The Phantom Heiress: His Secret Obsession
After eighteen years, I finally returned to the billionaire Warren family, only to be treated like uneducated, rust-belt trash.
My stepmother shoved me into a freezing, windowless room, and my half-sister Kelly bought me an $89 plastic dress to humiliate me at the family's high-society gala.
When her petty bullying failed, Kelly took it a step further. Standing at the top of the grand marble staircase, she grabbed my wrist, screamed, and intentionally threw herself down the steps in front of hundreds of elite guests.
Lying in a pool of her own blood, she pointed a trembling finger at me.
"She pushed me! Corrie tried to kill me!"
The entire ballroom erupted in disgust. The guests called me a psychopath. My biological father, purple with rage, raised his hand to strike me, while my stepmother hid a victorious smirk behind her fake tears.
They thought they had perfectly framed the feral country bumpkin.
But they had no idea who they were dealing with.
They didn't know I was "Night God," the dark web's most legendary underground surgeon and hacker, currently being hunted by New York's most ruthless billionaire.
I didn't panic. I didn't cry.
I calmly pulled out my heavily encrypted phone and projected a crystal-clear, un-hackable security feed onto the ballroom's massive LED screen.
"Let's see the replay," I said.
Watching the color drain from their faces was just the beginning. I was going to tear this entire toxic family apart to find out who really burned my mother alive.
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Chapter 3
Corrie's long, slender fingers flew across the matte black keys. The clicking sound was rapid, a rhythmic staccato in the freezing, silent room.
She bypassed the standard operating system entirely. She typed in a thirty-two-character dynamic encryption key, her muscle memory flawless.
The screen blinked black for a fraction of a second. Then, it flooded with a deep, visceral blood-red glow.
She had successfully breached the Tor network's deepest node. She was inside the global underground medical black market.
Instantly, a chat box popped up in the center of the red screen. The sender's icon was a minimalist, glitching skull. The handle read: K. Nash.
An encrypted audio file dropped into the chat.
Corrie reached into her bag and pulled out a pair of sleek bone-conduction headphones. She hooked them over her ears, the cold metal pressing against her temples, and hit play.
"Night God," K. Nash's voice vibrated through her skull. The audio was heavily distorted by a voice scrambler, rendering it a low, metallic rasp, but the underlying panic was palpable. "We have a massive problem. New York is tearing the network apart looking for you."
A high-resolution image file loaded onto her screen.
It was a dark web bounty poster. The numbers at the bottom were printed in bold, glaring white font: $5,000,000 USD. Cash.
The target name at the top made Corrie's eyes narrow slightly. Night God.
"They need you to take a case," Nash's scrambled voice continued, breathless. "Severe neurological collapse. Rare genetic defect."
Corrie clicked on the attached medical files. High-resolution MRI scans and tissue biopsies filled her screen.
She leaned closer, her eyes scanning the complex web of decaying nerve endings. Her brain processed the data faster than a supercomputer. Her stomach tightened. It was a beautiful, terrifying mess. A genetic time bomb that was actively tearing the patient's brain stem apart. No legal hospital in the world would touch this. It was a guaranteed death on the operating table.
Her fingers hit the keyboard.
I am in Philadelphia, Corrie typed, her face illuminated by the harsh red light. Dealing with family garbage. I don't have time to play god this week. Decline the bounty.
The response from Nash was instantaneous.
You don't understand, Nash typed back, the letters appearing in frantic bursts. The buyer is a top-tier New York syndicate heir. Old money. Infinite resources. If you reject this, they will hunt you down just for the insult.
Corrie let out a short, breathy scoff. A cold smile touched the corners of her lips.
I don't care if he's the king of Wall Street or the devil himself, Corrie typed, hitting the keys hard enough to make the laptop shake. Night God's rule is absolute. No rush jobs. Tell him to buy a coffin.
She didn't wait for a reply. She hit a kill-switch command.
The red screen vanished. A wiping program engaged, scrubbing her IP address, her MAC address, and every digital footprint she had just made, burning them into unrecoverable ash.
Three hundred miles away, in the penthouse suite of a towering Manhattan skyscraper.
Barron Griffin stood perfectly still in front of a floor-to-ceiling window. The city lights below reflected in his eyes, making them look like shards of black ice.
The heavy mahogany door to his office swung open.
Arthur, his chief of staff, practically stumbled into the room. His face was chalk-white, a thin layer of cold sweat coating his forehead.
"Sir," Arthur gasped, his chest heaving as if he had sprinted up the stairs. "The bounty... Night God rejected it. The connection was severed."
Barron slowly turned around.
The air in the room seemed to drop ten degrees. He walked over to his massive oak desk. He picked up a crystal tumbler filled with amber whiskey. His large hand gripped the glass so tightly that the tendons in his forearm strained against his tailored suit sleeve.
He slammed the glass down onto the wood. The sharp, violent crack made Arthur flinch violently.
"You are telling me," Barron's voice was a low, terrifying rumble that vibrated in Arthur's chest, "that the Griffin family's money is not enough to buy a black-market butcher?"
