Big Kahuna

I spent my life working the syndicate sweatshops just to keep my family afloat. But my mother and brother still treated me like a disposable asset. To pay off my brother's gang debt, my mother tried to force me into an arranged marriage with a violent, widowed Capo. "If you don't do this, your brother is a dead man. You owe us this." When I refused, she slapped me across the face and leased my bedroom to a syndicate associate, leaving me completely homeless in the pouring rain. With nowhere to go, my thoughts drifted to Dante, the ruthless future Don who saved me from a fire ten years ago. I had loved him in secret for a decade, but I chose a vow of silence because my childhood best friend, Elena, claimed him as hers. I had watched her cling to his side through a decade of bloodshed, stepping into the shadows so they could rule. I thought I was nothing but a worthless pawn, abandoned by my blood and invisible to the only man I ever loved. So I packed my battered duffel bag, accepted a dangerous transfer to a hostile casino territory, and vowed to never return to New York. I chose to build my own empire and live for myself. But what I didn't know was that the moment I disappeared, the cold-blooded Underboss went completely feral. He kicked down my old apartment door, left my toxic family cowering in the hallway, and mobilized an entire death squad just to bring me back.

"Dad, I can break up with Lucas and marry into the most powerful mafia family, the Vittorine family, and wed that brutal heir." Eve's robe hung loosely, and there were kiss marks all over her neck. "But I have one condition. If you agree to it, I'll marry him." Eve's father, Robert Costa, asked her excitedly on the other end of the phone, but Eve abruptly hung up. Lucas got out of the bathroom, wiping droplets from his wet hair. Then he pulled Eve into his arms, and they fell into bed together. Eve buried her face in his chest, but her eyes were cold. She was the daughter of the Costa family and had been secretly in love with Lucas Smith, a district leader in the family, for five years. Three days ago, she was kidnapped. The kidnappers targeted a batch of goods belonging to Lucas. They used Eve as leverage to threaten Lucas. Her phone died after repeatedly trying to call him all night, but Lucas never answered. Eve was pushed off a cliff and was badly injured. She was then saved by the head of her family, so she narrowly escaped death. Lucas was flirting with her father's illegitimate daughter, Alina. Eve utterly realized Lucas's true face and stopped loving him. Lucas proposed to her today, and Eve had prepared a big gift for him. She would give him freedom.

Tonight was supposed to be the happiest night of my life, my engagement party to Alex Turner at the grand St. Regis ballroom. He was handsome, the heir to a fortune, and I had loved him for three years. As he reached for the ring, a woman stumbled in, disheveled and crying. "Alex!" she wailed, claiming she' d been drugged. It was Chloe Hayes, his childhood friend, the one he always called "just like a sister." Without a moment' s hesitation, Alex abandoned me on stage, scooping Chloe into his arms and disappearing into a private lounge. The crowd' s whispers and snickers burned my ears. "Did you see that? He just left her." "On their engagement night, too. How humiliating." My joy curdled into a cold, hard knot. I wanted the floor to swallow me whole. How could he do this to me, after everything? Why was I always the one left behind, the one humiliated? Just as shame threatened to consume me, another figure stepped into the spotlight. It was Daniel Sterling, Alex' s business rival. He picked up the abandoned engagement ring, ascended the stage, and knelt before me. "He can' t even be bothered to give you the ring himself," he said, his eyes surprisingly kind. Then, he held up the ring and asked, "Jane Lim, he doesn' t deserve you. Will you marry me?" My mind went blank. He then pulled out a stunning emerald bracelet. "This is a Sterling family heirloom," he declared. "It belongs to the matriarch of our family. I want you to have it." In that moment, I saw a lifeline, a chance to reclaim my dignity. Looking at Daniel, a man I barely knew, offering more respect than Alex ever had, I took a deep breath. "Yes," I said, my voice shaking but clear. "I will."

