My Baby, My Strength, Our Future
The mangled car teetered on the cliff's edge, my leg crushed, gasoline fumes thick in the air. My husband, Holden, stood safe on the highway, directing the rescue – but not for me. He was saving her, the woman in the passenger seat, leaving me and our unborn child to the ocean below.
I woke trapped in the crushed Maybach, leg pinned. The cliff loomed; the driver's seat was empty.
Holden, safe outside, directed paramedics past me to Giana, his "most valuable asset," ordering her rescue first.
I watched him comfort Giana, oblivious, as the car slid. My baby barely viable. Holden offered a black card for silence; Giana gloated.
Ten years of devotion, a cruel lie. Rage fueled me: how could he abandon his wife and child?
I swore a venomous oath: never again an accessory. I flicked his card away, shielded my pregnancy, and promised my baby escape.
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Chapter 4
Elise POV:
The heavy oak door pushed open just a fraction, the hinges silent. Giana slipped into the room. She was wearing a standard-issue hospital gown, but her face was painted with a flawless, full-coverage makeup look.
A thick, ridiculous foam brace wrapped around her neck, but her hands were perfectly steady as she casually held a venti iced coffee from Starbucks.
Giana reached behind her and clicked the deadbolt into place. The moment the lock engaged, the pitiful, traumatized victim routine vanished from her face, replaced by the smug, radiant glow of a conqueror.
I watched her with dead eyes. My right hand, hidden beneath the white hospital blanket, slowly slid upward, slipping under my pillow until my fingers brushed the cold glass of my smartphone.
Giana strutted to the foot of my bed, her eyes sweeping over the heavy traction sling and the thick plaster cast encasing my leg. She didn't try to hide her amusement.
"Tsk, tsk," she clicked her tongue, shaking her head in mock sympathy. "You really look like hell, Elise. Such a tragedy."
I didn't take the bait. I kept my face entirely blank, while my thumb blindly swiped across my phone screen under the pillow. Muscle memory from my years as a paralegal kicked in; three swipes right, one tap down. I hit the record button on the voice memo app.
When I didn't react, Giana rolled her eyes. She dragged the visitor's chair closer to the bed, the metal legs scraping harshly against the linoleum floor, and sat down, crossing her legs elegantly.
She took a slow, deliberate sip of her iced coffee. "Holden was a wreck last night," she sighed, her tone dripping with manufactured pity. "He refused to leave the ER waiting room until the doctors assured him I didn't have any brain bleeding. He held my hand the entire time."
A sharp, phantom pain pinched the center of my chest, but I refused to give her the satisfaction of seeing it. I just stared at her, letting the silence stretch until it became uncomfortable.
My absolute lack of reaction visibly grated on her nerves. Giana leaned forward, the ice rattling in her plastic cup, her voice dropping to a harsh, venomous hiss.
"Let's cut the crap, Elise," she sneered. "He only married you because you were a quiet, obedient little orphan who wouldn't get in the way of his ambitions. You were cheap to maintain."
She sat back, a triumphant smile stretching her red lips. "But in the real world, in the empire he's building? I am his equal. I am his true soulmate."
I let out a soft, dry laugh. The sound was so unexpected it made Giana blink. I finally spoke, my voice raspy but dripping with lethal condescension. "If you're such a profound soulmate, Giana, why are you still just a dirty little secret after ten years? Why are you sneaking into my hospital room like a rat?"
That hit the nerve. The smugness vanished, and Giana's face flushed a dark, ugly shade of red.
She shot up from the chair so fast her iced coffee sloshed over the rim, splattering dark brown drops onto the pristine white hospital sheets.
"You listen to me, you pathetic cripple," she snarled, leaning over the bed. "Holden is filing the divorce papers the second the IPO goes public. You better be smart and walk away with nothing, or we will destroy you."
To drive the final nail into my coffin, Giana aggressively raised her left hand, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear in an exaggerated, theatrical motion.
The harsh fluorescent lights of the hospital room caught the massive, pear-shaped diamond resting on her ring finger. The facets threw blinding, arrogant sparks of light across the walls.
