You Can't Buy My Heart, Mr. Vitiello
My father sold me to the Vitiello Crime Family to settle a three-million-dollar gambling debt.
For three years, I was Dante Vitiello’s property. I warmed his bed, tended his wounds, and let him own every part of me.
I thought I was earning my freedom. I thought I mattered.
Then his "true queen," the Mafia Princess Sofia, returned to the city.
Dante pushed me off his lap the moment she walked into the room. He ordered me to leave because, in the presence of his equal, I was nothing more than "the help."
The humiliation didn't stop there.
He evicted me from the penthouse to renovate it for her.
At a gala, he outbid me for my grandmother’s heirloom bracelet—my family's last scrap of dignity—just to gift it to Sofia in front of the entire city.
But the final blow came when he came to my bed drunk one last time.
He kissed me with a desperate hunger, whispering that he was only "practicing" his technique on me so he would be perfect for her.
I realized then that I wasn't a person to him. I was a training dummy. A debt with a pulse.
He told me to wait for him while he took her to Paris. He thought I would stay in the kennel like a good pet.
He was wrong.
While he was gone, I accepted a surgical fellowship in Switzerland.
I snapped my SIM card in half, left his millions on the floor, and boarded a one-way flight.
By the time the Wolf comes home to find his cage empty, I will be gone.
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Chapter 5
Elena Rossi POV
The elevator ride to the penthouse felt like being sealed in a vertical coffin.
When the doors slid open, I hesitated, convinced I had stepped off on the wrong floor.
The warmth had been surgically removed.
The beige walls, the plush rugs, the paintings I had meticulously chosen to make this stone fortress mimic a home—all of it had been erased.
The walls were stripped down to skeletal concrete.
The furniture was shrouded in plastic sheets, like bodies in a morgue.
Construction crews were hauling out debris in heavy canvas sacks.
And there, in the center of the living room, sitting in black trash bags like common refuse, were my things.
Dante stood by the floor-to-ceiling window, silhouetted against the city, nursing a cigarette.
He hated smoking indoors.
It was one of his cardinal rules.
But rules, apparently, were shackles designed only for me.
"What is this?" I asked, my voice echoing in the hollowed-out space.
He turned slowly.
"Renovations," he said, his voice flat. "Sofia prefers minimalism. Industrial chic."
"My books," I said, pointing to a bag that had split open, spilling my medical textbooks onto the dusty concrete.
I looked at the fabric peeking out of another bag. "My mother's quilts."
"They were in the way," he said, flicking ash onto the floor with deliberate indifference. "The crew needs the space clear by Monday."
He walked over to the kitchen island, the only structure left untouched in the demolition.
He picked up a small velvet box and slid it across the marble toward me.
It stopped inches from my hand.
"A severance package," he said.
I stared at the box.
I didn't open it.
I knew it would be diamonds.
Cold, hard carbon meant to purchase three years of my soul.
"Is she moving in?" I asked, the words tasting like ash.
"Eventually. The engagement will be announced next month."
He took a long drag of the cigarette, his eyes narrowing through the plume of smoke.
"You have until the end of the week to find a new place. I've arranged an apartment for you in Santa Monica. The lease is paid for a year."
He was evicting me.
Like a tenant who had fallen behind on rent.
"I don't want the apartment," I said.
"Take it, Elena. Don't be difficult."
"I'm not being difficult," I whispered, the fight draining out of me. "I'm being done."
I walked past him to the trash bags.
I didn't take the designer gowns.
I didn't take the emeralds.
I grabbed the bag heavy with my books and the one holding the quilt.
"Where are you going?" he asked, his voice sharpening.
"Out."
"You don't have anywhere to go."
"I'll figure it out."
I dragged the bags to the elevator.
He didn't stop me.
He watched me with a mix of annoyance and something else—maybe confusion.
He wasn't used to his property walking away on its own two legs.
I checked into a motel near the university that charged by the hour.
The room smelled of stale smoke and desperation, but for tonight, it was mine.
The next morning, I went to the Dean’s office to finalize my transfer paperwork.
"Are you sure, Ms. Rossi?" the Dean asked, peering over his spectacles. "We were prepared to offer you a tenure-track position here. Caltech doesn't like losing its brightest."
"I'm sure," I said, signing the final line. "I need... a change of scenery."
As I walked out, clutching my file, I collided with a chest as unyielding as a brick wall.
"Whoa, steady there," a deep voice rumbled.
I looked up.
Julian Cavalli.
The golden boy of the surgery department.
Top of the class, son of a Senator, and the only man in this city who had ever looked at me without undressing me with his eyes.
"Elena?" He frowned, leaning down to inspect my red-rimmed eyes. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine, Julian. Just... allergies."
He didn't buy it.
He shifted his gym bag, his gaze intense but kind. "If you need anything... coffee, a scalpel to stab someone with... I'm around."