I am a top-tier Alpha from another universe, but a spatial jump error dropped me straight into a high-security military isolation chamber. Right in front of me was a terrifying, silver-haired wolf-beastman Admiral, completely losing his mind to a lethal biological heat cycle. To survive in this strange dimension where my powers were restricted, I had to pretend to be a helpless, terrified girl. Surprisingly, my mere presence and scent instantly cured his incurable madness. But this backfired horribly. He became obsessively possessive, treating me like a fragile, priceless treasure. When I managed to sneak out to the city's lawless slums to gather intel and accidentally saved a dying panther boy, the Admiral went completely feral. He brought an entire war fleet, blotting out the sky, just to "rescue" me. He nearly slaughtered the boy out of blind jealousy, forcing me to throw myself into his arms and cry fake tears to stop the bloodshed. "I'm taking you home. No one will ever hurt you again." He brought me to his flagship's secret medical bay and ordered the Empire's chief doctor to run a full genetic classification test on me. I panicked. If they discovered my true identity as an off-world Alpha, I would be dissected or executed. I immediately commanded my AI system to fake my blood data, aiming for a perfectly average, forgettable Omega result. But as the machine processed my blood, the alarms blared, and the system overloaded. The old doctor fell to his knees in absolute worship, and the terrifying Admiral looked at me with wild, starving eyes. My system had overcompensated. I wasn't registered as average. I was just classified as the only SSSSS-grade Omega in the history of the universe.

Ava Kidd just wanted to escape her abusive stepmother when she got drunk at a high-end club and stumbled into the wrong hotel room. She woke up the next morning in a luxury penthouse, lying naked next to a terrifyingly handsome man covered in her scratch marks. Recalling rumors of the hotel's secret underground concierge, she immediately assumed she had accidentally slept with an elite male escort. Desperate to settle the bill, she offered him her only debit card with a pathetic $1,800. But the man, who was actually Garrison Terry, the ruthless billionaire CEO, was deeply insulted by the cheap plastic. He trapped her against the bed, coldly demanding a half-million-dollar service fee. When Ava frantically offered her dead mother's tarnished locket as collateral, he cruelly dismissed it as worthless junk. Ava was humiliated, her heart pounding with absolute terror. She didn't understand why this arrogant gigolo was acting like a deranged extortionist, demanding a fortune from a broke girl who had clearly made a mistake. Furious and refusing to cower, she sneaked out, put on his oversized designer shirt, and aggressively ate his $800 truffle breakfast. Having no money left, she grabbed her cheap red lipstick, wrote a defiant IOU on his expensive linen napkin, and fled the hotel. She thought she had escaped a criminal, but upstairs, the billionaire traced her lipstick-stained name with a predatory smile. "Ava Kidd, I will absolutely find you."

I woke up in a burning warehouse, twelve years after my supposed death. My body had been reset to its physical prime, the deep burn scar on my wrist completely gone. Through the smoke, my eldest son, Kennard, rushed blindly into the flames. He was screaming the name of the very woman who had orchestrated this trap-Brittnie. When I tackled him out of the way of a falling steel beam, he didn't recognize my youthful face. Instead, he pinned me to the concrete and nearly crushed my windpipe. "How much did she pay you to carve up your face to look like a dead woman?" He hissed the words at me, treating me like a sick corporate spy. For a decade, a bizarre narrative "script" had brainwashed my son, forcing him into pathetic devotion to Brittnie. She had drained his wealth, turned my daughter against him, and hollowed out our family empire. Whenever Kennard tried to resist her, the mind control punished him with agonizing migraines, driving him to smash his own hands against the wall just to cope with the pain. Hearing him quietly sobbing outside my locked door, my heart shattered. How could this invisible force torture my brilliant son and turn my family into puppets for a D-list actress? I dragged him to the hospital for a DNA test. When the results confirmed my maternity at 99.999%, the cold billionaire collapsed to the floor, weeping in my arms like a lost child. I wiped his tears and smiled ruthlessly. It was time to take back my empire and burn Brittnie's life to the ground.

I was sold to Damien Russo, the ruthless Don of Chicago, as collateral in a shipping route transaction. I was expected to be a silent, obedient bride in a cold, loveless marriage. But the moment I stepped into the Russo estate, I realized my new family wanted to completely destroy me. My mother-in-law, Eleonora, and her arrogant relatives immediately targeted me. They set traps in the solarium, mocked my late mother's heritage, and tried to force me into humiliating submission using their strict mafia traditions. They wanted to break my spirit so Damien would replace me with the bride they actually wanted—a purebred mafia princess. They expected me to cower in fear, isolated and helpless, while the whole family watched my public humiliation and waited for my downfall. Did they really think I was just a fragile girl who would cry and run away? They completely underestimated the survival instincts of a woman who grew up in this bloody world. I learned long ago that tears are worthless. "My rules are simple. Vendetta is a two-way street." Instead of breaking, I smiled. I weaponized their own legendary ancestors and the sacred promise of an unborn heir to trap the Matriarch in her own rules, forcing her into a suffocating silence. If they wanted a war for the throne, I would gladly show them exactly why I am the undisputed Mafia Queen.

