The Don's Dangerous Addiction
"Take them off yourself, or I will do it for you."
Ten sessions. Two hundred thousand dollars. Her brother's life for her body.
Dr. Avery St. Clair signed a contract in blood. To save her family, she has to fix the mind of Obsidian City's most feared monster, Dominic Kessler. He's a Mafia Don rotting from the inside out. A bullet gave him C-PTSD and a touch so sensitive he can't stand being touched. Avery is the only antidote who can calm him down. So he locked her in his villa.
But Dominic is playing a game he's already lost.
He doesn't know Avery is the woman from seven years ago. The stranger who saved him on that dark gambling ship and disappeared before sunrise.
He doesn't know the scar on his wrist is burned into her memory.
And most of all, he doesn't know the autistic little girl hiding in her clinic is his own daughter.
While Avery hides the truth behind her professional mask, their little girl feels his every nightmare. Every flashback. Every crack in his monster mask.
When the secrets finally come out, his empire will fall. He'll lose his sight. His throne. The only woman who ever made him feel human.
To win her back, he'll have to destroy the monster he became. And help her burn down the man who murdered her parents.
She won't make it easy.
This is not a love story. It's a monster learning to beg.
Why read this?
Obsessive Mafia Hero
Secret Baby with an Autistic and Gifted Daughter
Identity Reveal
"Touch Her And You Die" Energy
Massive Groveling and Revenge
A Heroine Who Fights Back
No Cheating. Happy Ending Guaranteed.
Chapters
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Chapter 3
Avery looked at him and didn't answer right away.
Her mind was already working.
Meant for her? With explosives?
She wasn't a security expert, but she wasn't stupid. The villa's windows were bulletproof. The hallway had motion sensor lights. Every corner had cameras. If someone just wanted to kill her, one sniper bullet would have been enough.
The moment she walked out of the study would have been the perfect time.
Using explosives meant they wanted to cause chaos. They wanted to break through the house's defenses.
They wanted him.
She looked at Dominic.
"It wasn't meant for me," she said, her voice steady. "It was meant for you."
Dominic's gaze froze for a fraction of a second.
"I was just collateral damage," she went on. "Or maybe I'm a variable. Something they couldn't control."
The corner of his mouth twitched.
"You're smart."
"I'm a doctor. Doctors need logic."
He looked at her but didn't respond.
The gunfire gradually stopped. Dominic took a call, said a few words, then hung up and looked at her.
"Come with me."
He led her through the hallway into a windowless room. Grey walls. Metal table and chairs. Like an interrogation room. One table, two chairs. A camera on the wall.
He pressed a remote. A screen on the wall lit up. Security footage from every corner of the villa.
"Sit."
Avery didn't move. Her eyes were fixed on the dark screens.
"Three entry points blown." Dominic leaned against the table, watching her. "Two bulletproof windows shattered. They used military grade explosives."
Her fingertips went cold.
The door opened. Drake walked in and placed a phone on the table.
"Boss, we just intercepted an encrypted order." He kept his head down. "Sent to East Pier. Someone's telling them to tamper with your shipment tonight."
Dominic's eyes darkened. "Source."
"The signal came from north of the city. Same encryption as the warehouse incident last time."
"Stay on it. Don't alert them."
Drake nodded and left.
Avery stood there and heard the whole conversation.
Explosion. East Pier. The same night.
She didn't say anything. But she put the two things together.
Right before Drake left, he paused. He pulled out a clear evidence bag and placed it on the table.
"Found at the explosion site. Dug it out of the wreckage. Doesn't belong to the villa."
Dominic glanced down and said nothing. After Drake left, he picked up the bag and emptied the contents onto the table.
A ring.
Black diamond. The letter D engraved on the inside.
The ring was old. The edges showed signs of wear, but it had been cared for.
Avery's breath stopped. She recognized this ring.
No. She wasn't sure it was the same one. But the one she remembered also had the same letter on the inside.
Something exploded in her head.
That night on the casino boat seven years ago. She had been drugged. Her memory was broken. A lot of things were blurry.
All she remembered was moonlight coming through the porthole, falling on the scar on the inside of the man's wrist.
