The Canary Who Learned To Fly
I died on a Tuesday.
It wasn't a quick death. It was slow, cold, and meticulously planned by the man who called himself my father.
I was twenty years old.
He needed my kidney to save my sister. The spare part for the golden child. I remember the blinding lights of the operating theater, the sterile smell of betrayal, and the phantom pain of a surgeon's scalpel carving into my flesh while my screams echoed unheard. I remember looking through the observation glass and seeing him—my father, Giovanni Vitiello, the Don of the Chicago Outfit—watching me die with the same detached expression he used when signing a death warrant.
He chose her. He always chose her.
And then, I woke up.
Not in heaven. Not in hell. But in my own bed, a year before my scheduled execution. My body was whole, unscarred. The timeline had reset, a glitch in the cruel matrix of my existence, giving me a second chance I never asked for.
This time, when my father handed me a one-way ticket to London—an exile disguised as a severance package—I didn't cry. I didn't beg. My heart, once a bleeding wound, was now a block of ice.
He didn't know he was talking to a ghost.
He didn't know I had already lived through his ultimate betrayal.
He also didn't know that six months ago, during the city's brutal territory wars, I was the one who saved his most valuable asset. In a secret safe house, I stitched up the wounds of a blinded soldier, a man whose life hung by a thread. He never saw my face. He only knew my voice, the scent of vanilla, and the steady touch of my hands. He called me Sette. Seven. For the seven stitches I put in his shoulder.
That man was Dante Moretti. The Ruthless Capo. The man my sister, Isabella, is now set to marry.
She stole my story. She claimed my actions, my voice, my scent. And Dante, the man who could spot a lie from a mile away, believed the beautiful deception because he wanted it to be true. He wanted the golden girl to be his savior, not the invisible sister who was only ever good for her spare parts.
So I took the ticket. In my past life, I fought them, and they silenced me on an operating table. This time, I will let them have their perfect, gilded lie.
I will go to London. I will disappear. I will let Seraphina Vitiello die on that plane.
But I will not be a victim.
This time, I will not be the lamb led to slaughter.
This time, from the shadows of my exile, I will be the one holding the match. And I will wait, with the patience of the dead, to watch their entire world burn. Because a ghost has nothing to lose, and a queen of ashes has an empire to gain.
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Chapter 10
Seraphina Vitiello POV
The Uber idled before the massive iron gates.
It was the morning of the wedding, and the air hummed with frantic energy.
Delivery trucks were lining up to gain entry. Flowers. Catering. The architects of a fairy tale I was about to ruin.
I got out of the car.
I walked to the guard booth, my spine stiff against the lingering pain in my body.
"Call Dante," I said.
The guard hesitated, his gaze flickering over me, then picked up the phone.
A minute later, Dante walked down the driveway.
He looked wrecked. There were dark, bruised circles under his eyes, like he hadn't slept in days.
He saw me and scowled.
"You're supposed to be on a plane to London," he said.
His voice was rough, a scrape of gravel.
"I missed my flight," I lied.
He ran a hand through his hair, a gesture of pure exhaustion.
"Jesus, Seraphina. Do you ever stop being a burden? I don't have time for this. I have to get married in four hours."
"I know," I said.
I held out the white box.
"I just wanted to give you this."
He looked at it suspiciously, making no move to touch it.
"What is it?"
"A wedding gift," I said, forcing the title past my lips. "For my brother-in-law."
He didn't take it.
Marco, his underboss, stepped forward and took the box from my hand.
"Check it for bombs," Dante muttered.
I almost smiled.
It *is* a bomb, Dante, I thought. Just not the kind that explodes. It’s the kind that leaves nothing behind.
"I'm not going to London," I said softly.
He looked at me then. Really looked at me, his eyes searching mine for the game I was playing.
"What?"
"I'm going away," I said. "Somewhere you will never find me."
"Good," he said.
The word hung in the air between us.
Cold. Absolving. Final.
He turned his back on me.
He walked back up the driveway, moving towards the house where my sister was waiting to marry him.
He walked towards the lie he had chosen.
I watched him go until he was just a blur against the manicured landscape.
"Goodbye, Dante," I whispered.
