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 8
The gala dragged on, but the atmosphere had permanently shifted.
The air in the ballroom felt thick, suffocating. The whispers followed Dean and Kelly everywhere they went, a relentless, buzzing swarm of social execution.
Corrie felt the heat of the room pressing against her skin. The smell of expensive perfumes and roasted meats was making her throat itch.
She set her half-empty glass of sparkling water on a silver tray. Without a word to anyone, she turned and walked toward the grand staircase, seeking the cold, empty air of the second-floor gallery.
She climbed the stairs, her hand trailing lightly against the polished mahogany banister.
Down below, Kelly was standing near the restrooms. Her face was stained with ruined mascara. Two of her closest friends had just made a pathetic excuse to leave her side, treating her like a leper.
Kelly looked up and saw Corrie's back disappearing onto the second-floor landing.
A violent, blinding surge of hatred exploded in Kelly's chest. Her blood pounded in her ears, drowning out the classical music. She lost every ounce of rational thought.
She grabbed the heavy skirts of her ruined Chanel dress and sprinted up the stairs, her heels digging viciously into the carpet.
Corrie was standing near the edge of the second-floor balcony, looking down at the crowd. The area was dimly lit, far away from the chandeliers.
"You bitch!"
The venomous hiss came from right behind her.
Corrie didn't jump. She slowly turned around.
Kelly was standing three feet away. Her chest was heaving, her face contorted into an ugly, unrecognizable mask of pure rage. Spittle flew from her lips as she breathed.
"You did that on purpose," Kelly snarled, her voice a ragged whisper. She took a step closer, invading Corrie's personal space. "I stood behind the heavy velvet curtain of the second-floor window and watched you step out of that car on your first day," Kelly hissed, her eyes wild with manic hatred. "I saw the cheap dirt on your boots. I knew immediately you were a parasite!" "You humiliated my mother. You ruined my life in front of everyone!"
Corrie looked at her. She didn't see a threat. She saw a pathetic, rabid dog barking at a wall.
Corrie took a sip of her water. The ice clinked softly against the glass.
"You bought the trash, Kelly," Corrie said, her voice a dead, emotionless flatline. "I just wore it. If the truth ruins your life, maybe you shouldn't be such a cheap, malicious little brat."
The words hit Kelly like a physical slap to the face.
Kelly's eyes darted wildly. She looked over the balcony railing. Down below, directly in their line of sight, a group of wealthy investors and their wives were looking up, their attention drawn by Kelly's aggressive posture.
A dark, psychotic light flashed in Kelly's eyes.
If she couldn't win the social war, she would destroy Corrie's life.
Kelly lunged forward. She threw her hands out and clamped her fingers around Corrie's left wrist. Her acrylic nails dug brutally into Corrie's skin, drawing tiny beads of blood.
Corrie's combat instincts flared instantly. Her muscles coiled. Her right hand twitched, ready to deliver a palm strike to Kelly's throat that would crush her windpipe.
But Corrie's hyper-vigilant brain processed the angle, the audience below, and the psychotic gleam in Kelly's eyes in a fraction of a second.
She aborted the strike. She froze her body completely, turning herself into a statue.
Kelly threw her head back. She opened her mouth and let out a blood-curdling, ear-piercing scream that ripped through the ballroom, shattering the polite chatter. The string quartet below abruptly stopped playing in shock, plunging the cavernous space into a sudden, deadly silence.
In that perfectly timed void, Kelly violently ripped her own hands away from Corrie's wrist and hurled her upper body backward.
"Corrie, no! Please don't push me!" Kelly shrieked as she fell, her voice echoing perfectly off the vaulted ceilings for every single guest to hear.
She intentionally threw herself down the grand staircase.
Her body hit the first carpeted step with a heavy thud. She tumbled backward, her limbs flailing, her expensive dress tearing as she rolled violently down the steep incline.
She hit the marble floor at the bottom of the stairs with a sickening, bone-jarring crack.
The entire ballroom erupted into absolute chaos.
Women screamed. Glasses shattered on the floor.
"Kelly!"
Dean's voice tore through the room, a raw, animalistic shriek of terror. She shoved past a waiter, sending a tray of champagne crashing to the floor, and threw herself onto the marble next to her daughter.
Kelly lay crumpled on the floor. A thin stream of dark red blood trickled from a gash on her forehead, staining the white marble. She was crying hysterically, her body shaking.
Kelly lifted a trembling, blood-stained finger. She pointed straight up the stairs.