"He's a ghost, Mr. Griffin," Arthur stammered, wiping his brow with a shaking hand. "The last time Night God surfaced was in a war zone in Syria, doing open-heart surgery on a mercenary warlord. He doesn't care about money."
Barron's jaw clenched. He turned his head, staring at a live feed monitor on his wall.
The screen showed a sterile hospital room. On the bed lay Leo, his younger brother. The boy's skin was translucent, his body curled into a tight, agonizing fetal position as another neurological spasm ripped through his muscles.
Barron's chest physically ached. A sharp, burning pain radiated from his sternum.
"Find him," Barron ordered, his voice dropping to a lethal whisper. "Tear the dark web apart. Trace the IP. I don't care how many firewalls you have to burn down."
Arthur rushed to a terminal on the desk. His fingers flew.
"Wait," Arthur breathed, his eyes widening. "The signal... it bounced through three hundred proxy servers, but the kill-switch sequence left a micro-lag. I have a terminal node."
"Where?" Barron demanded, stepping into Arthur's personal space, his presence suffocating.
"Pennsylvania," Arthur swallowed hard. "A rust-belt sector. A town called Blue Cloud Creek." He paused, then added quickly, "The node appears to be a physical relay—likely one of Night God's old proxy stations. If we move fast, we might find equipment, logs, even a lead to his real location."
Barron's eyes narrowed into lethal slits.
"Prep the helicopter," Barron commanded, grabbing his black wool overcoat from a chair. "I'm going to drag this doctor out of the dirt myself."
Back in Philadelphia, the first sliver of gray morning light crept through the narrow gap between Corrie's window and the brick wall outside.
Corrie's eyes snapped open exactly at 6:00 AM.
She rolled out of the terrible bed. She dropped to the floor and began her Krav Maga conditioning routine.
Her movements were silent, lethal, and precise. She pushed her body until her muscles burned with lactic acid, her joints popping softly in the cold air. She controlled her breathing, not because she feared the cheap bug under the lamp could actually pick up the sound from across the room, but out of a deeply ingrained, habitual caution. It was a survival instinct forged in the underground—to minimize her physical presence and erase all traces of herself, regardless of the threat level.
By 7:00 AM, she was done.
She took a freezing three-minute shower, washing the sweat away. She pulled on a massive, oversized gray hoodie, pulling the thick hood up to completely shadow her face. She shoved her hands deep into the front pocket.
She walked out of her room and headed toward the grand staircase.
As she reached the landing, she almost collided with Kelly.
Kelly was wearing a pure silk, pearl-white slip dress. She was barking orders at a terrified maid about flower arrangements.
Kelly turned and saw Corrie. Her eyes immediately dropped to the baggy, cheap gray hoodie.
Kelly let out a loud, theatrical snort. She rolled her eyes so hard her head tilted back.
"Oh my god," Kelly groaned, crossing her arms and stepping directly into Corrie's path. "You look like a literal homeless person. You know we have the Foundation Gala tonight, right? You cannot walk around my house looking like a trash bag."
Corrie stopped. She kept her hands in her pockets. She looked at Kelly from under the shadow of her hood, her eyes dead and unblinking.
"What do you want, Kelly?" Corrie asked, her voice a flat, bored monotone.
A vicious, ugly light sparked in Kelly's eyes. The corners of her mouth stretched into a sickeningly sweet, predatory smile.
"I'm going to be a good sister," Kelly purred, stepping closer, the smell of her expensive floral perfume clashing with the stale air. "I'm taking you shopping. We are going to get you a dress."
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7.6
Kaylee's family was drowning in debt, and her stepmother locked her inside a freezing bedroom.
To save their bankrupt company, they decided to sell her off to a sixty-five-year-old man with a disgusting reputation.
They cut off her allowance and confiscated the only precious keepsake her dead mother had ever left her.
"Put on the engagement dress, or I will smash your mother's crystal box into a million pieces."
Terrified of the old man, Kaylee risked her life by jumping out of the second-story window into a violent storm.
She hit the muddy ground hard, twisting her ankle and tearing her skin on rusted iron gates as she escaped into the pitch-black night.
Dragging her bleeding bare feet across the cold sand, her lungs felt like they were filled with broken glass.
She didn't understand why she had to be the sacrifice for their endless greed, or how they could be so cruel as to hold her dead mother's memory hostage.
She had absolutely nowhere to go, and the old man's cars were already pulling into the estate to claim her.
Cornered by the blinding headlights of a motorcade on the beach, she threw herself at the feet of Ernest Blackwell, the most ruthless billionaire in New York.
"Marry me! You need a wife, and I need a husband right now!"
To buy her freedom and crush the family that sold her, she chose to sign a twenty-million-dollar fake marriage contract with the devil himself.
8.7
For three years, I played the perfect, submissive housewife to billionaire Julian Harrison.
But right after an intimate night together, he coldly threw a divorce agreement onto the bed.
"Scarlett landed an hour ago. I need my single status restored to welcome her back."
That same night, I ended up in the emergency room and discovered I was pregnant with twins.