Star shaped. Jagged edges. Raised slightly.
She had stared at that scar for a long time. She didn't know why she remembered it.
Later, he got up. A ring slipped off his finger and fell onto the sheets. She didn't make a sound. After he left, she picked it up and looked at it in her palm.
Black diamond. A letter on the inside.
D.
Avery had kept that ring. Not long after, she sold it.
Eight thousand dollars. The pawn shop owner looked at her like she was an idiot.
But that money paid for her brother's first round of treatment.
"You know this." Dominic's voice pulled her back.
"I've seen something like it."
"Where?"
She didn't answer. Her fingers were shaking. She hid her hands under the table, not wanting him to see.
Dominic watched her for a few seconds. His eyes slid from her face to her hands, hidden beneath the table. He paused for a moment.
Then he put the ring back in his pocket and didn't push.
"Today's attack. Wenger did it."
Avery's head snapped up. "My mentor?"
"Yes."
"He has no reason to-" She stopped. A huge contradiction flashed through her mind, like a thorn stuck in her throat. "If he wanted to kill you, why send me to treat you?"
Dominic looked at her. He didn't answer right away.
Silence stretched between them. She could hear the ticking of the clock on the wall.
"Don't you think that doesn't add up?" Avery's voice steadied. "He recommended me to take over his work. He sent me to treat you. And at the same time, he's blowing up your house. What does he actually want?"
"What do you think?"
"I don't know. But those two things don't fit together. The logic is wrong."
Dominic was quiet for two seconds. He tapped his finger on the table. Light. But in the silent room, it was sharp.
"How long have you known Wenger?"
"Six years."
"Do you think you know him?"
Avery didn't answer.
Six years. She had studied under him for her PhD. Done research. Written papers. He was her mentor. Her guide.
When she was struggling the most, he gave her a teaching assistant job so she could take care of her brother while studying.
But she really didn't know much about him...
Dominic's voice was flat. "Wenger isn't the man you think he is. He was my doctor for years. I trusted him. My medical records, my condition. He knew everything."
He paused.
"And then he had someone blow up my house."
Avery didn't speak. Her fingers gripped the edge of the table. Her knuckles were white.
"A doctor who worked for me for years suddenly wants me dead. Aren't you curious why?"
"Why?"
"Because someone's behind him." Dominic's voice went cold. "He's not the mastermind. He's just a pawn."
"Then why don't you just-"
"Just what? Kill him?" He cut her off. "The man is already dying. What's the point?"
Avery froze. "Dying?"
"Pancreatic cancer. Late stage. He doesn't have long."
She stared at him. A ringing sound filled her head. Wenger had never told her. His pale face. His shaking hands. His more frequent time off lately. All those details rushed back, snapping together like puzzle pieces.
"So you're keeping him alive to find out who's behind him."
"Yes."
"And me?" Avery's voice tightened. "Are you keeping me because I'm his pawn too?"
Dominic looked at her. He didn't deny it.
"You're his student. He trusts you. Or at least, he thinks he can control you. As long as you're here with me, he feels safe."
"So you're using me too."
"Yes." His tone was flat. "Just like he's using you."
Avery's fingernails dug into her palms. Pain spread from her palms to her wrists, but she didn't let go.
"I need Wenger's complete medical records," she said. "The one you had-"
"Destroyed in the explosion."
Her head snapped up. "What?"
"The archive room was in the blast zone. Most of the paper records burned." Dominic's voice didn't change. "The electronic backup is with Wenger. His server. His encryption. I can't get it."
Avery stared at him, trying to read his face. His expression was a wall. Nothing showed.
"You need the records to treat me," Dominic said. "Wenger has the records. If you want them, you have to go to him."
"You want me to go to Wenger?"
"Yes."
"You locked me in this house yesterday. I couldn't even walk down the hallway alone. And now you want me to willingly go to the man who just blew up your house?"
Her voice came out louder than she intended. She felt it. Her emotions were spilling over.
Dominic watched her. His expression didn't change, but she knew he was studying her.
"Do you have a better idea?"
She didn't answer. She didn't.
"Aren't you afraid I won't come back?"