Eleven years ago, Damien Falcone pulled me from the freezing waters, and I thought I was marrying my savior. Instead, he orchestrated my absolute ruin by forging evidence to frame me for selling a vital mafia bootlegging route to the FBI. Under the guise of saving me from the family's brutal death sentence, he stripped away my future as his Mafia Queen. He dragged me to New York and locked me in a gilded penthouse cage. For eleven years, I rotted away as his secret prisoner until my failing body finally gave out. As I collapsed in the freezing New York snow, he caught me, his hands trembling as he held my dying body against his chest. "No, Fia, stay with me. I did it to keep you alive. I had to—" I didn't want to hear his monstrous lies anymore. I had given him all my love, and he repaid me with a tomb. Loving him was the only unforgivable sin I ever committed. "I pray... we never meet again." When the howling wind faded, I opened my eyes to the heavy stench of rust and lake water. I wasn't dead. I was back in the cramped cabin of a cargo freighter, exactly sixteen years old again. It was the very night my jealous cousin sent an assassin to carve up my face and void my marriage to the Falcone family. This time, I quietly gripped the heavy oak slat under my mattress.

I lived in Ellery Winters’ penthouse for two years, playing the role of the quiet, unremarkable girl who fixed his financial messes in the dark. I thought we had a partnership, until I walked in to find my belongings packed in a black garbage bag near the door. Ellery stood by the floor-to-ceiling window, a silhouette of ice, refusing to even look at me. On the marble table sat a "Termination of Relations" agreement and a one-million-dollar check. "Sign it," he said, his voice devoid of any warmth. He was discarding me to marry my sister, Claudine, as part of a strategic merger with the Fitzgeralds—the very family that had abandoned me to the foster system years ago. My mother, Victoria, didn't want a daughter; she wanted a tool to secure the Winters’ fortune. Silas, his assistant, looked at me with pity, expecting the "trailer park girl" to break down and beg for the hush money. They all thought I was a nobody, a line item to be deleted from the balance sheet of their lives so they could move on to their high-society wedding. I felt a cold, sharp rage bubbling up, the kind that only someone who has lived in the shadows can truly feel. I didn't beg, and I didn't scream. I just looked at the man I had protected for two years and realized he had no idea who I actually was. Why did they think I was helpless? Why did Ellery believe he could buy my silence when I knew every dirty secret buried in his Cayman accounts? I ripped the million-dollar check into confetti and dropped it in the trash. As I stepped back into the decaying Fitzgerald mansion as an "Honorary Ward," I wasn't coming home for a reunion—I was coming to dismantle both of their empires from the inside.

Our Maui anniversary trip was set. For years, I' d quietly funded my husband Mark' s tech startup, even his mother' s expensive cancer treatment. He thought I was just "Sarah Miller," unassuming, never guessing my father owned vast vineyards and luxury resorts. Then, at the airport, he canceled our trip. An 'investor crisis,' he claimed. My gut screamed suspicion. I checked Instagram: my au pair' s daughter, Tiffany, wearing my designer dress, passionately kissing Mark in my living room, captioned 'My man knows how to treat his queen!' I drove home to find a raging party. Mark was kissing Tiffany. When confronted, he called me a 'crazy ex.' Tiffany shrieked they' d been 'soulmates for two years.' Her friends mocked, assaulted me, tearing my dress. My au pair (also in my stolen clothes) sneered, calling me 'the help.' They then launched a brutal online campaign, leaking my private photos, twisted to accuse me of infidelity, securing donations. Mark demanded I sign divorce papers, abandoning everything. How could the man whose entire world I secretly built betray me so completely? How could they weaponize my private moments, twisting every truth? The public shaming, the injustice, felt suffocating. But I held a secret they never knew. So, I signed those papers, conceding everything. They believed I was broken, defeated. But they were wrong. My father had always called my true identity a 'trump card.' It was finally time to play it.

