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 6
Avery couldn't sleep.
She watched the sky bleed from ink-black to a bruised, pale gray. She lay there, eyes wide, as Dominic's words played on a loop in her mind: "I wanted to see if you would use Wenger's method. To kill me."
Beside her, Dorothea's chest rose and fell in a rhythmic, innocent slumber. Avery brushed a stray hair from her daughter's forehead. Her own fingertips were ice-cold.
A sharp double-knock broke the silence.
"Dr. Clair. Boss has canceled today's appointment."
Avery froze. "Where is he?"
"In his study. He gave strict orders not to be disturbed."
Her chest tightened. After last night's confrontation, he hadn't pressed her. He hadn't threatened or tested her. He had simply... discarded her. This sudden silence was more unnerving than any interrogation.
She stood by the window, peeling the curtain back just enough to see the courtyard. Sunlight shattered against the fountain into a thousand jagged pieces. Everything looked peaceful, as if the midnight standoff had never happened.
Dorothea stirred. Clutching her rabbit, she padded over and wrapped a tiny hand around Avery's finger.
"Mommy," the little girl whispered, her expression hauntingly serious. "That uncle... he's unhappy."
Avery looked down at her. Dorothea was staring toward the door with an intensity that didn't belong on a child's face.
"I'm going to the study," Avery said softly.
As she turned to leave, Dorothea tugged at her shirt. The girl shook her head slowly, her eyes locking onto Avery's for a long, heavy second. Then she let go, hugged her rabbit tighter, and turned away. She didn't look back.
Avery stopped before the heavy oak doors of the study. She knocked twice.
Silence. She tried again.
"Dominic."
Still nothing.
She pushed the door open. The room was a tomb of shadows, the heavy drapes cutting off the world. Only a single desk lamp was lit, carving out the sharp, brutal lines of Dominic's profile.
He was sitting there, twirling a syringe between his fingers-the very one she had refused to use on him. The pale yellow liquid caught the light, swaying like a rhythmic, golden trap.
His movement stopped the moment she entered. He tossed the syringe into a drawer and leaned back into the darkness.
"Who gave you permission to enter?"
She held up the key card. "You did. Yesterday."
He stared at her, saying nothing. Dark shadows bruised the skin under his eyes; his collar was rumpled, his usual lethal composure slightly frayed.
Avery had guided him through a relaxation exercise last night. She had watched him drift off. Clearly, his peace hadn't lasted.
"You didn't sleep," she noted.
"I slept fine," he countered, his voice gravelly. "Until I woke up."
She stepped closer, invading his space. "By what?"
He didn't answer. His gaze shifted past her, lost in the void outside the window.
Avery noticed the documents scattered across the desk-the folder with her clinic's logo.
"Dominic... Drake told me about the hospital. My brother's medication has been restored. Thank you."
"It was part of the deal."
She watched his broad shoulders, the tension radiating off him. "You said if I treated you, you'd save him."
"Is that why you're here? To check on your payment?"
"No." Avery's voice dropped, turning clinical yet firm. "I'm here to keep my word. As your psychiatrist, I'm going to treat you. But not with Wenger's poison. We're doing this my way."
Dominic turned, his eyes narrowing as he studied her.
"I need the complete records," she pressed. "Level Two access."
His fingers twitched. "You've already seen enough."
"I've seen the sanitized version. I need the truth."
Silence reclaimed the room. The lamp cast him in stark chiaroscuro-half a saint, half a monster.
"Why?" he asked.
"Because," she said, refusing to flinch, "you're starting to trust me."
The air went still.
He reached for a USB drive. As his fingers brushed the metal, they began to betray him. It wasn't just a tremor; his entire hand was convulsing. He slammed his fist shut, knuckles turning white, but the shaking wouldn't stop. His breathing turned jagged, his throat working as he tried to swallow the mounting panic.
He pressed his hand against his knee, eyes snapping shut.
After a brutal moment, he forced himself to slide the drive to the edge of the desk. "Take it," he rasped.