Dominic looked at her for two seconds.
"You'll come back."
Avery fell silent.
She knew he was right. In this city, no one could escape his reach. Her brother was in the hospital. Her clinic was downtown. Her daughter-
Her daughter.
Her blood went cold for a moment.
Dominic pulled something from his pocket and tossed it onto the table. Her phone.
"Twenty four hours," he said. "Don't disappoint me."
He turned and walked toward the door.
Avery grabbed the phone. The screen lit up. More unread messages piled on top of each other. All from Kate, her caretaker.
The latest one, sent two minutes ago.
"Someone broke into the house. Dorothea has been taken."
Avery stared at those words. Her heart missed a beat. The phone nearly slipped from her hand.
Her head went blank. She headed for the door on instinct. A guard blocked her way.
She shoved the phone screen in his face. "My daughter was taken. If you stop me now and something happens, you can explain it to your boss."
The guard hesitated for a second. His radio crackled.
Dominic's voice came through. Just two words. "Let her go."
Avery ran out of the villa.
The door to her house was open. Kate sat on the couch. When she saw Avery walk in, she stood up and started crying. "Two men came. Said they were your colleagues from the clinic, here to check on the child. I let them in. And then Dorothea just-"
Avery didn't let her finish. She ran straight into her daughter's room.
The stuffed rabbit was still on the bed. Crayons scattered across the floor.
She spun around the room. On the windowsill, a piece of paper weighed down. Not Dorothea's handwriting.
"The child is safe. It's time for you to come find us."
She gripped the paper. Footsteps sounded outside the door.
"Dr. Clair. Come with us."
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9.4
I thought the Burch family gave me a loving home when they took me out of the orphanage.
But when the global deep freeze apocalypse hit, my adoptive parents mercilessly kicked me out of the bunker to freeze to death.
As I lay dying in the snow, covered in horrific purple frostbite, my adoptive sister Kendal walked past me in a pristine designer jacket.
Around her neck was my only childhood possession—an antique gold necklace my adoptive mother had ripped off my neck to give to her.
Kendal gloated, bragging that my pendant held a magical space with infinite supplies and fresh food while the rest of the world starved.
I realized I had spent years emptying my life savings to fund their luxury cars and fake medical emergencies.
They had drained my bank accounts, stolen my bloodline's heirloom, and used my magical lifeline to live like royalty while leaving me to die.
I took my last ragged breath in that blinding blizzard, consumed by a toxic hatred.
Why was I so hopelessly weak? Why did I let them take everything from me?
Opening my eyes again, the painful frostbite scars were gone. My skin was warm.
I grabbed my phone. The screen lit up: November 12.
It was exactly three days before the world ended.
When my adoptive mother called, faking a tearful emergency to demand another thirty thousand dollars, I smiled coldly.
"Just tell me where to send the money, Mom."
This time, I'm taking my space back, and I'm going to drain them dry.
9.3
Halie woke up to a sharp pain and a terrifying reality. She was in a new body, her face covered in a hideous web of scars, and her spiritual power reduced to a pathetic D-Class.
Before she could even process the memories of being framed, her bedroom doors were violently kicked open.
Her sister Seraphina sauntered in with a venomous sneer, followed closely by Halie's S-Class fiancé, Jett.
"Look at the disgrace of the Avila family. What a waste," Seraphina mocked, throwing a mirror at her bed.
"I can't be tied to a cripple. As an S-Class, I have to break our engagement," Jett added, his gaze full of disgust.
The nightmare didn't stop there. Her father called, screaming about how she had shamed the family name. He officially stripped her of her inheritance, froze all her accounts, and exiled her to the decaying Southern District to rot.
To make matters worse, a cold, mechanical voice suddenly echoed in her skull, warning her of an impending genetic collapse. Without an immediate energy infusion, she would face total organ failure in thirty days.
A ruined face, a treacherous family, a world that wanted her dead, and a literal death clock ticking in her brain. The original owner had died in absolute despair, a tragic victim of sheer cruelty.
But if they thought she would just sit there and die, they were severely mistaken.
