Love by the monster I created
She only wanted to protect the man she loved... but she changed him instead.
Rena never imagined that her creation would turn into something powerful, something dangerous yet still deeply tied to her heart. Beneath the darkness, he still remembers her... still wants her... still loves her in a way only a monster can.
Now, caught between fear and a love she can't let go of, Rena must decide can she save him... or will she fall for the monster she created?
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Chapter 2
Run, Rena!"
Hale's voice wasn't a plea; it was a command that vibrated through the very marrow of my bones. I scrambled behind the heavy industrial cooling unit just as the laboratory door disintegrated into a cloud of splinters and steel.
The air was suddenly choked with the acrid sting of flash-bang grenades and the sharp, clinical smell of military-grade smoke. Red laser sights danced through the haze like hungry fireflies, all of them converging on the silhouette standing in the center of the room.
My heart felt like it was going to burst through my ribs. I was a scientist, a woman who spent her life under the soft glow of desk lamps, not a fugitive. I looked down at my hands they were stained with Hale's synthetic blood and the grease from the machines. I had no money, no backup, and now, the government was at my door to take back the "property" I had stolen.
"Target acquired! Fire!" a voice barked through the chaos.
The deafening clatter-clatter-clatter of automatic gunfire filled the small basement. I screamed, pressing my palms against my ears, waiting for the sound of Hale falling. Waiting for the silence that would mean I was truly alone.
But the silence never came.
Instead, I heard the sickening crunch of metal being crushed. I peered around the edge of the cooling unit, my eyes stinging.
Hale wasn't dead. He moved through the storm of lead like a phantom made of midnight. The bullets didn't seem to stop him; they sparked off his skin, leaving glowing blue embers where they struck. He reached the first soldier in a heartbeat, his hand clamping onto the barrel of the rifle and twisting it into a pretzel with a single, casual flick of his wrist.
"Rena, get to the back exit!" Hale yelled. He didn't even look back as he tossed the soldier across the room, sending him crashing into my expensive centrifuge.
"I'm not leaving you!" I cried out, my voice lost in the roar of another explosion.
I lunged for my bag the one containing the hard drive with his consciousness backuk but a hand grabbed my hair, yanking me backward. I shrieked as a soldier in black tactical gear pinned me against the wall, the cold barrel of a pistol pressing into my temple.
"Cease fire!" the soldier yelled. "I have the doctor! Asset 07, stand down or she dies!"
The room went deathly still. The smoke swirled around Hale's towering frame. He turned slowly, his glowing amber eyes locking onto the man holding me. The light coming from his chest pulsed with a deep, rhythmic thrum, like a warning siren.
"Let. Her. Go," Hale whispered. The sound wasn't human. It was the low, guttural warning of a predator that had found its mate in danger.
"Drop to your knees or I blow her head off!" the soldier screamed, his voice cracking with a fear he couldn't hide.
I looked at Hale, tears streaming down my face. "Hale, don't..."
In a blur that the human eye couldn't track, Hale didn't drop to his knees. He moved.
There was a wet thud, and suddenly the weight against me disappeared. The soldier was gone, thrown twenty feet back into the darkness of the storage closet. Hale was suddenly standing in front of me, his massive body shielding me from the rest of the squad.
He turned to face me, his hands reaching out to cup my face. His touch was heavy, his palms radiating a heat that felt like a furnace. For a second, the amber in his eyes softened back into the chocolate brown I loved, and I saw the man who used to help me with my research.
"Are you hurt?" he asked, his voice trembling with a terrifying intensity.
"I'm fine, Hale, but we have to go! There are more of them outside!"
He leaned down, his lips brushing my ear. "No one touches you, Rena. No one."
He picked me up as if I weighed nothing, tucking me against his chest with a possessive grip that made it hard to breathe. With a roar that shook the glass remaining in the windows, he didn't head for the back exit. He headed for the reinforced brick wall at the front of the building.
"Hale, what are you doing?" I gasped, clutching his neck.
"Shortcut," he grunted.
He hit the wall at full speed, using his shoulder as a battering ram. The bricks exploded outward, and we burst into the rain-soaked night. He hit the pavement running, his strides covering ground at a pace that felt like a speeding car. Behind us, sirens wailed and searchlights cut through the dark, but Hale didn't slow down.
