Belluxarose

I never imagined my life would lead here-a world where power, fear, and loyalty rule. I was an orphan, lost in the system until I was sold to the most feared and powerful man in the underworld: Zane Stormborn. They told me he was ruthless, a man who controlled cities and commanded armies of loyal followers. But to me, he was just my new master, a man I'd have to serve in the shadows of his mansion. Yet, as I moved through the dark hallways of the Stormborn estate, I saw a side of Zane no one else knew. He wasn't just a feared crime lord; he was a man shaped by pain, haunted by secrets, and drawn to me in ways I couldn't understand. Against all odds, I went from the lowest servant in his home to the only woman he trusted by his side. But life with Zane isn't a fairytale. His enemies lurk in every corner, waiting to use me against him. They tried to break me, to tear us apart, but I won't give up so easily. I've come too far to lose him now, and I'll fight anyone who dares to stand in our way. This is my story-a journey from darkness to love, and a fight to hold on to the one man who changed my life forever.

On my wedding day, my father sold me to the Chicago Outfit to pay his debts. I was supposed to marry Alex Moreno, the heir to the city's most powerful crime family. But he couldn't even be bothered to show up. As I stood alone at the altar, humiliated, my best friend delivered the final blow. Alex hadn't just stood me up; he had run off to California with his mistress. The whispers in the cathedral turned me into a joke. I was damaged goods, the rejected bride. His family knew the whole time and let me take the public fall, offering me his cousins as pathetic replacements-a brute who hated me or a coward who couldn't protect me. The humiliation burned away my fear, leaving only cold rage. My life was already over, so I decided to set the whole game on fire myself. The marriage pact only said a Carlson had to marry a Moreno; it never said which one. With nothing left to lose, I looked past the pathetic boys they offered. I chose the one man they never expected. I chose his father, the Don himself.

My marriage to Joshua Caldwell was a prison sentence. I was a Hartman trophy, sold to the powerful family who had destroyed mine. Then I discovered he was cheating. His mistress was pregnant with the child he denied me, and he was stealing my secret song lyrics to build her career. When I confronted him, he called me a spineless liability and threatened to destroy what was left of my family. To make matters worse, a one-night stand with a stranger turned out to be with my husband's brother, Anthony Caldwell-the Don of the city. He knew all of Joshua's secrets and used them to trap me in a twisted game, seeing me as nothing more than an asset. They both thought I was a broken doll they could control. I wrote a song for his mistress, a beautiful execution with a single, impossible note I knew would destroy her voice. She sang it, and now her career is over. Now the Don has summoned me to Chicago, not knowing the woman he thinks is his asset is the one who just burned his brother's world to the ground.

I was sold to the terrifying Mafia Don, Vincenzo Moretti, as a "Collateral Bride" to pay off my family's debts. I thought my total submission would at least guarantee the medical payments for my bedridden mother. But one night, I unlocked his encrypted tablet and discovered his secret life. While he claimed to be settling bloody mafia scores in Sicily, he was actually at Disneyland with his mistress, Giuliana, and their little blonde daughter. When I demanded a divorce, he didn't apologize. "Sign the behavioral agreement, or I will personally pull the plug on your mother's ventilator." The next day, he moved his secret family into our master suite. My belongings were violently thrown into the dirt, and I was banished to the sweltering servant's quarters. He ordered the staff to feed me nothing but watery broth and stale bread to cure my "female hysteria." I soon found out that even my own stepbrother had been conspiring with Giuliana for years, eagerly helping to build the cage I was locked in. I was stripped of my dignity, starved, and reduced to a pathetic joke in my own home. Why did I have to be tortured and erased while he played the perfect, loving family man on television? The grief and humiliation finally evaporated, freezing into a cold, sharp clarity. I stopped crying and forged an irrevocable transfer of Giuliana's luxury penthouse, slipping it right into Vincenzo's daily stack of paperwork. Watching the infallible Dark Don blindly sign away his mistress's greatest asset, I knew exactly what I had to do. It was time to burn his entire empire to the ground.

Three days after my fiancé publicly dumped me for my stepsister, the Supreme Don issued a command that silenced the entire estate. I wasn't being cast aside. I was being sold to Damien Russo. The "Broken Don." A crippled, scarred monster rumored to have murdered his last two wives. My adoptive mother, Elena, didn't cry for me. She smirked. To her, I was finally being disposed of. She was so confident I was walking to my death that she decided to loot my corpse before I even left. She forged documents to steal my entire inheritance—my biological mother’s trust fund—to pay for my stepsister’s lavish wedding to my ex. "She won't need money where she's going," my stepsister laughed, wearing a dress bought with my stolen funds. They thought they were sending a lamb to the slaughter. They thought I was too weak, too stupid, and too afraid of the monster to fight back. But they made a fatal mistake. With my aunt’s help, I didn't just find the proof of their embezzlement; I found a weapon. I’m not running from the monster. I’m going to marry him. And when I hand him the evidence that the Herrera family stole from his bride, he won't be my executioner. He will be my vengeance.