"She pushed me," Kelly sobbed, her voice echoing in the dead silence of the horrified crowd. "Corrie tried to kill me."
Hundreds of eyes snapped upward.
They locked onto Corrie, who was standing perfectly still at the top of the stairs, a glass of water still in her hand.
The whispers instantly turned into a roar of condemnation.
"Monster," a woman hissed.
"Call the police! She's a psychopath!" a man yelled.
George Warren pushed through the crowd. His face was purple with rage. The veins in his neck bulged against his collar. He took the stairs two at a time, his heavy footsteps shaking the wood.
He reached the landing and stopped inches from Corrie's face.
"What have you done?!" George roared, his spit hitting Corrie's cheek. His hands were shaking so violently he looked like he was having a seizure. "Are you insane?! You tried to murder your sister?!"
Brad ran to the bottom of the stairs, pointing up. "Throw her out! Lock her up! She's a freak from the slums!"
Corrie looked at George's purple face. She looked down at Dean, who was cradling Kelly, shooting Corrie a look of absolute, victorious venom.
Corrie didn't panic. Her heart rate didn't even elevate.
She took a slow, deliberate sip of her water.
"Call the police," Corrie said. Her voice was calm, cold, and projected perfectly over the screaming crowd. "And while we wait, have Davis pull the security footage from the second-floor hallway camera."
Dean's heart leaped with a dark, vicious thrill. That camera? She had personally taken a pair of wire cutters to its power supply two days ago. There was absolutely no way it caught anything.
"The camera?" Dean yelled, her voice dripping with fake tears and real venom. "The camera in that hallway has been broken for two days! You knew that! You planned this in a blind spot, you sick, twisted girl!"
The crowd gasped. The narrative was set. Premeditated attempted murder.
George raised his right hand. His palm was open, his muscles trembling as he prepared to strike his eldest daughter across the face.
Corrie didn't flinch.
She calmly reached into the pocket of her deconstructed dress with her free hand. She pulled out her matte-black smartphone.
Her thumb swiped across the screen, bypassing the lock. She tapped an icon that looked like a jagged lightning bolt.
"Broken?" Corrie asked, her lips curling into a terrifying, razor-sharp smirk. "That's funny. Because my feed looks crystal clear."
She hit a single button on her screen.
Behind George, in the center of the ballroom, hung a massive, 100-inch LED screen that had been displaying the Warren Foundation logo all night.
The screen suddenly went black.
A loud, electronic chirp echoed through the room's surround-sound speakers.
The screen flared back to life.
It wasn't showing a logo. It was showing a high-definition, night-vision enhanced security feed. The timestamp in the corner read exactly two minutes ago.
The entire ballroom froze. George slowly turned his head to look at the screen.
The video played in absolute silence.
It showed Corrie standing perfectly still, holding her glass. It showed Kelly sprinting up the stairs, her face twisted in rage.
The crowd watched in breathless horror as the high-definition camera captured Kelly lunging forward. They saw Kelly's hands clamp onto Corrie's wrist. They saw Corrie freeze like a statue.
And then, they saw Kelly scream, let go of Corrie, and violently throw herself backward down the stairs.
Corrie hadn't moved a single muscle.
The video ended, and immediately looped back to the beginning, playing the damning evidence over and over again.
The silence in the ballroom was absolute. It was the silence of a vacuum.
Kelly, lying on the floor, stopped crying. The blood drained from her face so fast she looked like a corpse.
Dean stared at the massive screen. Her mouth hung open. A cold, paralyzing dread seized her heart, squeezing it until she couldn't breathe.
She had personally cut the wires to that camera two days ago. It was physically impossible for it to be recording.
Unless the girl standing at the top of the stairs wasn't just a rust-belt dropout.
Corrie looked down at Dean's terrified, pale face. Corrie's eyes were black voids.
The trap hadn't been set by Kelly. The trap had been set by Corrie. And they had walked right into it.
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7.9
I woke up in a sterile hospital room, my head split open from a horrific car crash.
But the pain in my skull was nothing compared to the memory burned into my retinas just before the impact: my billionaire husband, Dawson, walking into a luxury hotel with a woman who looked exactly like his dead first love.
When Dawson finally arrived at the ward, there was no panic or relief in his eyes. He just coldly looked at my bloody bandages.
"Your reckless driving just forced me to postpone the quarterly board meeting."
Even our seven-year-old son, who I almost died giving birth to, didn't spare me a single glance. He kicked my hospital bed in annoyance.
"The Wi-Fi here is garbage. You're a bad mom! Dad said Aunt Angelita should be the one living with us!"
