The Ruthless Captain's Secretly Pampered Star
Aries Mathis stared at the glowing projector screen, his blood running completely cold.
For two years, he thought his mentor and former captain, Elias Beck, had simply left for a massive signing bonus in Europe.
But the financial report in front of him revealed a much sicker truth.
Elias had secretly sold Aries' contract to the highest bidder, packaging his own prodigy up like a commodity to line his pockets before abandoning him.
Now, Elias was back in North America, building a new esports empire from scratch.
The betrayal crushed Aries, turning his devastation into a blinding, toxic rage. He spiraled into a self-destructive frenzy, publicly executing Elias's new players in official matches, terrorizing them until their hands physically shook.
He hated Elias with every fiber of his being, yet the gaping hole in his chest screamed with agonizing confusion.
Why did the man who once saved him from the streets throw him away like a stray dog?
Driven to the edge, Aries cornered Elias at a VIP club, lining up ten shot glasses on a table.
"One is pure, high-proof whiskey. The rest are iced tea."
Aries sneered, knowing Elias had a severe stomach ulcer that could put him in the hospital.
"Pick the whiskey, and I sign with your new team for free."
Elias looked at Aries' broken eyes, reached out, and swallowed the liquid in one gulp.
There was no burn. All ten glasses were sweet iced tea.
As Aries fled the club in a blind panic, Elias smiled, pulling out his phone to text his lawyer.
"Liquidate my personal portfolio. I am bringing him home."
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Chapter 1
Aries Mathis stared blankly at the secondary monitor.
The countdown timer for his monthly streaming hours ticked down, the red numbers burning into his retinas.
A heavy wave of irritation settled in his chest.
He moved his mouse.
His character paced along the edge of the map.
His fingers slammed against the mechanical keyboard, the sharp clacking sounds filling the otherwise dead silence of his bedroom.
Through his noise-canceling headset, Ricky Boggs' voice grated against his eardrums.
"Are you blind? Heal me! You absolute garbage fire of a medic, move your feet!"
Ricky was screaming at a random player they had matched with.
Aries felt a muscle feather in his jaw.
He reached up and hit the physical mute button on his microphone cord.
He opened the team text chat.
"Shut your mouth and focus on your lane, Ricky."
Ricky ignored the text.
He keyed his open mic again, his voice dripping with venom as he hurled a string of vile, degrading slurs at the random medic, each word more intensely personal and humiliating than the last, attacking the player's intelligence and worth. Aries felt a muscle feather in his jaw. He had heard standard trash talk his entire career, but Ricky was crossing a line into outright psychological abuse.
On the screen, the medic's character froze.
The player was clearly stunned by the verbal assault.
The temperature in Aries' eyes dropped to freezing.
He let go of his mouse.
His character stopped moving entirely, standing completely still in the middle of a war zone.
Aries reached up and flipped the mute switch off.
He keyed his global microphone.
"Your positioning is a joke, Ricky. You pushed too far left, ignored the sightlines, and now you are crying because a random player cannot fix your stupid mistakes."
Aries kept his voice entirely flat, the coldness in his tone heavy enough to crush bone.
Ricky let out a loud, defensive scoff.
"Look who is talking. Your stats in the league have been absolute trash lately, Mathis. Do not lecture me."
Aries let out a short, hollow laugh.
His heart pumped a steady stream of ice through his veins.
"My stats are dropping because I have to cover your blind spots. Your macro awareness is nonexistent. You play like a rookie who bought his account."
The chat on his secondary monitor exploded into a blur of text.
Tens of thousands of viewers were watching this internal team meltdown live, the text scrolling so fast it made Aries dizzy.
Aries grabbed his mouse again.
He moved his character directly next to Ricky.
He used a collision mechanic, wedging his character's hitbox perfectly against Ricky's, trapping him against a concrete wall in the game.
"What are you doing? Move!" Ricky screamed.
A loud crack echoed through the game audio.
An enemy sniper put a bullet straight through Ricky's character's head.
Ricky's death screen popped up, and he started screaming incoherently into the microphone.
A notification popped up on Aries' screen. The random medic had sent him a follow request. Aries' cursor hovered over the accept button, his finger trembling with leftover adrenaline. Instead of clicking it, he stared at the username, RiverBowman. He committed the tag to memory, a silent acknowledgment of the player who had endured Ricky's abuse, before he dismissed the pop-up.
"Stay behind me," Aries typed into the lingering team chat box.
What followed was a bloodbath.
Aries let muscle memory take over, his hands moving in a blur of terrifying precision.
He hunted down the enemy team, securing four consecutive kills in less than sixty seconds.
The victory screen flashed across his monitor.
Aries kept his face entirely blank as he clicked the button to exit the lobby.
Before he could queue up again, a massive donation graphic covered his secondary monitor.
A robotic female text-to-speech voice filled his headset.
"Did you hear the news? Former captain Elias Beck is coming back to North America."
Aries' fingers locked up.
His hand froze on the mouse.
The knuckles of his right hand turned completely white.
The chat on his screen shifted instantly, a tidal wave of viewers confirming the news, spamming links and screaming about the return.
Aries' lungs stopped working.
His chest tightened so fast it felt like a blunt knife was twisting between his ribs.
He slammed his hand against the keyboard, ripping his headset off his ears. He snatched his smartphone off the desk. He didn't dare open a browser on his streaming monitor with fifty thousand people watching. His hands were shaking so badly he dropped the phone twice onto his mousepad before finally unlocking it. He opened his mobile browser, his thumbs fumbling erratically as he typed the letters.