I managed a weak, fractured smile. "I might take you up on the scalpel."
"I'm serious," he said, his voice dropping to a murmur. "I saw the news about the Vitiello engagement. I know you... knew him."
He was being polite.
Everyone knew I was the *Comare*. The mistress.
"I didn't know him," I said softly. "I just owed him."
My phone rang.
The screen flashed *Owner*.
I hadn't changed the contact name yet.
I ignored it.
It rang again.
And again.
Finally, I answered, my grip on the phone white-knuckled. "What?"
"Come get me," Dante’s voice slurred.
He was drunk.
He never got drunk.
"Call your driver."
"I fired him. Come get me. The Penthouse."
"I don't live there anymore, remember?"
"Elena," he growled, the sound vibrating with a terrifying mix of menace and need. "Come. Now."
I hung up.
I looked at Julian, who was watching me with concern.
"Do you need a ride?" Julian asked.
"No," I said, a bitter taste flooding my mouth. "I have one last debt to pay."
I took a cab to the penthouse.
The door was unlocked.
Dante was sitting on the floor amidst the construction debris, a half-empty bottle of scotch loosely gripped in his hand.
He looked wrecked.
His tie was gone, his shirt unbuttoned halfway down his torso.
When he saw me, he tried to stand but stumbled.
I caught him.
He was heavy, a dead weight of muscle and sinew.
I dragged him to the only piece of furniture left—the leather sofa in the den.
"Sofia," he muttered, his eyes squeezed shut against the light.
"She's not ready."
I froze.
My hands hovered over his chest, midway through unbuttoning his shirt so he wouldn't suffocate.
"What?"
He opened his eyes.
They were glassy, unfocused.
He looked directly at me, but he saw her.
"She said she's not ready," he whispered, a cruel, drunken smirk twisting his lips. "So I have to wait. I have to... practice."
He reached up and grabbed the back of my neck, pulling me down.
It wasn't a kiss.
It was a collision.
He kissed me with a hunger that was terrifying, desperate, and completely devoid of affection.
"Practice," he murmured against my lips.
I shoved him off.
I scrambled back, my chest heaving, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.
I wasn't a person to him.
I was a training dummy.
I was the warm body he used to perfect his technique for the woman he actually respected.
I stood up, trembling.
"Practice is over, Dante," I said to the unconscious man.
I walked to the window and looked out at the city lights.
They blurred through my tears into streaks of gold and red.
I sat there all night, watching over him one last time.
Not because I loved him.
But because I needed to watch the sun rise on a world where I no longer belonged to him.
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9.7
I ran through the freezing rain, desperate to escape the Pennington estate. My adoptive family had raised me for one purpose: to be sold off as a bargaining chip in a wealthy arranged marriage.
But before I could reach the highway, I was cornered. Not just by my family's cruel guards, but by Hollis Wall—a terrifying, ruthless billionaire who snapped my tormentor's wrist and dragged me into his car. He didn't want a ransom. He threw a prenuptial agreement in my lap.
I thought he was insane until he took a scalpel to his own arm, and a burning agony ripped across my flawless skin. Because of a near-drowning accident three years ago, our nervous systems were linked. Every time I bled, he felt the agony. He locked me in his fortress to keep me safe, but when I finally escaped back to my adoptive parents, they didn't protect me. Instead, my adoptive father smiled and showed me a live video of my biological father on life support, a guard's hand hovering over the plug.
"You will marry Douglas Cherry tomorrow, or your father dies," he sneered.
My own family was willing to murder my only real flesh and blood just to secure their wealth. I collapsed onto the cold marble floor, my heart crushed in a vice of absolute, suffocating despair.
"I'll marry him," I sobbed, surrendering to the darkness.
But miles away, in his dark study, the ruthless Hollis Wall violently collapsed to the floor, gasping for air as my severe panic attack bled directly into his chest. Our twisted bond was killing him, and I knew he would tear the city apart to find me.
7.3
Power built his empire. Silence protected her heart.
When a billionaire's untouchable world collides with a woman who refuses to be owned by it, a contract meant to save a legacy becomes a risk neither can afford. Signed, Sealed, His is a slow-burn billionaire romance about control, exposure, and the terrifying cost of choosing love when power is on the line.
8.5
I was four months pregnant, weighing over two hundred pounds, and my heart was failing from experimental treatments forced on me as a child. My doctor looked at me with clinical detachment and told me I was in a death sentence: if I kept the baby, I would die, and if I tried to remove it, I would die.
Desperate for a lifeline, I called my father, Francis Acosta, to tell him I was sick and pregnant. I expected a father's love, but all I got was a cold, sharp blade of a voice.
"Then do it quietly," he said. "Don't embarrass Candi. Her debutante ball is coming up."