I lived a quiet life on the Texas frontier, raised by my kind adoptive parents, Jed and Elara. My childhood sweetheart, Ethan, left for the city with a promise: he' d become a lawyer, make a fortune, and come back for me. He even sealed it with a small, simple ring. I wore it close to my heart, dreaming of our future. Then came the letter. Not from Ethan, but a cold, typewritten announcement of his engagement to Miss Seraphina Thorne, formally dismissing me as a simple frontier girl. That same day, I found Jed and Elara in the smokehouse. Not whole. Brutally, impossibly changed. I stood there, knife in hand, blood on my dress, when the first neighbor screamed. The sheriff arrested me for their murder. My silence earned me the town' s fury; they called me a monster, just as a spiritualist had once warned. Ethan returned, with Seraphina, who watched my public humiliation with a faint, cruel smile. They "found" Ethan' s old engagement letter on me, making it look like a crime of passion. But the real horror came later, in my jail cell. Someone, in the dark, had cut out my tongue. I couldn't speak, couldn't explain the unexplainable. How could I have murdered the only family I knew, the people who sacrificed everything to protect my deepest secret? Their love, their desperate final act, was twisted into my damnation. Who truly took my voice? And how could I, a survivor, explain a sacrifice so profound it defied sanity? But when Ethan, seeing my injuries, finally faced me, I knew I had to break my agonizing silence, even without a voice. With a trembling hand, charcoal on wood, I began to write. This, then, is the truth of Anya Brightwater: a tale not of murder, but of relentless love, ancient blood debts, an American frontier built on lies, and a secret that would shatter everything they thought they knew.

I married Liam Thorne, the love of my life, wearing a five-dollar thrift store dress. We ate pizza on museum steps, dreaming of a future where our shared music would change the world, just "us against everyone." I sacrificed everything for him: giving up my band's breakthrough gig, draining our meager savings for his mother's emergency surgery, and enduring ugly rumors and public scorn, all to pave the way for Liam's glittering career. My dreams faded, but his soared. As Liam transformed into a global rock superstar, my own life became a carefully constructed demolition. I was manipulated into a humiliating, sexualized music video, publicly branded a "desperate sellout," and then mercilessly blacklisted by the same industry that elevated him. When I was sick and broken, consumed by an autoimmune illness, the man I loved abandoned me, choosing manufactured fame and a new "power couple" over everything we'd built. I died alone, my life dismissed by the media as a tragic "trainwreck," just a footnote in his triumphant story. How could Liam Thorne, the boy who once held my hand and vowed "forever," so casually dismiss me as "unstable" while building his empire on my shattered dreams? Why was my truth buried with me, unheard, while his carefully crafted narrative reigned supreme? But now, my private journals—the raw, unfiltered record of every painful sacrifice, every calculated betrayal—have fallen into the hands of a fearless podcaster. The world is about to hear my voice, finally ready to uncover the shocking truth hidden beneath Liam Thorne's polished facade.

I was three days away from marrying the Underboss of the Fazio crime family when I unlocked his burner phone. The screen glowed toxic bright in the dark next to my sleeping fiancé. A message from a contact saved as 'Little Trouble' read: "She is just a statue, Dante. Come back to bed." Attached was a photo of a woman lying in the sheets of his private office, wearing his shirt. My heart didn't break; it simply stopped. For eight years, I believed Dante was the hero who pulled me from a burning opera house. I played the perfect, loyal Mafia Princess for him. But heroes don't give their mistresses rare pink diamonds while giving their fiancées cubic zirconia replicas. He didn't just cheat. He humiliated me. He defended his mistress over his own soldiers in public. He even abandoned me on the side of the road on my birthday because she faked a pregnancy emergency. He thought I was weak. He thought I would accept the fake ring and the disrespect because I was just a political pawn. He was wrong. I didn't cry. Tears are for women who have options. I had a strategy. I walked into the bathroom and dialed a number I hadn't dared to call in a decade. "Speak," a voice like gravel growled on the other end. Lorenzo Moretti. The Capo of the rival family. The man my father called the Devil. "The wedding is off," I whispered, staring at my reflection. "I want an alliance with you, Enzo. And I want the Fazio family burned to the ground."