I got back into the Uber.
"Airport," I told the driver.
As we merged onto the highway, I rolled down the window.
I took the SIM card out of my phone.
With a sharp *snap*, I broke it in half.
I threw it out the window.
I watched it bounce on the asphalt and disappear into the rush of traffic.
The wind whipped my hair across my face.
I took a deep breath.
It hurt my bruised ribs, but the air tasted different.
It didn't taste like blood or expensive cologne or fear.
It tasted like nothing.
And nothing was exactly what I wanted to be.
The girl who loved Dante Moretti died in a basement in Chicago.
The woman who landed in Sydney would be someone else entirely.
I closed my eyes and let the distance swallow me whole.
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8.7
I arrived at the hotel with Julian's favorite takeout, ready to surprise my fiancé before our big merger. But the moment I swiped the keycard, the silence of the hallway felt heavy and wrong.
Inside, a red-soled stiletto lay on the marble floor-the same one I'd watched my best friend Lila try on at Saks last week. Through the cracked bedroom door, I watched Julian's back arch as Lila looked me straight in the eye and smiled, wrapping her legs tighter around him to mock my heartbreak.
I fled to the penthouse to hide, only to find Grafton, Julian's "crippled" brother, waiting in the dark. To my horror, the man who was supposed to be paralyzed stood up from his wheelchair, gripped my chin with cold fingers, and forced me to sign a contract that gave him control of my family's shares. He knew about my mother's secret medical bills and used them to buy my silence, effectively turning my life into a calculated game of corporate chess.
The betrayal tasted like acid, and the injustice of it all burned in my throat. My fiancé was a liar, my best friend was a thief, and the man now controlling my fate was a predator who had been faking his disability for years.
I couldn't understand how everyone I trusted had turned out to be a monster. I was trapped between a man who cheated on me and a man who wanted to own me, with no way out and no one to turn to.
But when Julian came looking for me, Grafton didn't hide; he stood tall, looming over me with a possessive glint in his eyes. "Help me destroy Julian," I rasped, realizing that to survive the Faulkner men, I had to become the most dangerous player of them all.
9.1
I was the orphaned "parasite" of the Tyler family, taken in only to be abused for fifteen years after my parents died in a tragic car crash.
To finally escape their control, I sold my first time to my ruthless billionaire boss, Ellsworth Mosley, for one million dollars.
I thought it was a clean transaction.
But the next morning, covered in severe bruises he left on me, I was handed a brutal contract with a fifty-million-dollar penalty.
He didn't just buy my silence; he bought me.
My nightmare only worsened when my adoptive family found out about my connection to the billionaire.
Instead of disgust, they invited me to a hypocritical family dinner.
"Talk to Mosley, convince him to invest in our failing business," my adoptive father demanded shamelessly.
His son, who had tormented me for years, even grabbed my hand.
"Do this, and we can be officially engaged. You'll finally be a real Tyler."
They wanted me to whore myself out to save the family that had treated me like a stray dog.
I shattered my wine glass, cursed them to go bankrupt, and walked out into the rain.
As I reached the door, my phone vibrated with a terrifying summons from Ellsworth.
But it was the panicked whisper behind me that froze my blood.
"She knows about the brakes on her parents' car. If anyone finds out what we did, we'll go to prison."
They murdered my parents.
I gripped my phone, accepting the devil's call.
Since I was already bound to a monster, I would use his power to drag them all to hell.
7.7
I fled my werewolf pack five years ago to hide in a human city, all to escape a recurring nightmare.
Every full moon, a terrifying, golden-eyed Lycan slaughters everything in his path, forces me to my knees with a crushing Alpha command, and claims I am his fated mate.
The vivid dreams were destroying my inner wolf, forcing me to finally agree to return to my pack for the annual Pack Run to seek a cure.
But right before my flight home, I accidentally bumped into Rick Miller, the most arrogant, tyrannical Alpha on our college campus.
He looked down at the coffee spilled on his expensive leather jacket with pure disdain, publicly humiliating me in front of the entire airport.
"Do you have any idea what this jacket costs? Never mind. It's not like you could afford to replace it."
As he coldly insulted me, a terrifying realization suddenly froze my blood.
