Dark

I died. At my sister's eighteenth birthday party, the moment the champagne tower came crashing down.

While she stood under the crystal chandelier in her gown, soaking up congratulations from three hundred guests, I was tied up in an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of town. The wound in my stomach was still bleeding.

I called my family. Only my brother picked up, sounding pissed off and disg...

I'm the only daughter of a mafia leader. I married Marco, an outsider, against my father's wishes.

Six months ago, my father died in a car accident. Marco took over part of the family business. One day when I was feeling down, I passed through the slums and saved a girl named Gianna who was being beaten for stealing food. I took her in as my assistant and treated her like a sister.

But when I wa...

"Come see our wedding invitations!" I excitedly held up the document folder I'd grabbed from ,my fiancé, Lorenzo's study, showing it off to his men in his private safe house on the Upper East Side.

Lorenzo and I had been running ourselves ragged this month preparing for the wedding.

Lorenzo's guys raised their glasses, waiting to see our custom-designed invitations. I eagerly turned the folder u...

From a young age, I understood that my asthma was a shackle for my entire family. My parents took turns caring for me, their hearts gripped by the fear of any sign of respiratory distress. In their fervent concern for my health, they even compelled my sister, Sophie, freshly accepted into university, to postpone her studies and return home to assist in my care.
At Sophie's eighteenth birthday cele...

I waited five years for a heart transplant.
My mother—the Luna of our Pack, the healer everyone worships—gave it to someone else.
An orphan girl she took in. A girl who now calls her "Mom."
Ivy got my heart. She got a wolf. She got a mate and a wedding so grand the whole Pack attended.
Me? I watched from the corner, still dying, while my mother smiled for the cameras and accepted praise for her "s...

My brother Miles blames me for our parents' deaths.
So he chose to adopt the deaf Vivian instead of keeping me.
Later, I met Sullivan.
He gave me a grand confession. He chose me, resolutely.
He also said I hired someone to assault Vivian—that I didn't deserve sympathy.
Five years after being cast out of my family, a dismembered female body was found inside a carnival mascot costume.
Miles, now a p...

On our wedding night, my husband confessed that he had been unfaithful with my sister.

In response, I revealed that I had murdered my stepfather.

He laughed and said, "My dear, your story is so convincingly crafted."

It was only when he discovered—

Every detail within the narrative was, indeed, a stark reality.

Including the poison that was now coursing through his veins.

36 weeks pregnant, I was thrown into the dungeon by my own husband.

When my water broke, I desperately reached out through the mate bond, calling for him—only to discover that he had severed it with his own hands.

They lashed my swollen belly with leather whips. They injected wolfsbane into my veins. And when my baby's head began to crown, they shoved her back inside me.

All because his sister-...

I was the best student, the most obedient, the most compliant—yet the only unloved child in our family.

When my brother got into fights, I took his punishment. When my sister snuck out with boys, I bore the consequences. Mom force-fed me pills and made me get my stomach pumped just to scare my brother away from smoking. Dad dressed ten-year-old me like a prostitute and threw me into a bar to wa...

I was forced by my father to fulfill an arranged engagement I'd never met face-to-face.

Pushing open the private room door, I found my fiancé Tristan celebrating his secretary Clara's birthday.

"Security! Get this beggar out of here!" Clara screamed, pointing at me.

When I revealed my identity, Tristan sneered coldly: "What bullshit engagement? I would never marry a woman like you."

Clara pour...

I'm eight months pregnant, throwing up so violently I can taste bile, three "miracles" growing inside me.

Until that night at their celebration dinner, when I leaned against the wall and heard laughter from inside the private room.

I could hear the amusement in my husband Frank's voice: "Let's up the bet—another million. I'm betting two boys, one girl."

His mistress Ava giggled: "You already kn...

They say the dead go where they belong.

But I didn't.

I drift through the cold winds, watching my husband—the detective who once swore to protect me with his life—diligently investigating a dismemberment case.

He doesn't know that the broken body lying in the morgue is his wife.

He doesn't know that the gentle, caring "psychologist" who brings him lunch every day is the one who killed me.

He ...

Four months pregnant, I was full of joy and wanted to tell my gang-boss boyfriend.
He had sworn that if we had a child, he'd stay away from the underworld, and live a normal life with me.
But when I appeared at his stronghold holding a first aid kit, I was treated as a bitch who wanted to seduce the boss and suffered cruel abuse.
The most ironic thing was that my husband and I were only separated ...

No one would believe that Lorenzo Moretti's wife—the mafia Don's wife—

had to kneel in his study and beg him to approve three hundred thousand dollars to save her brother's life.

All because he thought a woman from Brooklyn's slums needed constant reminding of her place.

Just last night, kidnappers sent photos of my brother's severed finger, and I got on my knees begging him to sign that goddam...

Three years of marriage. Three pregnancies.

Every time I confirmed I was pregnant, my sister-in-law Ophelia would walk into the chapel behind the manor.

Then my in-laws would drag me to the hospital and force me to abort the healthy baby.

The night after my third miscarriage, I dragged my weakened body to follow her into the chapel.

The moment I pushed open that door, my blood ran cold.

In th...

I downloaded a mysterious app that promised to "silence noisy neighbors for good." 
With one tap, I became the 48th and final voter—and the raging party upstairs went dead quiet.
Three days later, detectives told me the family upstairs had died in perfect silence.
And they found a sonic weapon hidden in my bedroom, registered only to me.
Outside the interrogation room, my neighbors watched me wit...

I hid in my best friend's closet to catch my fiancé cheating.
Through the gap in the door, I saw them on the bed. Tessa was blindfolded, wrists tied to the headboard with silk scarves. Callum's hands wrapped around her throat—some kind of breath play, I guessed.
Then her moaning turned to choking.
Her body convulsed. Her bound hands clawed at nothing. Her legs kicked against the mattress.
Then sto...

I've been married to billionaire Joseph Miller for three years. Pregnant three times. Aborted three times.

Every time, my husband stood outside the operating room, watching them wheel me in.

The first baby, my mother-in-law Victoria said had spinal deformities. The second, my father-in-law Richard showed a "report" claiming heart defects.

I believed them. I thought it was my fault, something wr...