My Love Was Gone
My husband, Rodger Hayes, was a renowned chief negotiator, famous for his integrity and firmness within the circle.
When my son and I were kidnapped, with three hostages at the scene, the kidnappers agreed to release only one.
Among the women and the boy, Rodger should have chosen to save the boy first.
Yet, I heard him saying in Spanish fluently, "Release the woman in white."
His first love, Jolene Chapman, was freed, while my son, Jacob Hayes, died from a gunfire.
Later, Rodger explained the situation flatly. "The kidnappers chose to release Jolene."
I cradled Jacob's ashes and smiled sadly.
Rodger didn't know that I was fluent in Spanish, as I had been a special forces member.
His lies crumbled before me.
My phone vibrated, and I confirmed the encrypted message.
"Falcon returns to base."
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Chapter 3
Returning home, I found Rodger already there.
He was sitting on the couch. When he saw the urn in my hands, his eyes flickered with unease.
Yet, in the next moment, he had regained his icy composure.
He didn't comfort or embrace me. He simply stood up and said lightly, "Nicole, Jacob is dead, and he cannot come back to life. But we must carry on. You have to find a way to move on."
He asked me to move on.
I lifted my gaze to him.
I remembered three years ago when Jacob had a sudden high fever at midnight, convulsing and twitching.
At that time, Rodger was in another city dealing with a complicated international negotiation worth billions.
In a panic, I called him and cried, "Jacob is gravely ill."
Without hesitation, he canceled the negotiation and flew back overnight.
He rushed into the hospital room and pulled me into his embrace. He said in a hoarse voice, "Don't be afraid. I'm back. Nothing is more important than you and Jacob."
The warmth of his embrace still haunted my memory, but the air felt bitterly cold now.
I forced a faint smile and replied in a low voice, "Alright. I'll try to find a way to move on."
Rodger assumed I had come to terms with things and visibly relaxed. The tension between his eyebrows eased a bit.
A few days later, Jolene moved into our home under the pretext that she needed company for her trauma.
Rodger didn't ask for my opinion.
But what difference would it make?
I no longer had the energy to question it.
He had often ranted about Jolene after he was drunk.
He condemned that she had left him without hesitation. He complained that she was brutal and heartless.
Now I realized that his "hatred" for Jolene was merely another form of lingering attachment.
One day, when I returned home and opened the door, I was stunned.
Jacob's room had been completely different.
His favorite dolls, Legos, and toy cars were all gone.
The starry wall mural I painted was covered by a giant white canvas.
In the center of the room stood an easel.
Jolene was sitting in front of it, humming as she mixed paints.
When she saw me, she wasn't surprised at all and even smiled. "Nicole, hi. Look! I tidied up the place a bit. Isn't it much neater now? Since it was just a spare room, I figured it would make a good art studio for me."
A surge of anger clouded my vision and blurred everything before me. "Who gave you permission to touch Jacob's things?" My voice trembled.
"I…" Jolene feigned innocence. "I saw those things were old and taking up space, so I helped you get rid of them."
"Bring them back to me." I forced out each word.
"They're all thrown away." Jolene spread her hands. "The garbage truck took them this morning."
"I said bring them back to me!" I screamed, lunging at her.
Rodger burst in at that moment.
He grabbed my arm and pushed me away. "Nicole, what's gotten into you?"
His shove sent me reeling, and my back slammed against the doorframe as I collapsed to the floor.
He didn't even glance at me. Instead, he anxiously checked on Jolene. "Are you alright? Did you get injured?"
"I'm fine, Rodger." Jolene immediately nestled into his embrace. She trembled slightly, and her voice was perfectly tinged with grievance. "I just wanted to tidy up the room and make a memorial painting for Jacob… I didn't expect such a strong reaction from her…"
As she spoke, she sneaked a provocative glance at me.
Did she want to make a memorial painting?
I propped up my weakened body and looked at the enormous white canvas.
On it were swirling shades of gray, like dense fog or the ashes of something burned out.
My gaze froze suddenly.
I stared fixedly at the palette beside the easel.
Among the paints, there was some gritty, bone-like grayish-white powder not fully mixed.
A chilling realization shot up my spine and seized my mind.
My eyes darted frantically around the room.
It finally landed on the nightstand where Jacob's urn should have been.