My eyes locked onto the ring, and my pupils dilated. A sickening jolt of recognition hit me.
It was the exact custom design I had sketched with Holden in a sunlit cafe in Paris last year. We had spent hours perfecting the setting for our upcoming five-year anniversary.
Giana caught my stare and let out a sharp, victorious laugh. "Beautiful, isn't it? Holden had it rushed for me last night. Said I needed something beautiful to help me recover from the trauma."
I took a slow, deep breath, forcing the violent surge of bile back down my throat. My thumb moved under the pillow, pressing the screen to stop and save the recording.
I lifted my chin, looking at Giana not as a rival, but as a pathetic, delusional clown performing a cheap trick.
"Take your little trophy and get the hell out of my room," I commanded, my voice dropping to a freezing, absolute zero.
Giana scoffed, clearly thinking I was just putting on a brave face to hide my shattered heart. She turned, her hips swaying as she marched toward the door.
As she unlocked the deadbolt, she threw a nasty smirk over her shoulder. "I'll see you in court, Elise."
The door clicked shut, leaving me alone in the sterile silence of the room.
I pulled my phone out from under the pillow. My fingers flew across the screen, taking the five-minute audio file and uploading it directly to my encrypted, cloud-based legal drive.
I stared at the blue progress bar inching across the screen, my eyes narrowing into slits of pure, calculating ice.
"Enjoy your stolen goods while you can."
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8.4
I worked three double shifts at the garage just to buy a velvet-boxed cake for my wealthy girlfriend, Arleen.
But when I pushed open the VIP room door, I saw her lover kissing her bare leg.
She didn't push him away. Instead, she laughed and swirled her martini.
"I only forgot Finn because I knew he would stay. He is a poor boy from Queens who follows me around like a loyal dog."
Later that night, her lover intentionally crashed a Porsche to scare me, sending a piece of jagged metal into my skull.
Lying in a growing pool of my own blood, I watched Arleen crawl out of the wreckage.
She didn't even look at me. She threw herself at her uninjured lover, screaming for a medic.
"He just got scraped by a piece of plastic. He is faking it. Deal with Jaquez first!"
When I woke up, I wasn't free. Arleen had locked me in a private hospital wing with 24-hour security, planning to isolate me and keep me as her broken, captive toy forever.
My blind, pathetic devotion finally froze into absolute disgust.
I looked at the heart monitor next to my bed and grabbed an IV needle.
I severed the sensor wire to trigger a flatline, slipped out the fire stairs while the nurses panicked, and burned my identity to ashes.
This time, I was going to disappear to London, build my own empire, and watch hers burn.
7.9
After her twin brother's unexplained death at Alpha Academy, Alexandria Hyde takes his place and his name to uncover the truth. Now living as "Alex," she's thrown into a world of hot, testosterone-fueled Alphas who fight to the brink of death... and she has to survive it while hiding who she really is.
But staying hidden isn't easy–
Not when the Alphas start noticing her.
Not when the truth she's chasing might destroy her first.
And definitely not when they start fighting for her instead.
7.7
Rory stood on the witness stand, forced by her father into an impossible choice: secure her dying mother's medical funding, or save her innocent boyfriend.
She looked Corbin right in his trusting eyes and lied to the court, testifying that he was the one driving the car during the fatal hit-and-run, sending him to a maximum-security prison for ten years.
The betrayal destroyed him. Corbin's father died of a heart attack upon hearing the guilty verdict. Six years later, Corbin returned as a ruthless billionaire and systematically blacklisted Rory from every job in the city. He cornered her into singing at his private club, humiliating her by forcing her to drink scotch—knowing she was severely allergic—and making her throw away his promise ring just to earn a stack of cash.
"Remember this moment. This is only the beginning."
She endured his cruel revenge because she was hiding a desperate secret: she was raising his five-year-old daughter, Willa. But when Willa's congenital heart defect suddenly worsened, requiring an impossible one-million-dollar surgery, Rory realized Corbin's calculated blockade had left her completely trapped with no way to save their child.