He smelled exactly like the ancient pine and storm from my nightmares, and his brief touch sent a mate's electric spark straight to my soul.
How could this cruel, spoiled campus bully possibly be the legendary, terrifying Lycan King who haunted my every sleeping moment?
As he turned and boarded his private jet, I looked down at my trembling hands and realized the horrifying truth.
My trip back to the pack wasn't a journey to heal my trauma.
I was walking straight into the cage of the very monster I had spent five years trying to outrun.
8.8
I spun the dial on the hidden wall safe, expecting to find the Glock 19 Aiden insisted I keep.
Instead, I found a ledger proving my husband, the Mafia's most feared Enforcer, was funding a secret family with my dead father's money.
For seven years, I had been his obedient doll. I cleaned the blood off his knuckles and justified his violence.
But the ledger showed he had siphoned my entire inheritance into a trust for a child he had with his brother's wife.
When I tried to leave, his mistress framed me as a spy.
Aiden didn't ask for proof. He didn't hesitate.
He dragged me to a damp warehouse, hooded me, and beat me until my ribs cracked.
He left me to rot in the dark, ignoring the diamond bracelet on my wrist—the very one he had gifted me the day before as a symbol of his "ownership."
He thought he had broken me. He thought I would die in that basement, a silent collateral of his rage.
But he made a fatal mistake. He left me alive.
I escaped through a ventilation grate and ran straight to the one man Aiden feared most: his sworn enemy, Jensen Levy.
"Make me a weapon," I told him.
Two years later, I walked back into Aiden's office.
Not as his battered wife, but as the CEO of the corporation that had just bought his empire's debt.
He looked at me with horror, realizing the ghost he created had come back to burn him down.
"Hello, Aiden," I said, pressing a high-voltage tactical pen against his chest.
"You're trespassing."
8.1
His second name is Death. Anyone who tries to get too close to him loses their life. He was cursed with the blood of his dead brother and till he finds the killer of his brother, he's forever bound with the curse. He's avoided like a plague, but he even loves it that way. He's so addicted to solitude and being alone. He is a bloody supernatural being, an unusual wizard. The only child born under Three Red Stars on a gloomy night 25 years ago. The demons fret at the smell of his scent, and evils flee. He has no shadow even in the dark. He is soulless-Orion Alaric, that's his name. The son of Duran Alaric, who owns Mystic Institute, a school for supernatural beings, located deep in the fogs of Mount Delos. Mystic Institute takes in over five hundred disciples yearly, and of the five hundred, Orion was determined to find his brother's killer that year, so he joined the school as a superior. There he sat on his throne, and as expected, she came.
Samara Hercules, a whitehead witch who's the exact opposite of everyone around him. Unexpectedly she is not the one he's hunting for, but her white hair reminds him of the killer each time he sets eyes on her and that builds a toxic hatred in him for Samara.
He was even ready to get rid of her so he wouldn't have to see her face anymore.
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Will Samara ever escape him and his tortures
Will romance ever bloom between these two?
Will his curse ever get lifted?
Will the real killer ever show up?
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7.8
I returned to Boston after three years, not for forgiveness, but to die.
My family, who blamed me for my mother's death, had cast me out, replacing me with a quiet, grateful orphan named Gabriela. She stole my father's love, my brother's affection, and my childhood sweetheart, Corey.
Now, terminally ill, my only wish was to reclaim my mother's wedding dress, a final piece of her to hold onto. But Gabriela was wearing it to marry Corey.
When I confronted her, she destroyed my mother's locket and cursed me to drop dead. In a blind rage, I slapped her. She shrieked, stabbed her own arm, and framed me for the attack.
As my family and Corey looked on with disgust, calling me a maniac, my body gave out. I collapsed, coughing up blood, my secret illness revealed in the most brutal way possible.
"You always blame me," I gasped, the words bubbling out with blood. "But I was just... dying."
Their faces filled with dawning horror, but it was too late. I was already gone.
Until I opened my eyes again, and my mother, who had been waiting for me all along, took my hand. "We'll be reborn," she promised, her eyes blazing with fury at the family who had destroyed me. "Together. As mother and daughter, again."