The Mafia King's Regret: She Moved On
For four years, I was the invisible baker's daughter who memorized Dante Vitiello’s routine. I baked stomach-friendly meals for the Underboss of New York, ensuring his ulcer didn't kill him, all while loving him from the shadows.
But when I collapsed from exhaustion in his gym, he didn't help me. He looked at me with pure revulsion and asked his guard:
"Is she dead? Call pest control."
To him, I wasn't a girl; I was a stain that smelled of "grease and desperation."
When the Capo’s daughter framed me for stealing family secrets, Dante knew the truth. Yet, he stood silent. He didn't defend me.
Instead, he handed me a scholarship check—hush money to exile me from the city, sacrificing my reputation to protect his political alliances.
I took the money, not out of gratitude, but out of spite. I burned every sketch, every note, and every shred of the girl who had foolishly loved a monster. I realized I was just a disposable extra in his story.
Five years later, I returned as a ruthless top-tier lawyer, engaged to a safe, clean man. Dante, now the Don, cornered me at a gala, looking at me with a desperate hunger he’d never shown before.
"I broke you to save you," he claimed, his voice rough with regret.
I pulled away and smiled, cold and unyielding.
"You didn't save me, Dante. You burned the only person who ever truly loved you. And she’s never coming back."
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Chapter 3
The library was the only place in the compound where I felt like a person, rather than a piece of furniture.
It was 2:00 AM.
I was huddled in the back corner, buried under a stack of contract law textbooks. The silence was heavy, saturated with the scent of old paper and dust.
I closed my book, pressing the heels of my palms against my burning eyes.
"Rossi."
The name sliced through the stillness.
I jumped, spinning around in my chair.
Dante was leaning against the bookshelf in the shadows. He was wearing a crisp black shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows to reveal the corded muscle of his forearms.
He knew my name.
My heart did a traitorous little flip before my brain reminded me of the gym floor. The cold tile against my cheek. The look of absolute revulsion on his face.
"Mr. Vitiello," I said, standing up abruptly. I clutched my book to my chest like a shield. "Do you need the room? I was just leaving."
"I'm not here to read," he said. He pushed off the shelf and strode toward me.
He stopped three feet away. The safe zone.
"About this morning," he started, his voice low, vibrating in the quiet room. "Bianca... she has a sharp tongue. She didn't mean to insult your family's business."
I stared at him.
He wasn't apologizing for flinching at my touch as if I were diseased. He wasn't apologizing for calling me a rat. He was doing damage control for the Capo's daughter.
"Are you apologizing as the Underboss, or as her babysitter?" I asked.
The words left my mouth before I could stop them.
Dante's eyes narrowed. The air temperature seemed to drop ten degrees.
"Careful," he warned softly. "I'm trying to be civil. I don't want any friction with the civilian staff."
"Friction?" I let out a dry, humorless laugh. "You treated me like I was radioactive because I tripped. Bianca called my family's livelihood 'trash'."
"It's just a suit, Elena," he said, the use of my first name sounding like a foreign word on his tongue. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a thick envelope. "This should cover the bakery's trouble. And the dry cleaning."
He held it out. Hush money.
He thought he could pay for my dignity.
I looked at the envelope, then up at his face. He looked bored. Impatient. Like this was just another item on a checklist.
"My father wakes up at 3 AM every day to make that bread," I said, my voice steady despite the shaking of my hands. "It's honest work. It doesn't taste like blood."
Dante's jaw tightened, a muscle ticking in his cheek.
"We don't want your money," I said. "And I don't want your apology. We are even."
I shoved my book into my bag and stepped around him.
"Elena," he said.
I didn't stop. I walked to the heavy oak door.
"You're making a mistake," he called out.
"My mistake," I said, yanking the door open, "was thinking you were different from the rest of them."
I slammed the door shut, severing the connection, and locked it from the outside.
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9.1
Waking up with a cold, scaly hand wrapped around my throat wasn't the worst part.
The worst part was realizing I'd transmigrated into the body of Terra Mason—the most despised woman in the entire Enclave. She drugged high-level beast-men and forced them into life-binding bio-contracts. She locked an aquatic warrior in a dry basement until his organs failed. She treated the most lethal males in the city like broken toys.
Zev, the Level 6 serpent who's currently choking me, would rather blow up his own heart than spend another day as my slave. His affection metric? Negative ninety. His trust? Zero.
Then my system activates: the Kore AI. It gives me exactly 500 credits, a medical nano-gel, and a recipe for neutralizing the radioactive poison in mutant meat. Real food. In this world, that's worth more than gold.
I save Rhys, the dying aquatic male everyone left for dead. I season a slab of purple mutant steak until Sam, a battle-scarred grizzly shifter, groans at the taste—and his trust points finally tick above zero. When my backstabbing ex-best friend tries to steal my males and destroy me, I don't scream or throw a tantrum like the old Terra. I dismantle her with the truth.
But earning their trust means more than grilling meat. A scorpion swarm ambushes us at midnight. Sam throws himself between me and a stinger the size of my arm. As he stands over the corpse, fur receding from his claws, he stares at me and whispers, "You were testing me."