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.

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."

I stood outside my husband's study, the perfect mafia wife, only to hear him mocking me as an "ice sculpture" while he entertained his mistress, Aria. But the betrayal went deeper than infidelity. A week later, my saddle snapped mid-jump, leaving me with a shattered leg. Lying in the hospital bed, I overheard the conversation that killed the last of my love. My husband, Alessandro, knew Aria had sabotaged my gear. He knew she could have killed me. Yet, he told his men to let it go. He called my near-death experience a "lesson" because I had bruised his mistress's ego. He humiliated me publicly, freezing my accounts to buy family heirlooms for her. He stood by while she threatened to leak our private tapes to the press. He destroyed my dignity to play the hero for a woman he thought was a helpless orphan. He had no idea she was a fraud. He didn't know I had installed micro-cameras throughout the estate while he was busy pampering her. He didn't know I had hours of footage showing his "innocent" Aria sleeping with his guards, his rivals, and even his staff, laughing about how easy he was to manipulate. At the annual charity gala, in front of the entire crime family, Alessandro demanded I apologize to her. I didn't beg. I didn't cry. I simply connected my drive to the main projector and pressed play.

The moment I saw my husband massaging his dead brother's pregnant mistress's feet, I knew my marriage was over. He moved her into our home under the guise of "family duty," forcing me to watch as he prioritized her comfort over our vows. The final betrayal came when she stole and deliberately broke my mother's priceless necklace. When I slapped her for the desecration, my husband struck me across the face to defend her. He had violated a sacred honor code by putting his hands on the daughter of another Don-an act of war. I looked him in the eye and swore on my mother's grave that I would bring a bloody revenge upon his entire family. Then I made one phone call to my father, and the demolition of his empire began.

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.

On my wedding day, the wedding planner looked at me with pity in her eyes. She told me the groom had called with a last-minute request. He wanted the name on the floral arch changed from "Elena" to "Sofia." Five years of loyalty to Dante Romero, and I found out he was planning a "secret" ceremony with his mistress an hour before ours. He claimed she was dying of cancer. He said it was her final wish to be a bride, and that as a good mafia wife, I should understand. He swore it was just charity. But I had seen the texts where he called me "furniture." I had watched him step over my body when I fell down the stairs at a club, just so he could leave with her. And this morning, I watched Sofia walk into the hotel lobby wearing *my* custom French lace wedding dress, smirking as she clung to his arm. Dante thinks I'm crying in the bridal suite. He thinks I will sit in the front row of his "fake" wedding and wait for my turn like a dutiful puppet. He is wrong. I wiped my tears and picked up my phone. I didn't cancel the wedding date. I just changed the location to the ballroom next door. And I changed the groom. As Dante says his vows to his mistress, I am walking down the aisle to meet the only man the Romero family fears. The Reaper.

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.

"Le--Leave Me, Christian" I stuttered, as his closeness was driving me crazy. I was screaming in my mind to push him away, I belonged to someone else but... my heart was ditching at that moment, telling me to melt in his arms again and drown in the pleasure pool. He seemed to be the firm rock in my solitude providing me light in my mafia dark world. Ivanna being the simple girl was a love-struck fool until she was dumped by the man, whom she loved dearly. Her life then reversed a whole 180 degrees when a stranger entered simultaneously with her ex's entry, who wanted forgiveness and to get back with her. Ivanna was left with two choices: one who had been a complete stranger to her but brought immense happiness and light while the other with whom she had a complicated past. Who will she choose? .

BLURB: River never intended to be pulled into the dangerous world of the Mafia, but a single moment of bravery changes everything. In an attempt to save the man who fuels her wildest fantasies, she unwittingly steps into the path of Rico Swavey, the ruthless Mafia Lord with a dark, hidden past. Rico has built his empire on control and secrecy, keeping his heart locked away. But when River, the doe-eyed woman who sparks something dangerous within him, stumbles into his life, his defenses begin to crumble. Haunted by a crime from his childhood, Rico struggles to accept love, especially from someone like River. What happens when she becomes a stripper in his club? Can River break through the walls around Rico's heart? And can Rico forgive himself for the sins of his past to embrace a future with her? Dive into their world of passion, danger, and redemption in HIS HEALING GRACE.