He didn't just reject me; he erased me. My trust fund was frozen, and I was told I was no longer an Acosta. My fiancé, Auston, had already discarded me, calling me a "bloated whale" while he looked for a thinner, wealthier replacement. I left New York on a Greyhound bus, weeping into a bag of chips, a broken woman the world considered a mistake.
I couldn't understand how my own father could tell me to die "quietly" just to save face for a party. I didn't know why I had been a lab rat for my family’s pharmaceutical ambitions, or how they could sleep at night while I was left to rot in the gray drizzle of the city.
Five years later, the doors of JFK International Airport slid open. I stepped onto the marble floor in red-soled stilettos, my body lean, lethal, and carved from years of blood and sweat. I wasn't the "whale" anymore; I was a ghost coming back to haunt them.
With my daughter by my side and a medical reputation that terrified the global elite, I was ready to dismantle the Acosta empire piece by piece.
"Tell Francis to wash his neck," I whispered to the skyline. "I'm home."
9.6
I endured years of humiliation and forced sedatives from my billionaire husband's family, hoping my quiet obedience would eventually win his heart. When I finally discovered I was pregnant, I thought the child would be our anchor.
But when I rushed to his office to tell him, I found his untouchable first love sitting in his chair, rubbing her own swollen belly.
She smiled and whispered that she was the one who orchestrated the car crash that left my adoptive mother in a vegetative state.
When I lunged at her in a blind rage, my husband shielded her and shoved me backward with brutal force. My spine slammed against a marble table, and blood pooled at my feet.
"Kingston, please! I'm pregnant too!" I sobbed, clutching my stomach.
He just looked down at me with profound disgust.
"I had a vasectomy five years ago," he hissed, condemning me as a cheating whore before ordering his men to lock me up and forcibly abort the child.
I had never touched another man. I couldn't understand how the man I loved could order the murder of his own flesh and blood without a second thought.
To save myself, I stole his prized Aston Martin and drove it off a bridge into the freezing Atlantic, letting his pathetic, obedient wife drown in the wreckage.
Five years later, I returned to New York as a powerful European executive, ready to burn his empire to the ground.
7.6
Eloise was the adopted stray of the wealthy Foreman family, mocked daily for her tarot cards and dismissed as a mentally unstable burden.
When her adoptive father suddenly collapsed with thick, black veins pulsing up his neck, they didn't blame his corrupt real estate deals. They blamed her.
"She's a witch! She cursed me!" Mitch roared, ordering his doctor and armed guards to forcefully drain her blood to cure his supernatural toxin.
Her adoptive mother revoked her trust fund and threatened to drag her to a psych ward. Her spoiled sister threw a crumpled twenty-dollar bill at her feet, laughing as the security team cornered Eloise against the wall.
Eloise stared coldly at the family that had abused her for years. They had dug up a sacred burial ground to build condos, bringing this deadly curse upon themselves, yet they wanted to bleed her dry to survive.
Just as the guards lunged, the heavy oak doors were violently shoved open.
An aristocratic butler stepped through the freezing rain, flanked by elite operatives who snapped the guards' legs in seconds. He dropped a three-billion-dollar trust document onto the table as mere "compensation" for her shelter.
"Please, Miss Palmer," the butler bowed deeply, offering her pristine white gloves. "Do not dirty your hands in this place."
Leaving her adoptive father to his midnight death sentence, Eloise stepped into a waiting Rolls-Royce, ready to reclaim her place in a hidden global dynasty.
9.7
I woke up in a hospital bed with the sting of antiseptic in my nose and my body feeling like lead. My world had been turned upside down by a crash, but the nightmare was only beginning.
Instead of a doctor, I found my Aunt Ursula and a man named Julian standing over me. They weren't there to comfort me; they were calculating my worth.
"Poor thing," Ursula cooed, pinning my wrist to the mattress.
Julian claimed he was my fiancé, even though I’d spent a year dodging his calls. I tried to scream, but my throat felt like it was filled with broken glass. They were using my silence to paint me as incompetent so they could seize my family’s trust fund. Just as Julian tried to force a ring on my finger, the door slammed open. Hilliard Blackburn, the city’s most ruthless billionaire, walked in and tossed a marriage certificate on the floor.
"I am her legal husband," he said. "Now, get out."
I was a piece of collateral, traded by my dying grandfather to pay off a debt. To Hilliard, I was just an asset in his portfolio. He didn't know that I was secretly "The Analyst," a hacker who moved millions on the dark web. He didn't know about the missing algorithm that could crash the market, or that my mentor had vanished in a lab fire.
The world saw a broken, mute heiress, but I was hiding a secret that could destroy us all. I was pregnant, and my stolen code was already being auctioned to the highest bidder. With Hilliard moving into my house to monitor me, I had to find the truth before my "husband" realized I was his greatest threat.