Stolen By The Alpha's Dangerous Brother
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.
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Chapter 7
Sloane POV
"I'd rather watch her burn her life down with my brother, so my friend can finally be free."
Knox's words hung in the air, cold and absolute. But ten years of deeply ingrained conditioning couldn't be erased by one brutal truth. My body moved before my brain could stop it. I spun away from the window and lunged toward the massive oak doors. I had to stop him. I had to be the one to pull Finn back from the ledge, just like I always did.
I didn't even make it three steps.
Knox's arm, thick and unyielding as a steel beam, banded around my waist. He jerked me backward, pinning my spine flush against his solid chest. The suffocating, intoxicating scent of a violent thunderstorm and spent gunpowder swallowed me whole, completely drowning out the faint smell of polished wood and old money that permeated the Great Hall.
"Let me go!" I thrashed against his grip, my nails digging uselessly into his forearm. "You're a monster! He's your brother, and he's in agony out there!"
Knox didn't budge. His jaw tightened, the rough stubble there grazing my temple as he leaned down. "He doesn't want to be saved, little one," he murmured, his dark baritone vibrating straight through my ribs. "He wants to drown, and you are not his life raft."
Tears of pure, human frustration burned my eyes. I was entirely powerless against him, physically and fundamentally. The fight drained out of me, leaving only a trembling, exhausted shell. His Alpha aura pressed down on the room, a suffocating weight I could feel but to which my wolfless soul owed no allegiance. It didn't work on me, not the way it would on a she-wolf. But his physical strength was absolute. I was trapped.
Sensing my stillness, Knox gripped my shoulders and turned me around to face him. His dark eyes were entirely black, the merciless gaze of an apex predator locking onto its chosen prey.
"You want to play the martyr for a male who doesn't even see you?" Knox challenged, his voice dropping to a lethal whisper. "Fine. Let's make a wager."
I stared up at him, my breath catching in my throat. "What?"
"If Delilah and Hunter's Mating Ceremony successfully takes place, I will walk away. I will never interfere with you again, and you can go back to your pathetic infatuation." He stepped closer, his massive frame forcing me to tilt my head back. "But if the ceremony fails..."
He reached out, a single, calloused knuckle tracing the line of my jaw. A violent shiver, purely physiological, wracked my body. My skin erupted in goosebumps. It was a reaction born of sheer, overwhelming proximity to a predator, a cocktail of fear, adrenaline, and a furious, defiant anger that he could affect me at all. There was nothing supernatural about it. I hated my body for reacting, for trembling under his touch when my mind screamed to run.
"You're mine," he growled, the possessive rumble vibrating in the floorboards. "I will pursue you. I will ruin you for anyone else. And you will forget my brother's name."
I was pinned by the sheer force of his presence, a human caught in an Alpha's sights. In a moment of sheer, panicked exhaustion, wanting nothing more than an escape from the crushing weight of the moment and knowing I was physically incapable of breaking free, I gave a stiff, jerky nod. It was a surrender of convenience, not belief. A gambit to make him release me. I didn't believe for a second his insane wager would ever come to pass.
A cruel, devastatingly handsome smirk curved his lips. "Good. Now I'm going to go make sure I win."
"You can't," I breathed, the realization of his trap crashing over me. "You can't hurt your friend just to—"
The heavy groan of the front doors swinging open cut me off.
The night air swept into the Great Hall, carrying the sour, heartbroken scent of rain-soaked grass. Finn stood in the threshold. He looked entirely hollowed out, his shoulders slumped and his eyes red-rimmed from whatever fresh hell Delilah had just put him through.
He looked up, instinctively seeking me out—his safe, reliable emotional sponge.
Instead, he found me trapped between Knox's arms and Knox's body. We were inches apart, the air between us practically crackling with the heavy, possessive pheromones of an Alpha asserting his claim.
Finn froze. The vulnerability in his eyes instantly shattered, replaced by a cold, jagged disbelief. His gaze darted from Knox's hands, which were still lingering near my waist, up to my flushed, panicked face.
"What..." Finn's voice was a ragged, sandpaper rasp. "What is going on here?"
I shoved Knox away, stumbling backward like a sinner caught in the light.
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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.
9.1
The best way to get back at a cheating bastard? Make him sick to his stomach for the rest of his life!
Days before her wedding, Corinne caught her fiancé cheating with his coworker in what she thought was their future home.
Furious, she tore everything apart, ended the engagement, and decided on a bold revenge plan.
To make him regret it for life, she set her sights on marrying his powerful uncle. Confident in her scheme, she tried to win over the cold, untouchable man, only to realize too late that she had mistaken his identity.
The man she married was far more dangerous than she imagined!