Armed with a mysterious system and her brilliant scientist mind from her past life, Halie packed her bags. She chose the craziest survival quest: head to the slums, find the exiled, sterile S-Class "madman" Coleman, and cure him to harvest his life energy. It was time to start her counterattack.
9.4
My brother and his wife slapped the contract on the table, forcing me to marry Alpha Stone. He was a cruel monster known for breaking his mates' bones, and I was just the price for a new trade route.
Right before I surrendered, the legendary Blackwood Pack arrived. But they didn't offer a glorious rescue. They claimed I was the fated mate of Kaelan, a disgraced, wolfless Omega.
My family laughed in my face, eagerly taking the dowry and throwing me out like garbage. They mocked my miserable future, sending me off to a crumbling shack in the woods. When they later summoned us back to publicly demand a humiliating "tribute" to bleed us dry, they waited for me to break.
"Couldn't handle life in a shack with an Omega? Come crawling back already?" my sister-in-law sneered.
But I refused to let them shame him. I didn't understand why the Moon Goddess gave me an Omega, but Kaelan was kind, giving me the only bed while he slept on the cold floor. Why did my family value a cruel Alpha over a gentle soul? I declared to their faces that his loyal spirit was worth more than any title.
Then, a vicious rogue wolf threatened us at the local market.
My "wolfless" husband stepped in front of me and grabbed the rogue's wrist.
Suddenly, a suffocating, terrifying Alpha King's aura exploded from Kaelan, bringing the rogue to his knees in pure terror.
I stared at my quiet, supposedly weak mate in absolute shock. Who exactly did I marry?
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.
7.6
I woke up to the suffocating smell of copper and sulfur, my fingers wrapped around a blood-soaked leather whip.
Hanging from an obsidian cross in front of me was a boy with silver hair and dead, golden eyes.
His pale chest was torn open to the bone.
I recognized those eyes immediately. I had spent three years describing them on my laptop.
He was Kamari Monroe, the tragic, overpowered protagonist of my own web novel.
And I wasn't just a bystander. I was Benedict Guerrero, the sadistic academy headmaster. The ultimate villain.
A reel of images flashed in my mind: my original ending. Kamari, fully awakened, skinning me alive and burning my soul in a furnace for forty-nine days.
My loyal attack dog, Gideon, stepped forward with a basin of glowing green liquid.
"Headmaster, let me wake him up with this bone-rot acid so you can resume."
If that acid hit Kamari, his hatred would become permanent. My gruesome death would be sealed.
But if I broke character and apologized, the magical world would sense the shift, and Kamari would just think it was a sicker, more twisted trap.
How was I supposed to survive a death sentence I wrote myself?
I couldn't show weakness. I had to play the monster to survive.
Suppressing my terror, I smashed the acid basin, healed his ruined flesh with agonizing dark magic, and lied straight to his face.
"Someone had to be the monster to push you into the fire."
This time, I will rewrite my own fate.
9.2
I woke up suffocating in the dark, only to find my mind trapped inside a tiny, plump, and entirely uncoordinated body.
A cold, mechanical voice echoed in my brain, announcing that I was dead in my original world and had transmigrated into a corporate revenge novel as the six-month-old illegitimate daughter of Edward McClure, the story's ruthless villain.
The system mercilessly outlined my doomed fate. Tonight, my cold-blooded father would abandon me to a state orphanage. By age two, he would officially sign my rights away, leaving me to die miserably at the hands of human traffickers. Outside my nursery, I could hear his terrifying footsteps approaching, his voice devoid of any human warmth as he debated throwing me out like garbage. I was completely helpless, trapped in a baby's body, staring up at a man who looked at me with pure, visceral disgust.
Why did I have to be reborn as the tragic cannon fodder of a tyrant destined to put a bullet in his own head? How was I supposed to win over a severe germaphobe when my unequipped infant reflexes made me literally pee and vomit all over his pristine Tom Ford suits?
"Your ultimate mission is to prevent Edward McClure's self-destruction. Step one: Survive tonight's abandonment crisis."
Hearing the system's terrifying ultimatum, I swallowed my adult panic, forced a pool of pitiful tears into my large eyes, and reached my chubby little hands toward the monster.