It was empty.
The small black velvet box that held my entire world was gone.
A jolt of horror struck me and split my sanity instantly.
I raised my head, and my eyes turned bloodshot as I locked onto Jolene. I asked in a trembling voice, "What did you use to paint this?"
Jolene peeked out from Rodger's arms as she smiled innocently.
She pointed at the gray painting. "Of course, I used Jacob's ash. Rodger said you wouldn't let go of that box, so you couldn't move on. So I thought I could turn him into art. So he'll always be here with us in another way. Look! The hues of his ash are hauntingly beautiful."
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8.1
"I don't share my women, Adele. Breeder or not. Go on your knees." He instructed, his hands going to unbuckle his trousers.
My heart burned with hatred as I clutched the knife behind me. "Of course, Alpha Loic. I was wondering... If you were to choose between a quick death and a slow one, which would you choose?"
I smiled brightly. He was taken aback for a moment. Then his face twisted in anger. "Have you forgotten your place so soon, Omega? Go down on your fucking knees."
"Omega? Aww. Adele would be so hurt. Tonight, I'll pronounce your death. The Alpha of the Vanguard pack, killed by fire. Touchè." I snapped my hands, and fire sprang up from all corners, encircling the room, with us in it.
"Y-you are not Adele. Who are you?" His eyes widened.
...
The Demon Queen, a name that struck terror in the minds of mortals and werewolves alike. Who'd have thought she'd meet her end during one of her adventures at a nightclub?
After being struck dead by the Alpha of her most hated race, Ophelie returns in the body of a wolf-less girl with only one mission in mind. To kill her murderer.
But sometimes, things never go as planned. When love is thrown in the mix, Ophelie finds herself and her previous plans swaying.
Refusing to kill Loic is to lose herself and her powers. What would she choose?
7.6
Jocelyn Yang lived in the grand Turner Mansion, not as a guest, but as a prisoner. Ever since her father's death, the ruthless billionaire Elam Turner forced her to atone for sins her father never committed.
On her nineteenth birthday, a male classmate secretly sent her a diamond necklace. Elam, who had flown back from London overnight, flew into a psychotic, jealous rage at the sight of another man's gift.
He mercilessly crushed the delicate necklace into the marble floor with his custom leather shoe.
"Did you forget what you are?" Elam hissed, dragging her into a pitch-black storage room. "You take gifts from other men behind my back?"
He pinned her to the dusty floorboards and violently assaulted her. The next morning, a wire transfer of $500,000 hit her bank account. He had humiliated her, broken her spirit, and was now casually trying to buy her silence. Later, when a broken bike left her walking miles through a freezing rainstorm, he just shoved scalding tea into her bleeding hands.
"Look at you," he sneered. "You look like a stray dog ruining my floors."
Jocelyn curled up in the cold, her lips bleeding and her heart shattered. She couldn't understand his terrifying obsession. If he hated her so much, why did he refuse to let her go? Why did he look at her with such manic hunger while systematically destroying her life?
Staring at the massive sum of hush money on her phone, a desperate spark of vengeance flared in her chest. Jocelyn wired every single cent back to Elam's account. She picked up her charcoal pencil, vowing to win the upcoming art competition and buy her escape from this monster forever.
7.3
Clara came home from a fourteen-hour board meeting to the sound of a piercing scream in the playroom.
When she rushed in, she found her husband, Chadwick, kneeling on the floor in a panic.
But he wasn't looking at their five-year-old son, Leo, who had a massive bleeding welt on his forehead.
Instead, Chadwick was trembling as he held the nanny's daughter, Autumn, who barely had a microscopic scratch.
"She needs ice. And antibacterial ointment," Chadwick snapped, carrying the nanny's daughter away and leaving his bleeding son behind.
From that moment, the nightmare only escalated.
Chadwick ordered Clara to cook a three-hour meal for the nanny's kid, threw away Leo's favorite toys because Autumn sneezed, and even secretly took the nanny and her daughter on Leo's promised Disney trip.
The final humiliation came at the Met Gala.
Right before their sponsor speech, Chadwick received a frantic call from the nanny claiming Autumn was having a panic attack.
He abandoned Clara in front of hundreds of flashing cameras, sprinting out of the ballroom.
Clara stood completely alone, the humiliation eating through her veins like acid.