He ducked into a narrow, flooded alleyway, weaving through the labyrinth of Oakhaven's industrial district. Finally, he stopped behind a row of rusted shipping containers, setting me down gently on my feet.
The rain drenched us both instantly. My lab coat was ruined, sticking to my skin, and I was shivering so hard my teeth were chattering. Hale stood over me, his amber eyes scanning the perimeter like a radar system.
"We're safe for a moment," he said, though his body stayed tense, ready to spring.
"Safe?" I laughed breathlessly, a bit of hysteria leaking into my voice. "Hale, we're fugitives. They're going to hunt us. They're going to hunt you."
I reached out, my fingers trembling as I touched the glowing blue lines on his chest. "What have I done to you? You're not... you're not supposed to be this."
Hale grabbed my hand, pressing it firmly against his heart. I didn't feel a heartbeat. I felt a vibration, a powerful, mechanical hum that seemed to sync with my own pulse.
"You gave me a second chance, Rena," he said, his voice dropping into a dark, seductive register. "And I'm going to use it to make sure nothing ever scares you again."
He leaned in to kiss me, a desperate, hungry movement that tasted of rain and electricity. For a moment, I forgot the soldiers, the debt, and the monster I had created. I only felt him.
But as he pulled away, his expression suddenly went blank. His head tilted sharply to the side, his amber eyes widening until they were almost entirely orange.
"Rena," he whispered, his voice sounding hollow.
"What is it? What's wrong?"
He looked down at his own hands, which were starting to flicker with a glitchy, digital static. "I... I can hear them."
"Hear who?" I asked, grabbing his shoulders.
Hale looked at me, a look of pure horror crossing his face. "Not the soldiers. The others. The ones who died in the lab before me. They're... they're inside my head, Rena. And they're telling me to kill you."
Before I could scream, Hale's hand clamped onto my arm, his grip so tight I heard the bone groan. He wasn't looking at me anymore. He was looking at something behind me that wasn't there.
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7.6
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.
9.0
Elena Hart survived the crash.
Her memories didn't.
When she wakes in a pristine suburban home with a diamond on her finger and a man gripping her hand like she might disappear, she's told a simple truth:
He's her husband.
They've been married for two years.
They're deeply in love.
Caleb knows everything about her-how she takes her coffee, the scar on her thigh, the way she hums when she's anxious. The photos lining the walls prove their life together. The neighbours confirm it. Her doctor insists memory loss after trauma is common.
So why does her body recoil when he kisses her?
And why, every night, does another man visit her in dreams-bleeding, desperate, whispering:
You promised you'd run.
The dreams aren't romantic. They're frantic. Urgent. As if time is running out.
Then Elena finds something she was never meant to see.
A locked drawer in Caleb's office.
A second wedding ring.
A newspaper clipping about her accident-dated three weeks before the crash she remembers.
The more she questions, the more Caleb tightens his grip. His patience becomes surveillance. His affection becomes control. Doors begin locking. Her phone disappears. The neighbours stop meeting her eyes.
And the dreams start happening while she's awake.
A reflection in a window that isn't hers.
Footsteps behind her when no one is there.
A voice that says, He changed it. He changed everything.
What if she wasn't supposed to survive that crash?
What if the accident wasn't an accident?
As fractured memories return in violent flashes-running through rain, screaming in a dark parking lot, a different man's blood on her hands-Elena is forced to confront a horrifying possibility:
She wasn't stolen.
She was rewritten.
And the man who calls himself her husband didn't just save her life.
He erased it.
Now she must decide who the real ghost is-
The man haunting her dreams...
Or the one sleeping beside her.
Because this time, if she remembers the truth...
One of them won't let her live to tell it.
8.5
After surviving years in the Alpha King's brutal prisons, I returned to my pack only to be stripped of my family home and exiled to a rotting cabin.
I accepted the humiliation in silence, until I found a dying baby girl abandoned in a trash-filled alley.
Taking her in awoke the terrifying, protective beast I had kept chained in my mind. The pack, fueled by rumors and a jealous woman's bruised ego, viewed us as abominations. They trespassed on my land to uncover my "dirty secrets," forcing me to build a massive stone fortress with my bare hands just to keep my daughter safe from their cruelty.
