He Betrayed Me, Now He Begs
For seven years, I was the architect of my fiancé's criminal empire and the strategist behind his every move. I was Dante Gallo’s unofficial Consigliere, his partner in everything but name. Tomorrow, I was finally supposed to marry him and take my place as the queen to his throne.
But on the eve of our wedding, a single text message sent by mistake detonated my life. It was a photo from Dante, showing a platinum wedding band on his hand. The message read: “Married this morning. She’s safe now.”
My gaze fell to the engagement ring on my own finger. It was the identical band, just smaller. The engraved initials ‘D.I.’ didn’t stand for Dante and I. They stood for Dante and Isabella—his childhood sweetheart. My entire relationship was a lie; I was just a shield to protect his one true love.
He dismissed my discovery as a "tantrum." Then, his new bride began taunting me, sending a picture of them tangled in bedsheets with the caption: "Loser." They expected me to break. They thought I would shatter.
They were about to find out just how wrong they were. I forwarded the picture to Isabella’s fiancé, a man far more dangerous than Dante. "Your fiancée is in Suite 8808 at the Grand Hyatt," I told him. "I'll meet you downstairs. We're going to crash their party."
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Chapter 3
Serafina's POV:
I stared at Dante's message, the words radiating his casual, thoughtless authority.
I didn't reply.
Simply deleting his threats wasn't enough; I needed to erase him completely.
Just as my finger hovered over the block button, a new notification popped up. A friend request.
From Isabella Falcone.
A cold, detached smile touched the corners of my mouth.
The timing was too perfect to be a coincidence.
I accepted it.
Instantly, a message appeared on the screen. It was a photo of Dante, slumped in a leather chair with a half-empty bottle of whiskey on the table beside him. He looked wasted, his tie loosened, his eyes unfocused.
Isabella followed it up with a caption: "He's heartbroken because I'm getting married tomorrow. Poor guy."
I scoffed. He didn't look heartbroken at all; he looked like a pathetic drunk drowning his sorrows.
Next came a voice note. The background was loud, filled with the clinking of glasses and muffled music. But over it all, I could hear Dante's slurred voice, heavy with alcohol and self-pity.
"Isabella... don't marry him... I love you... only you..."
The words were a grotesque parody of a romantic confession. Then, she dropped the final bombshell: a photo of her and Dante tangled in the bedsheets, her face pressed smugly against his bare shoulder.
Her final message was simple, yet dripping with malice: Loser.
A feeling akin to pity welled up inside me. Not for myself, but for the sheer delusion of it all.
I had spent seven years falling in love with a lunatic, and he had an equally unhinged friend to match.
My fingers moved slowly across the screen. I opened a digital gift card app, loaded it with exactly one dollar, and attached a note.
No refunds on secondhand goods. Buy yourself some class.
I hit send. Then, with a deeply satisfying sense of finality, I blocked and deleted Isabella Falcone.
I switched back to my chat with Dante. His message was still sitting there, like an order waiting to be obeyed.
"Come back when you're done throwing your tantrum. Don't make me come get you."
I blocked him, too.
For what felt like the first time in forever, my world finally went quiet, and it was an absolute blessing.
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9.1
Waking up with a cold, scaly hand wrapped around my throat wasn't the worst part.
The worst part was realizing I'd transmigrated into the body of Terra Mason—the most despised woman in the entire Enclave. She drugged high-level beast-men and forced them into life-binding bio-contracts. She locked an aquatic warrior in a dry basement until his organs failed. She treated the most lethal males in the city like broken toys.
Zev, the Level 6 serpent who's currently choking me, would rather blow up his own heart than spend another day as my slave. His affection metric? Negative ninety. His trust? Zero.
Then my system activates: the Kore AI. It gives me exactly 500 credits, a medical nano-gel, and a recipe for neutralizing the radioactive poison in mutant meat. Real food. In this world, that's worth more than gold.
I save Rhys, the dying aquatic male everyone left for dead. I season a slab of purple mutant steak until Sam, a battle-scarred grizzly shifter, groans at the taste—and his trust points finally tick above zero. When my backstabbing ex-best friend tries to steal my males and destroy me, I don't scream or throw a tantrum like the old Terra. I dismantle her with the truth.
But earning their trust means more than grilling meat. A scorpion swarm ambushes us at midnight. Sam throws himself between me and a stinger the size of my arm. As he stands over the corpse, fur receding from his claws, he stares at me and whispers, "You were testing me."
Yes. I was. Because in this world, the weak don't survive. And I refuse to be weak again.
Four beast-men. Four contracts. One system. And a whole lot of steak. Let this dystopian wasteland know—I'm not the monster they remember. I'm worse. I'm the one who's going to feed them until they'd kill for me.