Corinne decided to make a quick escape. "Let's get a divorce. We're clearly not right for each other... "
He cornered her with a knowing smile, "Not right for each other? Funny, that's not what you said last night in bed. Want me to remind you how wrong you are?"
9.5
As the fetal monitor screamed in the delivery room, Danae begged the nurses to call her billionaire husband to save their dying baby.
Instead of Adrian, his chief lawyer arrived with a chilling directive: all emergency interventions were explicitly denied.
While security guards pinned her arms to the mattress, Danae was forced to listen to her baby's heartbeat flatline. The lawyer simply dropped divorce papers on her bed and walked out. A sympathetic doctor helped Danae fake her own death to escape the family. Stripped of her assets and kicked out into the freezing rain, she tried to drown herself with her child's ashes, only to be saved by a mysterious benefactor.
Three years later, Danae returned as a top medical researcher. But at a high-profile symposium, she crossed paths with Adrian and his new fiancée—a cheap lookalike of Danae. The woman maliciously staged a bloody miscarriage using a restricted chemical, perfectly framing Danae's lab for the crime.
Adrian pinned Danae against the wall, his eyes black with rage, vowing to make her beg for death. Three years ago, he let their real child die without even answering the phone. Now, he was ready to destroy her over a fake pregnancy.
Just as Adrian's private guards dragged her away to be locked up, the hospital doors were violently kicked open. A rival billionaire stepped in with a team of ruthless lawyers, shielding Danae behind his back and declaring war.
8.1
I lived my entire life in a beautiful, naive bubble, completely trusting my husband and my best friend.
That was until they tied me to a chair, slit my vocal cords, and set my family's estate on fire.
As the flames crept closer, my husband Demarco calmly crushed my diamond wedding ring under his leather heel.
My best friend Cristin walked in, leaning against his shoulder and pouring her champagne onto the floorboards to fuel the fire.
"Your grandfather didn't just have a stroke. The medication swap was incredibly easy to arrange."
Looking down at my bleeding body, they casually confessed to murdering the only person who had ever truly protected me, all to swallow the Bridges empire.
I couldn't even scream. I could only suffocate in the thick black smoke as they turned their backs and locked the heavy oak door behind them.
Why was I so blind? How could the two people I loved most treat me like disposable garbage?
In my final moments of agonizing pain and pure, concentrated fury, I pulled out the detonator my grandfather had secretly left me.
I pressed the button, blowing the estate and all of us to hell.
But the burning stopped.
When I opened my eyes, I was staring up at a pristine crystal chandelier.
I was fifteen years old again, lying in my childhood bedroom, right before my treacherous uncle and those parasites started tearing my family apart.
And I didn't come back empty-handed.
This time, I am not the naive heiress.
9.0
My fiancé, Jadon, proposed on the Fourth of July. It was the perfect moment I had dreamed of since we were kids. That night, he called me on FaceTime.
But the man on the screen wasn't him. It was a version of him from five years in the future, his face hollow with regret.
He laid out a horrifying timeline of betrayal. He was sleeping with my best friend and business partner, Kimberly.
She would use his venture capital to steal my architectural firm. She would sabotage my father' s life-saving kidney transplant, leaving him to die.
And she would maliciously cause a future pregnancy to end in tragedy, murdering our unborn child.
My entire world-my love, my friendship, my future-was a lie. The two people I trusted most were plotting my complete ruin.
This broken man from the future, desperate to atone, gave me a roadmap to escape. So I drove my car off a cliff and faked my own death, determined to rewrite the story they had written for me.
9.8
On the night of her seventh wedding anniversary, Annabelle waited by a cold dinner, only for her husband Julian to kick the doors open, carrying his bleeding sister-in-law, Jocelyne.
Jocelyne had committed a horrific drunk driving hit-and-run, and Julian demanded Annabelle sign a plea deal and go to prison to protect the family's stock prices.
What truly broke Annabelle wasn't Julian's ruthless betrayal, but her own twin sons.
Her own flesh and blood stood fiercely in front of Jocelyne to protect her.
"Nobody even likes you anyway, Mother. If you go to jail, everything stays normal."
Julian stripped her of every cent, locked her in a remote estate, and chased her to the edge of a cliff with his bodyguards when she refused to be their scapegoat.
Looking at the man she had loved for seven years and the children she had devoted her life to, her heart turned to ice.
Why was her endless sacrifice rewarded with being a disposable shield for a manipulative liar?
Standing on the jagged cliffs, she played the dashcam audio proving Jocelyne's guilt to a suddenly horrified Julian.
"You don't deserve the truth."
Then, she stepped backward off the cliff into the raging black ocean.
Two years later, she returned to the city as an untouchable, powerful elite, walking right past a broken, miserable Julian without a second glance.