She picked it up, but he didn't pull away. His hand remained suspended in the air, grasping at nothing.
"Dominic-"
"Don't," he hissed. "Don't ask."
Avery turned toward the door, but a sickening thud stopped her.
She whirled around. Dominic had slammed both fists onto the desk. A glass had shattered under the force, blood immediately blooming from his knuckles.
Then, he began to count. His voice was low, the numbers tumbling out faster and faster, a desperate mantra against the dark.
Drake burst in from the hall, moving toward his boss, but Dominic stopped him with a single, lethal glare.
Avery didn't leave. She stood her ground.
"Dr. Clair," Drake warned, his voice low. "He needs-"
"I know what he needs." She cut him off and stepped back into the lion's den.
Drake blocked her path. "Going in there now is suicide. You'll only make it worse."
"And staying out will let him break every bone in his hand."
Their eyes locked in a silent battle of wills. Drake stepped aside.
Avery approached the desk and crouched beside Dominic. She didn't speak. She didn't offer platitudes. She simply placed her hand over his, pinning his bloodied knuckles to the wood.
The counting stopped.
He kept his head down, his breath hitching, but the tremors slowly began to die down under her touch.
Her eyes fell on his wrist-on the star-shaped scar.
Up close, it was hideous. The edges were raised and irregular, like flesh that had been burned and re-burned. It wasn't an accident.
She remembered the diagram in the file. The Vagal Nerve Sensitivity Test. This was the exact spot.
She stayed there, anchored to him, until his breathing leveled out.
Finally, Dominic lifted his head. His eyes were dark, haunted. He looked at her for a heartbeat, then tore his gaze away.
"Get out."
Avery stood, walked out, and pulled the door shut behind her.
Drake was waiting in the hall, silent as a grave. She didn't say a word to him either as she retreated to her room.
Dorothea was still tucked in bed. Avery sat on the edge, plugging the drive into her laptop.
The files were meticulously named by date-Wenger's signature style. But at the bottom sat a file with a scrambled string of characters.
She stared at it. Wenger didn't make mistakes. She reversed the string in her mind. A date. And at the end, a single letter: D.
Her heart skipped. The ring from the explosion site... the engraving inside was also a D.
She punched in the restored date as the password.
The screen flickered to life.
Level Two was a nightmare of data. At the bottom was a hidden folder filled with surveillance footage of Dominic's treatment room.
She opened the earliest file.
Red text flashed in the corner: Project 030 | Subject 047.
In the video, a younger Dominic sat on a couch, limp as a marionette. Wenger stood over him, fixing electrodes to his forehead. Without checking the monitors, Wenger twisted the dial.
The current shot past the safety line.
Dominic let out a choked, muffled sound. His body lurched, hands clawing at the armrests, but he didn't dare move.
Wenger leaned in, whispering something-a command, a threat.
But it was the shadow in the corner that stopped Avery's heart.
A silhouette stood there, watching. Unmoving.
Every time Wenger tortured him with the settings, the shadow just loomed.
Avery stared at the screen, her breath hitching. Wenger had said he was just a piece on the board.
She thought of the wax seal. The shadow in the video. She didn't know his name, but she remembered her own name listed in Project 030. A cold sweat broke out across her neck.
She dragged the progress bar forward, video after video. Her skin crawled.
This wasn't medicine. It was a lobotomy of the soul.
Avery reached up, her fingers trembling as she touched the side of her own neck. Right here. The spot Wenger had marked for 'Candidate A.'
If Dominic was 047, then she was...
She tried to shove the thought away, but the realization took root. She hadn't been sent here by chance. She had been delivered.
She closed the laptop. The room plummeted into darkness.
At the end of the hallway, Dorothea stood in the shadows, her rabbit dangling from her hand. She was as still as a statue.
She wasn't looking at her mother. She was staring toward the study, her tiny lips moving in a ghostly whisper.
"He's going to break today," the child said, her voice like a chilling sigh.
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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.