7.1
The last thing I remembered was the blinding flash of my starship crashing. But instead of a rescue crew, I woke up tied to a wooden post, surrounded by hostile beastmen.
My universal translator kicked in just in time to hear their priestess, Chelsea, declare that I was a cursed demon who ruined their hunt. To save the clan from winter starvation, I was to be burned alive.
The flames were already blistering my legs, and jagged stones hurled by the crowd gashed my forehead. I barely negotiated a three-day reprieve to find them food, venturing into the deadly primeval forest.
I found a massive supply of wild potatoes and even gained the protection of Bronson, a terrifyingly powerful saber-toothed tiger beastman.
But Chelsea wouldn't stop.
She labeled my food as poisonous, tried to sentence me to starve in a penitent's cave, and when my agricultural knowledge proved her wrong, she invoked an ancient law. She incited the tribe's savage warriors to fight over me, turning me into breeding property.
I was a scientist offering them endless food, yet their primitive ignorance and one woman's vicious jealousy kept pushing me toward a brutal end. I was terrified, completely powerless against their monstrous physical strength.
As five ruthless challengers drew their bone axes to claim me, I begged Bronson to leave me and run.
Instead, he pulled me against his scarred chest and kissed me fiercely in front of the entire clan.
"She is my mate," he roared, unleashing a soul-crushing aura. "Anyone who wants her, come at me together."
8.9
In a future where biological manipulation is a tool for control, a rogue operative uncovers a sinister conspiracy hidden within a top-secret research facility. As the line between humanity and experiment blurs, they must navigate a web of corporate lies and lethal security measures to expose the truth. With time running out and powerful enemies closing in, the protagonist fights to dismantle the laboratory's deception before the world is forever altered.
7.6
AKARI TANAKA didn't know she was a werewolf until she inherited a murder.
Summoned to a remote Carpathian town, she learns she's the last heir of an ancient alpha line-and her great-uncle's suspicious death has thrown the local packs into a war for succession. As her own latent power violently awakens, Akari is caught between a ruthless rival alpha who wants to control her and a fanatical uncle whose faked death masks a plan to sacrifice her in a ritual that will rewrite reality.
To prevent a genocide of her own kind, Akari must forge an alliance with her enemy, master the wolf within, and confront the monstrous truth of her bloodline.
The price of leadership is sacrifice. The cost of failure is annihilation. But in Lupinara, the greatest predator isn't the wolf... it's the past.
7.5
It took seven years for Ethan to convince me I was the center of his universe, and exactly seven weeks for his "business partner," Chloe, to prove I was just a placeholder.
I was the woman who ironed his shirts and managed his schedule, yet she was the one he comforted at 2 AM.
But the real end didn't come with a fight. It came with an explosion.
At a family gathering, a gas heater malfunctioned. Glass shattered, and fire erupted. In that split second of life or death, Ethan didn't look for me.
He threw his body over Chloe.
He shielded her from the flames, cocooning her in his arms, whispering frantically to her while I stood twenty feet away, watching my boyfriend of seven years act like I didn't exist.
When I confronted him later, he didn't apologize. Instead, he let Chloe carve her initials over ours on our anniversary tree.
When I tried to stop them, he shoved me into the dirt to comfort her over a broken nail.
"You are dead to me, Ava," he screamed. "Jealousy makes you ugly."
He thought I would beg. He thought I was an appliance he could unplug and plug back in whenever he wanted. He was arrogant enough to believe I would always be there, waiting for his scraps.
He was wrong.
While he was playing hero to his mistress, I didn't cry.
I booked a one-way ticket to Portland, snapped my SIM card in half, and vanished.
By the time he realized the silence in his apartment wasn't peace, but abandonment, I was already gone.
8.8
My little boy died on the operating table during a minor, routine surgery.
That exact same night, my billionaire husband bought out the Hudson River for a massive, million-dollar fireworks show.
It wasn't to mourn our child. It was to celebrate his first love's son being discharged from the hospital.
When I confronted him with our son's death certificate, he sneered and accused me of hiding the boy to get his attention.
He held his mistress in our home, watched her fake a panic attack, and threatened to bankrupt my family if I didn't get on my knees and apologize to her.
But the most horrifying truth came from a terrified hospital nurse.
My son's anesthesia was deliberately kept low during the procedure to keep his tissue viable to save the mistress's child.
He was awake and in agonizing pain while his own father planned a grand celebration for another man's son.
I couldn't understand how a father could be so completely heartless.
How could he sacrifice his own flesh and blood just to please a woman who constantly manipulated him?
Looking at the ashes on my son's favorite toy, my paralyzing grief evaporated, replaced by a cold, unyielding rage.
I arranged my little boy's funeral alone in the freezing rain, left my wedding ring on the counter, and walked straight into the private hotel suite of my husband's most ruthless business rival.
"Let's take him down," I said.