Uche Lawrence

Irina Volkov has three rules: no emotions, no real names, and never meet in person. For two years she has survived on those rules alone - running romance scams on wealthy men, funneling every stolen dollar toward the crushing debt her abusive stepfather signed in her name before she escaped. She is not greedy. She is desperate. And she is very, very good. Until she targets Nikolai Dragunov. What Irina doesn't know is that Nikolai has known about her from the beginning. He created the perfect bait - a lonely businessman with money to burn - and waited for her to find him. Because in a world Nikolai controls down to the last detail, Irina Volkov is the only unpredictable thing left. He wanted to see how far she would go. Now the game is over. The con is exposed. And Nikolai isn't asking for his money back. He's keeping her. Trapped in his penthouse with nowhere to run and a Bratva boss who looks at her like she's both a puzzle and a prize, Irina has to survive the most dangerous mark she's ever made - and somehow stop herself from falling for him in the process. She's a liar. He's a monster. And neither of them expected to fall. "You took my money, malyshka. Now you belong to me."

Camila Damien has spent years avoiding Eric Sylvester-the ruthless CEO whose cold reputation precedes him. But when a career-making promotion forces them together on a billion-dollar pharmaceutical project, avoidance becomes impossible. Eric can't shake the feeling that he's seen her before. The mysterious woman in his wallpaper. The missing pieces of a night he can't remember. And now, the brilliant scientist who challenges him at every turn. But Camila is hiding something darker than career ambitions. Three weeks of her life is gone. Stolen by a drugging incident she can't remember and a saboteur she can't identify. As corporate espionage, toxic family ties, and a dangerous conspiracy close in around them, Camila and Eric must decide: trust each other with their carefully guarded hearts, or lose everything, including their lives. In the high-stakes world of pharmaceutical giants, where betrayal comes from those closest to you and the truth is buried in forgotten memories, love might be the most dangerous risk of all.

How do you feel when you got deceived by your best friend. Just to get you raped. Your male best friend. You got deceived, your best friend whom you trust so much tricked to a birthday party. Suddenly, he started acting cold and you're wondering why he's like that. Everyone gathered around you, smiling like devils. Your best friend pushed you to the floor, tore your dress and had his way. He raped you. Not listening to your cries, your pleas. How wicked he is. Everyone watched. Every f*cking one. You felt ashamed right? When they say bad things to you. Your best friend called you a whore, saying he never loved you as a friend but was just lusting after your body. He laughed at you, everyone mocked you. Even for being raped. What a pity! You can't do anything other than to stand up shamefully, embarrassedly and painfully walked out of the party. It gonna take long before overcoming that trauma. You tried to forget it. Traveled out of the country to begin a new life. Filled with hope. You don't wanna trust anyone again. Especially men. You became happy at last but the happiness didn't last when you finally found out that you're pregnant for the bastard. You never wished for that right? No one do too. But you got no choice dear. Abortion is risky. Nine months later, it's like heaven didn't smile on you when you gave birth to a set of twins. You laboured hard to take good care of them. And also, you're always shouting here and there because of your troublesome kids. Five years later, you saw the bastard again. That day, with your kids. Surprisingly, he told you, he never had peace since day he raped you. He wants your forgiveness. Haha! The question is, are you? Are you gonna forgive him? Think about what you went through. Will you? It's hard for some and easy for some. It's your choice. He's also trying to take responsibilities. He's trying to gain your trust again. Okay, let me stop here. Am Kira Michael. This is my story. It begins, right here.

Kimberly White got a job in one of the biggest company in Germany after she ran away from her stepfather and stepbrother who made life miserable for her. She was to be the secretary of a strange CEO who left his seat vacant for almost a year and half. When the staffs have a problem, they take it to his mansion to sort it out. Some of the new staffs haven't seen his face before. Damien Anton is the CEO of the company, no one knows why he decided not to come to his company. But at last, he came back looking more cold and inhuman all of a sudden. He needed a new secretary and eventually employed Kimberly because he met her few hours to her interview. It was a very bad meeting. Damien made life difficult for her but Kimberly being a no-nonsense girl would sometimes talk to him back not caring about loosing her job. Kimberly knew something was wrong when she found out Damien many weakness. Darkness has been surrounding him. She decided to find out what happened to him and will do her very best to bring him out of darkness? Will she succeed?

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.

Becoming a bride to settle a debt was never part of my dreams. Yet, my stepbrother's betrayal and a trap party turned my life upside down, shattering my illusions of a joyful marriage. Now, I'm faced with the harsh reality of being married to a ruthless Mafia boss, Alessio Marino. Can I trust his promises, or will my situation be worse than the abuse I endured from my stepbrother? With love stripped from my wedding vows, all I can do is cling to hope for God's mercy and summon the strength to navigate this perilous new life.