We lived in isolated peace for years, until the day I took her outside the walls to visit my parents' graves.
A convoy of royal Alphas arrived, and their Luna fell to her knees at my mother's cousin's grave, weeping and calling her "sister."
I didn't understand. Why was my forgotten family connected to the royals? And why did Cassian Vargan, the most powerful Alpha in the world, freeze in absolute shock the moment he realized who I was?
"You... are you Gideon Stone's son?"
The bloody past I had buried under a mountain of stone had finally found me.
I didn't answer him. I just pulled my daughter behind me and tightly gripped my knife, ready to slaughter a king if he took one more step.
9.5
After months of tearing the continent apart, I finally found her. Covered in mud and blood, raw from the river, I was a monster, a ghost. Across the street, June looked peaceful, utterly unaware.
Then, a man stepped out, shielding her with an umbrella, his arm a casual, possessive claim. My heart stopped.
I unleashed my Alpha aura; June shivered, thinking it a cold snap. Frankie turned, a mocking smile in his eyes. He knew.
Marcus broke ribs restraining my rage as June and Frankie drove away, taking the only light in my miserable world.
The 'Tabula Rasa' spell hadn't just erased her memory; it rewired her soul, making her immune to our mate bond. She saw an ordinary stranger. Her scent gone, preferences changed. Agony shredded my mind; my power useless.
My magic failed, but I had other weapons. "Buy the street. Buy the shop. Buy every property within five miles. Suffocate them with cash," I commanded. Tomorrow, I'd be Bren, a bankrupt man seeking solace, ready to reclaim what was mine.
9.6
I was only three and a half years old, living in a damp basement and beaten daily by Enoch Pruitt with a heavy leather whip.
"Get up, you useless waste of space!"
He always told me I was a stray he had picked out of the garbage.
But during one brutal beating that nearly stopped my heart, time froze, and a glowing figure called The Chronicler appeared.
"You are not an abandoned orphan, Clare. You carry the blood of the highest gods."
He revealed that I was the stolen daughter of the ultra-wealthy Barrett family.
Then, he showed me the horrific ending of my previous life.
I had died right here on this bloody dirt floor.
My real parents and three brothers went completely insane with grief, turning into ruthless monsters who destroyed themselves and the entire world to avenge me.
Meanwhile, the Pruitt family kept torturing me, locking me in a woodshed and feeding me moldy bread.
The memory of my bones breaking and my real mother's agonizing screams crushed my chest.
Why did I have to suffer like an animal while my true family tore the world apart looking for me?
This time, I refused to die in the mud.
I accepted my divine blood, my eyes glowing gold as I summoned a bolt of purple lightning to strike my abuser.
I just needed to survive the night.
Because my real father's heavily armed convoy was already tearing up the mountain, ready to burn this hell to the ground.
9.1
Jessie Compton harbored a lethal, burning secret in her veins, forcing her to live as a ghost on the fringes of society.
When her volatile blood spiked to a boiling point, she fled into the woods and stumbled upon a dying billionaire, his veins turned to ice by a synthetic toxin.
To stop herself from literally combusting, she made a desperate gamble: she cut their wrists and mixed her fire-blood with his poisoned ice.
The insane transaction saved them both, but it unleashed an absolute nightmare.
Bryce Hogan woke up completely cured, but violently obsessed with the anomaly that had invaded his system.
He deployed a private army, thermal drones, and limitless wealth to hunt her down.
He tracked her across state lines, shattered her carefully built new identity, and cornered her in an underground Las Vegas black market.
"Find her! I want her found!"
His men ruthlessly closed in, leaving her battered, bleeding, and with a cracked rib as she barely escaped his terrifying pursuit.
With only three vials of inhibitor left to keep her body from catching fire, Jessie was exhausted and desperate.
She couldn't understand why the man she had saved was hunting her with such a predatory, suffocating intensity.
What exactly had her blood awakened in him, and why did he look at her with a chilling mix of absolute terror and dark obsession?
Sitting on a midnight bus heading into the desert, Jessie tightened her grip on her tactical knife.
She was finally out of places to hide, which meant the billionaire was about to find out exactly how dangerous a cornered ghost could be.