Yes. I was. Because in this world, the weak don't survive. And I refuse to be weak again.
Four beast-men. Four contracts. One system. And a whole lot of steak. Let this dystopian wasteland know—I'm not the monster they remember. I'm worse. I'm the one who's going to feed them until they'd kill for me.
9.2
Clara was drowning in student debt and barely making rent when she downloaded a fantasy mobile game to escape reality.
Inside the game, an exiled prince named Alex was freezing to death. Pitying him, she spent her last few dollars on microtransactions to fix his shelter and cure his poison.
But the game was far too real.
Every time she paid, the prince reacted. When she complained aloud about going broke, the in-game army suddenly halted, as if the prince had heard her voice.
Then, the terrifying real-world consequences hit.
Clara woke up to find her water glass and a box of Kleenex had vanished from her locked bedroom overnight.
She frantically searched the tiny apartment, her heart pounding in her chest.
She thought she was losing her mind. Had she thrown them out in her sleep? Was there a stalker hiding in her home?
How could physical objects just disappear into thin air behind a deadbolted door?
Until she looked at her nightstand.
Sitting exactly where her missing items used to be was a glowing, weightless crystal cup that defied all logic.
And on her laptop screen, the exiled prince was carefully holding her Kleenex box, offering a mountain of real gold on an altar.
She hadn't just downloaded a mobile game; she had opened a cross-dimensional trade route with a desperate future king.
8.9
The mangled car teetered on the cliff's edge, my leg crushed, gasoline fumes thick in the air. My husband, Holden, stood safe on the highway, directing the rescue – but not for me. He was saving her, the woman in the passenger seat, leaving me and our unborn child to the ocean below.
I woke trapped in the crushed Maybach, leg pinned. The cliff loomed; the driver's seat was empty.
Holden, safe outside, directed paramedics past me to Giana, his "most valuable asset," ordering her rescue first.
I watched him comfort Giana, oblivious, as the car slid. My baby barely viable. Holden offered a black card for silence; Giana gloated.
Ten years of devotion, a cruel lie. Rage fueled me: how could he abandon his wife and child?
I swore a venomous oath: never again an accessory. I flicked his card away, shielded my pregnancy, and promised my baby escape.
9.1
Five years ago, I was a world-renowned concert pianist. Now, I'm an auto mechanic with a mangled right hand, hiding from a past my ex-husband, Carter, dismisses as a "tantrum."
He drags me to a charity gala where his mistress, Alexandrea, puts me on the spot, demanding I play for the city's elite-a cruel, public humiliation she knows I can't perform.
When I refuse, Carter shoves me to the ground in a rage. He still thinks our daughter, Lily, is alive, and he uses her as a weapon.
"Behave," he hisses, "and maybe we can bring Lily back home."
Bring her home? The sheer ignorance is staggering. He has no idea our daughter froze to death in the same car crash that destroyed my hand.
But just before the gala, my best friend uncovered the final, devastating truth. It wasn't an accident. They sabotaged my car and left us for dead.
Tonight, I'm not just attending a party. I'm orchestrating a funeral. Theirs.
7.9
"I, Hailey Moreno, reject you, Jude Castellan, as my mate."
The words tasted like poison, but not as bitter as finding him in bed with my twin sister.
Hailey's world shattered when her mate betrayed her with the one person who should have protected her-her own twin, Lucy. The broken mate bond nearly destroyed her wolf, but from the ashes of that pain, something darker was born: revenge.
Her plan is simple and ruthless-seduce Alpha Lucian, Jude's powerful father, and make her ex-mate watch as she takes everything from him. But Hailey doesn't know that the lonely Alpha has been watching her, wanting her, for far longer than she realizes.
What starts as revenge becomes something neither of them expected. Now Hailey must decide: Is she strong enough to want something real again? Or will her thirst for vengeance destroy the only chance she has at true happiness?
In a world where wolves mate for life, some bonds are meant to be broken-and others are worth fighting for.
7.7
I was happily pregnant with my mate Ronan's child, ready to become the pack's future Beta female.
But during a routine checkup, my sister Isolde maliciously exposed my blood test results to the clinic.
The baby wasn't Ronan's. It was the consequence of a hazy, primal encounter with a mysterious Alpha during a Pack Run under lunar madness.
Ronan ignored my desperate pleas. He dragged me into the pack square, publicly rejected me, and immediately claimed Isolde as his new mate.
Exiled and spiritually shattered, I was attacked by rogues in the woods. I lost my inner wolf, and I lost my unborn baby.
For five years, I lived as a crippled, Wolfless outcast, scrubbing floors and enduring daily humiliation while they ruled in luxury.
My heart was completely dead. So when the terrifying Alpha King suddenly offered me his Luna crown just because I accidentally saved his son, I only felt a chilling disgust.
He didn't want a mate. He wanted a convenient political pawn and a glorified nanny for his traumatized heir.
"I refuse."
I rejected the most powerful wolf on the continent and escaped his golden cage in the dead of night.
I walked straight into the brutal Warrior Trials as a Wolfless human. This time, I wouldn't be anyone's prize. I would earn my own power and burn their world to the ground.