in the present, a crooked, bitter smile tugged at Lainey's lips.
If that was the game, then she would play her part to the end.
This would be the moment she buried every last feeling she had for Jeremy.
Outside, the rain thickened, and inside the car, shadows swayed as heat pooled.
When the heat finally ebbed, moonlight spilled through drifting clouds and scattered stars.
Lainey reached into her toppled handbag, drew out a sleek card, and slid it into the man's waistband with nimble fingers.
"Impressive work. Let's make this a standing arrangement."
As she pushed open the car door to step out, the man's hand shot out and caught her wrist.
Lainey glanced back over her shoulder, one brow arching in mild curiosity.
"What are you really after?" he asked.
With a teasing smile, she tipped his chin up again, locking eyes with him.
"Learn some self-control. Same time tomorrow."
With that, she slipped from the car without another glance, her scarlet velvet dress blazing against the dark street.
He watched her disappear, his gaze tangled with emotions he couldn't name.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Roberts. I should have noticed her getting into your car. I accept whatever punishment you decide."
A man in black bent forward in a deep bow.
Dylan Roberts pulled his eyes away, his features settling back into cold composure.
"Was that a red dress?"
"Yes, Mr. Roberts," Ian Douglas answered on reflex, his eyes widening the next second. "Sir, can you see colors again?"
Dylan's lashes lowered as he struck a match and lit a cigarette.
"No. Just her dress."
Fifteen years ago, an accident had drained the world of color for him, leaving everything in shades of gray.
As the head of the Roberts family, who steered the nation's economy, that flaw was a dangerous secret.
In spite of exhausting every option, even the world's finest eye specialists had failed him.
By some strange twist of fate, that woman had brought colors back into his vision.
If the shock hadn't stolen a heartbeat of his focus, he would never have let her come that close.
"How can that even be?" Ian whispered, disbelief threading through his voice.
Dylan stared at the card Lainey had left him, exhaling a thin ribbon of smoke as his features dissolved into the gray haze.
"Dig up everything on her," he said quietly, the order edged with cold authority.
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8.0
My entire family was slaughtered three years ago by Alistair Kirkland, the usurper who stole the underworld throne.
I was the only survivor. Smuggled out of New York as a child, I was trained in the shadows to become a flawless weapon. Now, at sixteen, I returned to the city that was supposed to be my graveyard.
But the New York I returned to was a suffocating cage. Kirkland didn't just wipe out the Valenzuela bloodline; he branded my few surviving loyalists as traitors. He paraded my men down the streets in heavy iron chains, letting the very people we once protected hurl rocks at them. He bought the doctors, ensuring my wounded soldiers would bleed out in the dark. Even worse, the mother of my only ally—Julian Morgan—secretly sold us out to a Chicago warlord just to keep her archaic grip on power.
I stood in the shadows, watching an eleven-year-old boy get his head smashed with a jagged stone just for defending his father's honor. How could the city my grandfather built cheer for our extermination? Why did the old guard prefer to cower and die in the dark rather than fight the monster who stole our home?
"Ghosts don't knock on my door, Athena. What do you want?" Julian asked me.
I tossed a blood-stained ledger of Kirkland's deepest secrets onto his desk.
"I'm here to help you take back what's yours, and burn Alistair Kirkland's empire to the ground."
9.2
In LA's Business world, Zane Calloway, thirty, turns cartel king after his father's gruesome murder, ruling The Atlas Group with a bloody fist. He learned how betrayal could ruin even the biggest empire and was hell bent on keeping Atlas Group. However when Sienna Carter, his new assistant got in the picture, he threw caution to the wind. To become the only one controlling the cartel, he would use Sienna who was a supposedly ghost from a dead cartel as bait for his enemies. Sienna Carter made his mission become even more complicated as she ignites a dangerous sparks in him. Twenty-five year old Sienna Carter just wanted to stay alive, running away from danger had been the only thing she was capable of since her family were murdered. All she had as a semblance of her old life was the locket her dying father had given her and when a new job pops up in Los Angeles, she gambled for it, hoping for her sake that it wouldn't lead her straight to the same hell she was running from.
However, she would soon realize that the Atlas Groups was going to be more than just a survival decision but the key to everything.
9.0
I shattered my knee jumping in front of a silver bullet meant for him.
The poison seeped into my marrow, putting my wolf into a coma and leaving me crippled.
I thought my sacrifice would secure his love forever.
Instead, five years later, Brennan stood in a warehouse while a Rogue held a silver-laced dagger to my throat.
Beside me sat Debbi, his mistress—a spy who had staged the whole kidnapping.