Staring at the sterile hospital walls, the last shred of her guilt burned away, replaced by a cold, hard resolve. He had destroyed her career and backed her into a corner, but he was the only one with the money. Wiping her tears, Rory turned and headed straight for Vance Tower.
9.2
When Alma's father stood in front of the bulldozers to protest, the energy company's thugs beat him half to death in the mud.
Instead of arresting the attackers, the police handcuffed her bleeding father and threw him into a cruiser.
"Stay back, kid," the officer barked, shoving Alma away.
Her father was denied bail and framed for assaulting an officer. The corrupt mayor just smiled and told her not to cause a scene. Meanwhile, the company mailed her weeping mother a severance check that barely covered a month of groceries.
Alma was forced to watch her family be completely destroyed by men with money and power.
Kneeling in the cold dirt where her father's blood had spilled, she didn't shed a single tear. The panic in her chest died, replaced by a cold, absolute hatred.
She realized that crying wouldn't do anything. In this world, justice didn't exist for the weak.
Years later, Alma stepped onto a prestigious Ivy League campus, her cheap backpack slung over her shoulder.
She was surrounded by the arrogant children of the very executives who ruined her life.
She lowered her head, hiding her dead eyes, and put on the perfect mask of a timid, helpless charity case.
Undergrad was just a training ground, and these elite kids were just her practice dummies. The hunt was officially on.
7.6
Top DEA agent Kaitlynn Bruce woke up to a heavy, chemical lethargy, only to realize she was trapped in the body of a weak, abused war widow.
Before she could even process her new reality, she heard her sister-in-law counting cash, selling her unconscious body to a local thug for a measly two hundred dollars.
The thug dragged her new seven-year-old son, Cason, into the bedroom.
"Mommy!"
When the boy reached out, the man brutally kicked his small body into a wooden doorframe, leaving him gasping and bleeding on the floor.
Memories flooded Kaitlynn's mind. Her predecessor was a pathetic doormat whose husband's military pension had been bled dry by these greedy in-laws, leaving her children to starve and suffer endless abuse.
But as Kaitlynn looked at the bleeding boy's dark, unnervingly alert eyes, a chilling piece of DEA intelligence clicked in her mind.
Cason Richmond.
The name, the town, the abusive aunt—it all matched the classified files of the "Director of the Hive," the most ruthless and feared cartel puppet master in the criminal underworld.
How could this battered, starving child be destined to become the ultimate monster she used to hunt?
The original widow's tragic death was supposed to be the catalyst that pushed this boy into total darkness.
But Kaitlynn Bruce was not a victim.
Adrenaline burning through the drugs, she cracked the thug's neck with a brass lamp and choked the sister-in-law against the wall.
Looking down at the boy who was supposed to become a global nightmare, she made a vow. She was going to rewrite his script, even if she had to burn the whole world down to do it.
8.4
Arlene was the illegitimate daughter of the wealthy Boone family, treated worse than a stray dog. To keep her meager scholarship, she had to swallow her pride and apologize to the frat boy who tormented her.
But he didn't just want an apology. He forced her to drink twenty shots of liquor laced with pure capsaicin extract.
"Drink us under the table, or take off your clothes and crawl out."
Arlene drank until her stomach tore, vomiting blood and collapsing on the filthy club floor.
When she dragged her half-dead body back to the Boone estate, her biological father and half-sister didn't care. Instead, her sister ground Arlene's SAT admission ticket into the dirt with her stiletto.
"Throw her out. Dad doesn't want to look at her before Hardie's engagement."
The guards threw her onto the gravel, leaving her bleeding and barefoot in the freezing night.
Arlene sat shivering at a dark bus stop, her dignity completely stripped away. She never wanted a dime from the Boones, so why did they insist on crushing her only way out? And why did Dr. Hardie Boone, the untouchable head of the family, look at her with such a twisted, terrifying obsession?
When Hardie's black Aston Martin pulled out of the shadows, he scooped her up, took her away, and locked her inside his penthouse.
"You carry the Boone name. Whether you live or die is my decision."
Trapped by the dangerous man who demanded total control over her life, Arlene finally realized that simply running away was no longer an option.