My cousin Hailey paid a dock worker to assault me just to ruin my engagement. To survive the military-grade aphrodisiac she poisoned me with, I stumbled into a walk-in freezer and threw myself onto the only source of cold I could find-a man paralyzed by unnatural hypothermia. It was a desperate, primal exchange of my heat for his ice just to keep my heart from stopping. But when Hailey threw open the heavy iron door, leading my fiancé and the entire Bolton family to witness my "shame," her triumphant grin instantly vanished. She hadn't caught me with a low-life thug. She had caught me straddling Demetrius Maddox, the ruthless Iron King of Chicago. The air in the room dropped to absolute zero. My grandmother screamed in horror, and my father turned the color of ash. Hailey, blinded by jealousy, tried to double down. She pointed a manicured finger at the deadliest man in the city and called him a "nameless muscle" I picked up to defile the family name. She didn't realize she had just signed her own death warrant. I didn't cower. I realized this was the only chance to survive the family that wanted me dead. I walked up to the Devil himself, my body still humming with the poison, and looked him in the eye. "Kill me, and the cold inside you wins," I whispered, knowing he was dying from the inverse of my own poison. "I am the only doctor who knows how to cure you." Demetrius tightened his hand around my throat, his dark eyes assessing my worth. "Prove it," he growled. I turned back to my trembling cousin and signaled the enforcer to hand me the whip.

Andrew Hebert, the man who promised to protect me, stood on a stage and announced his engagement to my tormentor. It wasn't just heartbreak; it was a business deal. He was selling me to a creditor to cover his gambling debts. The applause of the powerful families was a death sentence, each clap sealing my fate as collateral. Andrew had paraded me here just to show everyone I was an asset to be liquidated, while his new fiancée smirked at me from the stage. I was trapped, with no money and no one to turn to. The man I loved was leading me to the slaughter. But as I fled into the library, a voice emerged from the shadows, deep and dangerous. Damien Maddox. The Dark Don. The only man Andrew feared. He offered me a different kind of cage, one with the power to burn Andrew's world to the ground. With nothing left to lose, I looked the devil in the eyes. "Take me with you."

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.

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 replaced my twin sister in a marriage contract to the ruthless Mafia Don, Donovan Blackwood. For three years, I was a ghost in his home, silently enduring his coldness while he flaunted his mistress, Chloe. On the very last day of our contract, Chloe staged an accident. Donovan didn't hesitate. He forced me to drain my blood to save her life. Then, to prove his loyalty to her, he drove me to the cliffs and pushed me into the freezing ocean. He even locked me in a cellar infested with spiders—my deepest phobia—because she lied and said I threatened her. He thought he was punishing the spoiled, arrogant Isabella. He didn't know he was breaking Ava, the woman who had silently memorized his allergies and waited up for him in the dark every single night. When I finally took my fifty million dollars and vanished, I left behind nothing but the divorce papers and a photo revealing the truth. He tore the city apart, destroying my family to find me, only to realize he had tortured the wrong woman. Now, he is standing on my porch in the pouring rain, staring in horror at the simple wooden ring on my finger given to me by another man. He falls to his knees, begging for a chance to love the wife he tried to destroy. I look at him, feeling absolutely nothing. "It's too late, Donovan," I say, locking the door. "You killed her."

I sat at the head of the mahogany table, the heavy heirloom emeralds around my neck marking me as the future Queen of the Cosa Nostra. But the man beside me—Jax Viles, the most feared Don in New York—had his hand resting possessively on the thigh of the woman sitting to his right. She wasn't his fiancée. I was. The humiliation didn't stop at dinner. Jax moved her into my home, turned my dance studio into her closet, and when she pushed me down a flight of stairs, he stepped over my broken body to comfort her because she was "shaken up." He started a bloody gang war just to defend her honor, yet ignored my desperate calls warning him of an ambush. To him, I wasn't a partner. I was furniture—a fixture that was expected to be silent and useful. He would burn the world to ash for her, but for me, he wouldn't even skip a meeting. So, while he was out celebrating his victory for her, I didn't wait for him to come home. I left the engagement ring in the trash can next to the toilet. On his desk, I left a single note: "I release you from the oath. I hope she's worth the war." By the time he realized his mistake and came looking for his shadow, I was already gone, ready to become the Queen of my own life.

On the night of my career-defining art exhibition, I stood completely alone. My husband, Dante Sovrano, the most feared man in Chicago, had promised he wouldn’t miss it for the world. Instead, he was on the evening news. He was shielding another woman—his ruthless business partner—from a downpour, letting his own thousand-dollar suit get soaked just to protect her. The headline flashed below them, calling their new alliance a "power move" that would reshape the city. The guests at my gallery immediately began to whisper. Their pitying looks turned my greatest triumph into a public spectacle of humiliation. Then his text arrived, a cold, final confirmation of my place in his life: “Something came up. Isabella needed me. You understand. Business.” For four years, I had been his possession. A quiet, artistic wife kept in a gilded cage on the top floor of his skyscraper. I poured all my loneliness and heartbreak onto my canvases, but he never truly saw my art. He never truly saw me. He just saw another one of his assets. My heart didn't break that night. It turned to ice. He hadn't just neglected me; he had erased me. So the next morning, I walked into his office and handed him a stack of gallery contracts. He barely glanced up, annoyed at the interruption to his empire-building. He snatched the pen and signed on the line I’d marked. He didn’t know the page tucked directly underneath was our divorce decree. He had just signed away his wife like she was nothing more than an invoice for art supplies.