"You can only save one," the kidnapper sneered.
Brennan didn't even hesitate.
He looked me in the eye, his gaze cold and devoid of the bond we once shared.
"I choose Debbi," he said.
He walked out with her in his arms, leaving his Fated Mate to bleed out on the concrete floor.
As the blade dug into my skin, I felt the mate bond snap.
He thought I died in the explosion that followed.
He spent weeks howling in grief when he finally realized Debbi was a traitor and he had killed the only woman who truly loved him.
But he was wrong.
I didn't die.
A federal agent pulled me from the fire, and the trauma didn't kill my wolf—it woke her up.
A year later, Brennan walked into a small bistro in Italy, looking for redemption.
He fell to his knees when he saw me standing there, healed and glowing with the aura of a White Wolf.
"Alyssa," he wept, reaching for me. "I'm so sorry. I'll do anything."
I looked him dead in the eye, my gaze icy blue.
"Get out," I said. "We don't serve traitors here."
7.6
I am the wife of Julian Falcone, a powerful mafia boss, but my title in this house is nothing but a joke.
When our car broke down in a deadly blizzard, Julian rushed to the scene, only to bypass me entirely.
He wrapped his heavy coat around his fragile cousin, Livia, and put her in his only available passenger seat.
"Livia's constitution is too weak to survive this cold. I have to take her back first."
He left me to freeze in the pitch-black car for the entire night.
When his men finally dragged my half-dead body out the next morning, they openly mocked me, calling me a piece of "collateral" that the boss wouldn't care about as long as I was breathing.
Back at the estate, Julian didn't even ask if I had survived the frostbite. Instead, he stormed into my sickroom, demanding I treat his mistress with respect just because my absolute silence had hurt her feelings.
His grandmother then publicly humiliated me for failing to provide an heir, while Livia flaunted the custom diamond bracelet Julian bought to soothe her "fright" from the storm.
I finally understood. He didn't marry me out of honor to save my fallen family. He just needed my aristocratic Rossi blood to legitimize his new-money mafia empire.
I was never a wife. I was a transaction he was willing to let freeze to death.
When his men delivered a heavy diamond necklace to buy my submission, I didn't cry or beg.
I dropped the blood diamond into the deepest drawer, and began to plan my escape.
8.0
For ten years, I played the safe, "wolfless" emotional support animal for my werewolf best friend, Finn, secretly loving him while he chased his toxic ex.
When she got engaged to a rival Alpha, he dragged me across the country to crash the mating ceremony, only to abandon me at the airport.
His terrifying older brother, Alpha Knox, picked me up instead and shattered my world with one sentence: Finn had always known how I felt, and he intentionally weaponized my devotion.
To prove how little I meant to him, Knox orchestrated a cruel test at a seedy Rogue club.
While I sat right next to Finn in a sticky booth, Knox sent over a stripper.
"You don't mind, right, Sloane? It's just a gift," Finn slurred.
Without hesitating, he let the stripper straddle him right in front of me, burying his face in her neck to chase away the pain of his ex.
A decade of my blind loyalty turned to ash in that smoke-filled room.
I hated my defective, wolfless biology, but I hated him more for treating me like a stray dog begging for scraps.
Why did I waste my entire youth protecting a male who didn't even see me as a woman?
Suffocating on shame and fury, I fled to the cramped club bathroom to hide.
*Click.*
The deadbolt slid into place, and the intoxicating scent of a violent thunderstorm and spent gunpowder swallowed me whole.
Alpha Knox Crawford stood against the locked door, his merciless eyes pinning me to the sink.
9.7
I tried to quit.
My boss said no.
When you work for billionaire restaurateur Bastian Hale, every day is an exercise in endurance.
He screams at you in front of half the staff? Endure.
He tears your work to bits and tells you to start again? Endure.
He surprises you shirtless in the office late one night? Endure... then go home and die of embarrassment.
I've endured six years of Bastian Hale.
I can endure anything.
... Until my doctor tells me I'm going blind in ninety days.
Suddenly, enduring isn't the goal anymore.
Living is.
Seeing everything I can before the lights go out forever.
And that means one thing: quitting the job that's consumed my entire adult life.
There's just one problem:
Bastian doesn't accept my resignation.
Instead, he shreds my letter to pieces...
Offers me a million dollars to stay...
And vows to make my last ninety days of sight worth remembering.
The man is arrogant. Brutal. Cold as the walk-in freezer.
But his hands are warm.
And in the dark, he teaches me things my eyes never could.
I wanted one last look at the light.
I got a taste of the dark instead.