When Julian found out, he didn't show a shred of joy. Instead, he stormed into my hospital room, threw a blank check directly at my face, and ordered me to get rid of them.
He accused me of using the babies as a sick game to trap his assets.
Then, his ruthless lawyer kicked me out of our penthouse, confiscating the jewelry he gifted me and tossing my worn-out notebook onto the floor like garbage.
Standing in the freezing rain, my heart completely died.
I had swallowed my pride, managed his life, and cooked his meals to his exact standards for three years, only to be thrown away the second his first love returned.
But he didn't know that the notebook his lawyer discarded contained the secret formulas of Aura Beauty, a billion-dollar empire I built in the shadows.
I tore his check into pieces, blocked his number, and left in a Maybach sent by my associate.
Logging into my global CEO database, I looked at his company's fragile stock chart with a predatory smile.
The docile Mrs. Harrison died in the rain. It was time to crush his empire.
8.1
Desperate for a way out of rejection and poverty, Pearl Augustine accepts a nanny job with an outrageous salary-working for billionaire Ace Warren. What she doesn't expect is his daughter.
Mia Warren is spoiled, sharp-tongued, and feared by everyone in the mansion. Behind her cruelty is a lonely child longing for a mother. As Pearl becomes the only one who can reach her, walls begin to fall-especially those around Ace, a grieving man hiding behind wealth and control.
What started as "just a job" quickly turns into something dangerous: attachment.
Sometimes, healing begins where you least expect it.
8.9
Aubree Hamilton was the top-tier executive assistant to Wall Street's most ruthless titan, Beck Franco. A month ago, she made a catastrophic mistake and spent the night in his bed.
Thinking she had erased the mistake with a morning-after pill, she panicked upon his return and lied about being engaged to push him away.
But Beck, a man who despised disloyalty above all else, immediately suspended her and ordered her escorted out of the building. Her nightmare only escalated when her toxic ex-boyfriend attacked her on the street, tearing her purse open and exposing the empty morning-after pill box to the public—and to Beck, who was watching from his penthouse. After having his security rescue her, Beck trapped her in his car, ruthlessly tearing apart her fake engagement. Later in her apartment, the suffocating tension between them almost ignited into a kiss, but a violent wave of nausea suddenly hit Aubree.
She shoved him away with all her strength and violently threw up in the bathroom.
Beck took it as the ultimate physical disgust. He walked out, deeply humiliated and dangerously obsessed, unleashing his resources to investigate her every move.
Left alone and trembling, Aubree finally checked the crushed white box. The pill she took had expired a month ago.
Staring at the two bright pink lines on the pregnancy test, she made a desperate vow: Beck Franco could never know she was carrying his child, and she had to disappear before he found out.
7.9
I woke up in a burning warehouse, twelve years after my supposed death. My body had been reset to its physical prime, the deep burn scar on my wrist completely gone.
Through the smoke, my eldest son, Kennard, rushed blindly into the flames. He was screaming the name of the very woman who had orchestrated this trap—Brittnie.
When I tackled him out of the way of a falling steel beam, he didn't recognize my youthful face. Instead, he pinned me to the concrete and nearly crushed my windpipe.
"How much did she pay you to carve up your face to look like a dead woman?"
He hissed the words at me, treating me like a sick corporate spy. For a decade, a bizarre narrative "script" had brainwashed my son, forcing him into pathetic devotion to Brittnie. She had drained his wealth, turned my daughter against him, and hollowed out our family empire.
Whenever Kennard tried to resist her, the mind control punished him with agonizing migraines, driving him to smash his own hands against the wall just to cope with the pain.
Hearing him quietly sobbing outside my locked door, my heart shattered. How could this invisible force torture my brilliant son and turn my family into puppets for a D-list actress?
I dragged him to the hospital for a DNA test.
When the results confirmed my maternity at 99.999%, the cold billionaire collapsed to the floor, weeping in my arms like a lost child.
I wiped his tears and smiled ruthlessly. It was time to take back my empire and burn Brittnie's life to the ground.
8.2
Casey woke up with a throbbing skull in a glamorous dressing room, facing a public execution by an internet mob.
Her wealthy family had thrown her away. Her hypocritical sister, Coralie, forced a holographic tablet into her hands, demanding she join a deadly survival reality show on a wasteland planet.
"It's what Mommy wants. If you don't sign, you're dead to the Hendersons."
The whole world wanted her dead. On the live broadcast, billions of viewers cursed her as a toxic stalker. The golden boy idol Kayson physically attacked her to defend Coralie's honor. Even the show's staff mocked her, deliberately leaving her with nothing but a torn, broken tent and a single bottle of water for the lethal alien wilderness.
The universe was playing a cruel joke on her. She was framed as the villain of her sister's perfect story, banished to a wasteland where everyone expected her to cry, beg, and die on live television.
But they didn't know she had already survived a decade in the ruins. Casey didn't shed a single tear. Instead, she invoked a hidden contract clause, demanding a full year on the planet instead of the standard month.
"I'll survive for a year, and the planet becomes mine."
She grabbed her broken tent, stepped onto the red alien dirt, and prepared to show the universe what a real predator looked like.