E-L-I-A-S.
He hit enter.
The front page of the biggest esports news site loaded instantly on his small phone screen.
A massive banner stretched across the top of the display.
"Tactical Mastermind Elias Beck Ends European Contract, Officially Returns to NA League."
Aries stared at the high-definition photo of Elias' cold, sharp face.
His stomach violently cramped.
Bile rose in the back of his throat.
He did not look at his chat.
He did not say a single word to the fifty thousand people watching him.
Aries reached down under his desk.
His fingers found the physical power button on his computer tower.
He pressed it hard.
The monitors went completely black.
The hum of the cooling fans died instantly.
Aries slumped back against his gaming chair, the leather squeaking in the dead silence of his room.
He sat in the dark, dragging ragged breaths into his burning lungs.
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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.
7.7
Not only was I drugged, blinded and assaulted. I was deceived into carrying a baby by a stranger I never knew. Then he appeared and took my child away.
I was sent to a militia by the father of my child. I thought I was rescued but I was recruited to be a weapon for killing. Who was manipulating me, I didn't know. The answers were far from what I knew.
Forced to blend into the world that I could never believe I would be to, a place where brutality reigned, kill or be killed was the only language. I have survived but he has to pay for everything he did to me, because I believed every phase of my life was set by him and him alone. Have I really survived?
Who would have thought, he existed twice in the same world? Do I really know who I should take revenge on? Him or the person I would sacrifice everything for?
Was my mother the one who orchestrated everything? What kind of pawn am I?
9.1
I stood alone at the marble altar, the silence of the temple pressing against my eardrums.
It was my Mating Ceremony, but the groom was missing.
My phone buzzed with a notification: a livestream of my mate, Alpha Cain, skipping our union to welcome my sister, Eris, home.
In the video, he held her like she was fragile glass, captioning it: "True power recognizes true power."
When I returned to the Pack House, humiliated, I wasn't met with an apology.
I was met with a slap from my mother.
Eris, feigning a powerful "Alpha Aura," claimed my mere scent was poisoning her.
To "save" her, my family locked me in my room.
But the true betrayal came when I overheard their hushed whispers through the door.
"Use Vera," my mother said, her voice chillingly practical.
"She recovers fast. We can drain her blood weekly for Eris. She can stay as a servant to raise Cain and Eris's pups."
My blood ran cold.
They didn't just neglect me; they planned to harvest me like livestock.
They thought I was the weak Omega they exiled to the North years ago to peel potatoes.
They had no idea that in the North, I wasn't a servant.
I was Commander V, a warrior forged in ice and blood.
I reached under my bed and pulled out my black tactical duffel.
"Screw the meatloaf," I whispered.
I wasn't just leaving. I was going to war.
9.1
With only fifteen days of cash flow left to save her tech startup, Aida had no choice but to seek a five-million-dollar bridge loan from Brendan Walls, a ruthless billionaire predator.
He agreed to sign the check, but on one sickening condition. He demanded Aida act as bait to get close to his corporate rival, Grayson Lott, treating her like a high-end call girl for a business transaction.
Forced to comply to save her employees, Aida let Grayson take her to a windowless underground club, where he secretly spiked her whiskey.
As the drugs paralyzed her body, triggering horrific flashbacks of a brutal assault from six years ago, Aida locked herself in the bathroom. She had to shatter a mirror and slice her own thigh open with a jagged shard of glass just to stay conscious enough to call Brendan for help.
Brendan's armored SUV immediately smashed through the club's wall to save her, and Grayson was arrested. But lying in the hospital, the horrifying truth finally clicked in Aida's mind.
The rescue was too fast. Brendan’s men hadn't rushed from Midtown; they had been parked outside the entire time. He had watched Grayson drug her and waited for the felony to happen just so he could legally seize Grayson's company. He had gambled her life and trauma for a hostile takeover.
When Brendan casually tossed a signed contract and luxury car keys onto her hospital bed as hush money, the last thread of Aida's sanity snapped.
"The deal is dead. NovaTech is mine. If you ever come near me again, I will kill you."
Bleeding and shaking with icy rage, Aida threw the keys at his chest, formally declaring war on the monster who thought he could buy her soul.
9.2
After catching my fiancé cheating with my adoptive sister, I broke off our engagement on the spot.
In retaliation, my abusive adoptive parents sold me to Kaelen Knight, the Lycan King, to clear our pack's debts.
He was rumored to be a ruthless, reclusive monster who had been horribly crippled in a fire centuries ago.
To ensure my absolute ruin, my sister planted fake love letters to my ex in my luggage and anonymously destroyed my university scholarship, cutting off my only escape route to the human world.
"A wolfless whore. You planned to drug me," Kaelen sneered, looking at the fake evidence with absolute disgust.
Believing I was a spy, my new husband had his guards throw me into the freezing woods with the Dire Wolves, leaving me to survive the night alone.
I was just a broken, wolfless Omega, entirely at the mercy of a cruel, powerless Lycan and a family that wanted me dead.
But I was wrong about him being powerless.
One night, I accidentally saw him rise from his wheelchair, his tall frame radiating an overwhelming, lethal aura.
He wasn't crippled at all.
The secret I thought was my shield was actually a loaded gun pointed at my head. Trapped with a terrifying predator, I had to stop playing the victim and fight for my life.
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.