My blood turned to ice. For five years, I had bent over backward, wearing the hideous pale dresses he picked, starving myself to maintain a fragile figure, all to be a perfect, obedient substitute for a ghost.
And this was what I got. An unfaithful husband who would rather bury me in debt than grant me a divorce, and a son who wished I was dead.
The weak, subservient Charlene died on that wet asphalt.
When the doctor pointed to Dawson and asked for his name, I looked at my husband with a hollow, defensive stare.
"Who are you?" I whispered.
Using retrograde amnesia as my shield, I was going to tear their perfect world apart.
7.8
Elie Joyce’s entire life was controlled by Ebert Ewing, a ruthless billionaire who held her sick grandmother's survival and her family's freedom in his hands.
But on a freezing, stormy night, he forced her into a scandalous scrap of red silk and handed her over to a notorious, disgusting predator.
"You aren't an escort. You're just a free gift."
Ebert mocked her, using her as a disposable bargaining chip to secure a corporate funding round.
When the predator humiliated her, forced high-proof vodka down her throat, and violently pinned her to the floor, Ebert simply watched with dead eyes.
And when Ebert finally intervened to brutally beat the man, it wasn't out of mercy.
"She is my property. Even if she is trash that I threw away, a filthy pig like you doesn't get to touch her."
Afterward, he dragged her battered, barefoot body into his car, only to kick her out into the torrential rain, leaving her on the dark streets to die.
Standing in the storm, shivering and bleeding from broken glass, the last shred of Elie's hope shattered.
She had sacrificed her dignity and soul, enduring his violent bites and cruel control, just to keep her family alive.
Why did she have to suffer this endless, twisted humiliation for a psychopath who only saw her as trash?
But she didn't break.
Tearing a strip of his expensive shirt to bandage her bleeding foot, Elie gripped her broken stiletto like a knife.
With her eyes turning cold and calculating, she limped out of the shadows.
She was going to survive, and Ebert Ewing would soon realize she was no longer his obedient prey.
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.
7.7
Jaclyn woke up in the sterile hospital room after falling down the stairs. The nurse delivered the devastating news: she had bled heavily and lost her baby.
But before she could even cry, her trusted cousins, Katelyn and Cherri, locked the door and revealed the horrifying truth.
"It wasn't an accident," Katelyn smirked, pinning Jaclyn's arm down. "The lubricant on the top step was a very deliberate choice."
They needed her broken and unstable. They had forged her signature, draining her massive trust fund to save their uncle's bankrupt business.
What shattered Jaclyn's world was the fresh hickey on Cherri's neck. Her lover, Bradford, had helped plan the entire murder.
When Jaclyn tried to scream, they smothered her with a pillow, framing her as a lunatic having a mental breakdown.
Two weeks later, when she confronted them, Bradford violently shoved her through a second-story glass window to silence her forever.
As she fell to her death, the husband she had spent her life hating—the ruthless billionaire Gaines—burst through the doors.
He threw himself forward, his face filled with pure terror, desperately trying to catch her.
When her body hit the stone patio, Gaines fell to his knees in her blood, weeping and begging her not to close her eyes.
Until her last breath, Jaclyn was consumed by suffocating regret. Why did she trust the monsters who killed her, and hate the only man who truly loved her?
Opening her eyes again, she was back in the penthouse, exactly one month into her marriage with Gaines.
7.4
I was freezing to death in an abandoned cabin, desperately waiting for my fiancé to save me.
Instead, my phone flickered with a video from my adopted sister.
She was smiling as she confessed that she and my fiancé had orchestrated my kidnapping, and my parents' fatal plane crash, just to steal my family's trust fund.
When I called him with my dying breath, he mocked me for faking a PR stunt and hung up.
I died in the sub-zero blizzard, consumed by absolute despair.
But as a ghost, I watched my greatest business rival, the ruthless billionaire Collins, kick down the doors of my mansion.
He didn't just mourn me.
He shot my fiancé, trapped my sister, and set the entire place on fire, choosing to burn alive in the inferno just to avenge me.
I couldn't understand why the man I had publicly despised for a decade loved me so fiercely, while the people I gave everything to wanted me dead.
Opening my eyes again, I was back backstage on the night I won my Oscar, four years ago.
My fiancé smiled, holding out his arms to hug me.
I pushed him away in disgust, marched straight into the crowded theater, and kissed my billionaire rival on live television.
"Let's get married tomorrow."
This time, I would use him to burn them all to the ground.