I was the perfect Mafia wife, my dowry the foundation of my husband's ambition. I paid for his Yale degree, his tailored suits, and the very mansion he called his own. My reward? He paraded his mistress into my bedroom and declared her his second wife, expecting me to silently finance their affair. They thought they had broken a merchant's daughter. They forgot I was raised by wolves. Armed with a blood chit—a life debt owed to my family by the most feared man in Chicago—I walked into the lion's den. I went to Damien 'The Wraith' Falcone, the Dark Don who rules the Outfit with an iron fist, to demand a simple annulment. But the King of Chicago isn't interested in simple transactions. He saw the steel beneath my silk, the vendetta burning in my eyes. He granted me my freedom, but at a price: my allegiance. Now, I'm a pawn in his lethal game of thrones, caught between a treacherous husband I swore to destroy and a ruthless Don who looks at me with a terrifying, possessive hunger. In a city built on loyalty and betrayal, I'm about to teach them all that a queen's wrath is the deadliest weapon of all.

"It was just one night stand, and now I'm pregnant with triplets? Gosh!" Josephine Jade never thought that she would have to run away from her own family while pregnant. She was alone, without money, without connections, with three fetuses in her stomach. How can she survive? However, Josephine couldn't give up now, until she managed to reclaim her arbitrarily seized property and get back at everyone who tried to get rid of her. A sick child, a past crush that comes back, a mysterious eccentric man, and a family that hates her, will weave together the journey of Josephine Jade's new life. "You have no right to separate me from my children, you bastard! I will survive and you will submit to me. Just watch!"

At my boyfriend's poorest moment, I suddenly broke up with him. Later, he became a Don in the Mafia and married me by any means necessary. Everyone said he loved me to the bone. But every night, he brought different women home, deliberately trying to provoke me. I asked no questions, shed no tears, and never disturbed his trysts with his mistresses. He went crazy with rage instead, kissing me fiercely and demanding, "Why aren't you jealous?" He didn't know I was sick. Dying. While he was furiously taking his revenge on me, I was slowly walking toward death.

I watched my husband sign the papers that would end our marriage while he was busy texting the woman he actually loved. He didn't even glance at the header. He just scribbled the sharp, jagged signature that had signed death warrants for half of New York, tossed the file onto the passenger seat, and tapped his screen again. "Done," he said, his voice devoid of emotion. That was Dante Moretti. The Underboss. A man who could smell a lie from a mile away but couldn't see that his wife had just handed him an annulment decree disguised beneath a stack of mundane logistics reports. For three years, I scrubbed his blood out of his shirts. I saved his family's alliance when his ex, Sofia, ran off with a civilian. In return, he treated me like furniture. He left me in the rain to save Sofia from a broken nail. He left me alone on my birthday to drink champagne on a yacht with her. He even handed me a glass of whiskey—her favorite drink—forgetting that I despised the taste. I was merely a placeholder. A ghost in my own home. So, I stopped waiting. I burned our wedding portrait in the fireplace, left my platinum ring in the ashes, and boarded a one-way flight to San Francisco. I thought I was finally free. I thought I had escaped the cage. But I underestimated Dante. When he finally opened that file weeks later and realized he had signed away his wife without looking, the Reaper didn't accept defeat. He burned down the world to find me, obsessed with reclaiming the woman he had already thrown away.

I am the wife of Julian Falcone, a powerful mafia boss, but my title in this house is nothing but a joke. When our car broke down in a deadly blizzard, Julian rushed to the scene, only to bypass me entirely. He wrapped his heavy coat around his fragile cousin, Livia, and put her in his only available passenger seat. "Livia's constitution is too weak to survive this cold. I have to take her back first." He left me to freeze in the pitch-black car for the entire night. When his men finally dragged my half-dead body out the next morning, they openly mocked me, calling me a piece of "collateral" that the boss wouldn't care about as long as I was breathing. Back at the estate, Julian didn't even ask if I had survived the frostbite. Instead, he stormed into my sickroom, demanding I treat his mistress with respect just because my absolute silence had hurt her feelings. His grandmother then publicly humiliated me for failing to provide an heir, while Livia flaunted the custom diamond bracelet Julian bought to soothe her "fright" from the storm. I finally understood. He didn't marry me out of honor to save my fallen family. He just needed my aristocratic Rossi blood to legitimize his new-money mafia empire. I was never a wife. I was a transaction he was willing to let freeze to death. When his men delivered a heavy diamond necklace to buy my submission, I didn't cry or beg. I dropped the blood diamond into the deepest drawer, and began to plan my escape.

For seven years, I was the architect of my fiancé's criminal empire and the strategist behind his every move. I was Dante Gallo’s unofficial Consigliere, his partner in everything but name. Tomorrow, I was finally supposed to marry him and take my place as the queen to his throne. But on the eve of our wedding, a single text message sent by mistake detonated my life. It was a photo from Dante, showing a platinum wedding band on his hand. The message read: “Married this morning. She’s safe now.” My gaze fell to the engagement ring on my own finger. It was the identical band, just smaller. The engraved initials ‘D.I.’ didn’t stand for Dante and I. They stood for Dante and Isabella—his childhood sweetheart. My entire relationship was a lie; I was just a shield to protect his one true love. He dismissed my discovery as a "tantrum." Then, his new bride began taunting me, sending a picture of them tangled in bedsheets with the caption: "Loser." They expected me to break. They thought I would shatter. They were about to find out just how wrong they were. I forwarded the picture to Isabella’s fiancé, a man far more dangerous than Dante. "Your fiancée is in Suite 8808 at the Grand Hyatt," I told him. "I'll meet you downstairs. We're going to crash their party."