She couldn't understand how a father could call the nanny's kid his "little princess" while watching his own son cry.
Why was he treating his own flesh and blood like garbage just to play savior to another woman's child?
Suddenly, the blinding camera flashes were blocked by a massive shadow.
Erasmo Chase, the heir to New York's largest financial dynasty, stepped out of the darkness and shielded her.
"A man like that is unworthy of your grief, Ms. Best," he whispered, pressing a silk handkerchief into her trembling hand.
Looking at the sharp profile of the powerful man beside her, Clara's shock hardened into a lethal, cold fury.
She was going to dump her family's shares, crash the board, and make Chadwick lose absolutely everything.
9.0
I had been a wife for exactly six hours when I woke up to the sound of my husband’s heavy breathing. In the dim moonlight of our bridal suite, I watched Hardin, the man I had adored for years, intertwined with my sister Carissa on the chaise lounge.
The betrayal didn't come with an apology. Hardin stood up, unashamed, and sneered at me. "You're awake? Get out, you frumpy mute." Carissa huddled under a throw, her fake tears already welling up as she played the victim. They didn't just want me gone; they wanted me erased to protect their reputations.
When I refused to move, my world collapsed. My father didn't offer a shoulder to cry on; he threatened to have me committed to a mental asylum to save his business merger. "You're a disgrace," he bellowed, while the guards stood ready to drag me away. They had spent my life treating me like a stuttering, submissive pawn, and now they were done with me.
I felt a blinding pain in my skull, a fracture that should have broken me. But instead of tears, something dormant and lethal flickered to life. The terrified girl who walked down the aisle earlier that day simply ceased to exist. In her place, a clinical system—the Valkyrie Protocol—booted up.
My racing heart plummeted to a steady sixty beats per minute. I didn't scream. I stood up, my spine straightening for the first time in twenty years, and looked at Hardin with the detachment of a surgeon looking at a tumor.
"Correction," I said, my voice stripped of its stutter. "You're in my light."
By dawn, I had drained my father's accounts, vanished into a storm, and found a bleeding Crown Prince in a hidden safehouse. They thought they had broken a mute girl. They didn't realize they had just activated their own destruction.
7.0
My marriage ended at a charity gala I organized. One moment, I was the pregnant, happy wife of tech mogul Gabe Sullivan; the next, a reporter' s phone screen announced to the world that he and his childhood sweetheart, Harper, were expecting a child.
Across the room, I saw them together, his hand resting on her stomach. This wasn't just an affair; it was a public declaration that erased me and our unborn baby.
To protect his company's billion-dollar IPO, Gabe, his mother, and even my own adoptive parents conspired against me. They moved Harper into our home, into my bed, treating her like royalty while I became a prisoner.
They painted me as unstable, a threat to the family's image. They accused me of cheating and claimed my child wasn't his.
The final command was unthinkable: terminate my pregnancy. They locked me in a room and scheduled the procedure, promising to drag me there if I refused.
But they made a mistake. They gave me back my phone to keep me quiet. Feigning surrender, I made one last, desperate call to a number I had kept hidden for years-a number belonging to my biological father, Antony Dean, the head of a family so powerful, they could make my husband's world burn.
8.7
Isabelle couldn't stop drinking as the music pounded through the club. She was trying to drown out the image of her best friend, Aurora, who was pregnant with her fiancé's child, on what should have been Isabelle's engagement night.
But fate had other plans. When an employee calls in sick, Isabelle volunteers to fill in, unaware she is about to walk straight into the arms of Don Miller-the club's most powerful and dangerous client. He was ruthless, commanding, and known for treating women as playthings. Don doesn't believe in love... until Isabelle.
One glance, one reckless touch, and something shifts. She stirs a hunger in him he thought he'd buried forever. And when he learns what broke her, Don makes Isabelle an indecent offer:
He promises to mend her shattered heart and destroy everyone who betrayed her-if she surrenders to him completely.
Two broken souls. One dark deal.
Isabelle is about to learn that submission might just be the sweetest form of revenge. What begins as a dangerous bargain soon spirals into something deeper, darker, and far more intoxicating than either expected.
Maybe love isn't always gentle. Sometimes it's an obsession. Sometimes it's surrender. And sometimes... it's the most exquisite kind of ruin.