Lan Lan

It wasn't a gun, but the pen in my hand was going to end my life just the same. Liam, the man I was supposed to marry in a month, pointed to the tablet on his desk. It showed a live feed of my mother’s hospital room. "Sign the confession, Ava," he said, his voice devoid of any warmth. "Take the fall for the embezzlement. Or the funding for her ventilator stops in ten seconds." My heart hammered against my ribs. The crimes weren't mine. They belonged to Chloe, his mistress. But Liam Valenti, the Underboss of New York, was sacrificing me to save her. "She's fragile," he said casually, adjusting his silk cuffs. "She can't handle prison. You're strong. You'll survive." With tears blurring my vision, I signed the document. I signed away my career as a lawyer and my freedom to save my mother. Liam snatched the paper like a prize. He didn't offer comfort. He just smirked. "Good girl. The wedding is still on, of course. You'll look beautiful in the ankle monitor." He walked out to celebrate with his mistress, thinking he had won. Thinking he owned me. But he forgot one crucial detail. I wasn't just his fiancée. I was the one who laundered his money. I knew where every body was buried—literally and financially. The moment the door clicked shut, I stopped crying. I pulled out a burner phone and opened an encrypted app. I wasn't going to jail. I was going to war. I typed three words to the one man Liam feared most. "Execute Protocol Zero."

My husband, Edgar, and my mentee, Amelie, betrayed me. He staged a car crash that left me with amnesia, then held me captive for three years, convincing me he was my protector. Meanwhile, Amelie stole my identity, my family's fortune, and became the new "Elise Everett." My parents died of grief, believing I was dead. A slap from Amelie shattered the lies, and my memory came flooding back. I learned the horrifying truth: my perfect life was a prison built on my grave. Forced to play the part of a broken, amnesiac lover, I endured their cruelty, secretly gathering evidence of their crimes. I overheard Edgar confess everything-the crash, my parents' deaths, his plan to keep me as his "obedient pet" forever. He wanted to parade his new wife at his birthday gala, a final humiliation for me. So I offered to plan the party for him. He thought it was a gesture of love. He had no idea I was planning his downfall.

My future was a single, glowing line on a computer screen, a nearly perfect SAT score promising MIT and a clear path to my AI dreams. The world felt bright, simple, and entirely within my grasp. Then the doorbell rang. It was Jake, my childhood best friend, looking disheveled and heartbroken, muttering that he had "bombed" his scores and was "not getting in anywhere that matters." He begged me, citing our childhood promises, to abandon my Ivy League ambitions and go to the state university with him. But as he laid on the act, my laptop pinged. A tagged photo on Emily Chen's Instagram showed Jake triumphantly celebrating his 1450 SAT score, directly contradicting his tearful performance. He was accepted to CIT, a top tech school, and had obviously lied to manipulate me. The performance was flawless, the lies seamless. My voice was quiet, dead. "You got a 1450." His face froze, the grief replaced by panic, then anger. He tried to grab my laptop, shouting that I was ruining everything. Just then, an email from our school confirmed his score. My friendship with Jake, twelve years in the making, was dead. Suddenly, a new email popped up. This one from Emily. Attached were encrypted files: chat logs, emails, audio recordings. Their plan wasn't just to steal my AI. They were planning a hostile takeover of Alex Turner's company, Eos Dynamics, using my work as the weapon, framining him for corporate espionage. The sheer audacity of their continued deceit, even after all I knew, left me seething. They wanted to play games? I'd play.

I drove to my father's mansion, divorce papers on the passenger seat, ready to tell him about my broken marriage. But voices from his study stopped me cold. My stepmother' s pleased tone and my father' s soft replies revealed a horrifying plot: they had orchestrated my forced marriage to David, drugging him and luring me there, all to seize my mother' s company, Miller Corp. My own father had sold me for a company. The man who orchestrated my five years of misery also murdered my mother. My world shattered. Grief turned to rage. I confronted David, only to find him with my stepsister, Samantha. He ripped up my divorce papers and choked me, accusing me of using him. My own husband, the one person I thought I could rely on, stood by as my father beat me. He let me risk my life to save his mistress. He let me lose our baby. After all that, they offered me a divorce, believing they had won. Why did they hate me so much? Why was I, his wife, continually punished while his mistress was doted on? What dark secret bound them all to this twisted game, and what was truly at stake? But they underestimated me. I refused to be a victim. I would reclaim my mother' s legacy, expose their crimes, and make them pay for every tear, every betrayal, and every loss.

"No." The word fell like a stone in our perfectly proper living room. Thirty years old in two months, and the Miller Curse loomed-marry or face ruin. My parents, desperate, had arranged my marriage to Ethan Black, my childhood sweetheart. But the perfect picture shattered. I found out Ethan, the man I was supposed to marry, had been having an affair with Sarah Jenkins, my ambitious young intern whom I had personally mentored. The final insult came at a high-profile gala. Ethan took the stage, and with a smile, proposed to Sarah using a priceless architectural sketch-a design I had always adored, a symbol of our shared dreams. He then soft-talked Sarah, telling her she understood him better, and kissed her passionately while the room erupted in applause around me. He walked right past me, leaving me humiliated, shattered, and utterly alone in a room full of pitying and scornful eyes. My world tilted. How could the man who promised me everything publicly choose another woman, and use my memories to do it? But when he cornered me afterwards, offering to keep me as his secret mistress, his words twisted the knife. He even used the Miller Curse against me, threatening to destroy my career. That was when I knew: I wouldn't just walk away. I would rebuild. On my own terms.

The rain fell, cold and miserable, at my six-year-old daughter Lily' s funeral. My world had shrunk to a muddy patch of grass, as I numbly watched her tiny white casket lowered into the ground. The one person who should have been by my side, my wife Sarah, was conspicuously absent. I'd told everyone she was too overwhelmed, but a chilling doubt was already taking root. Back at our opulent mansion, I found Sarah not grieving, but on the phone with her ex-boyfriend, Mark. Her voice was light, cheerful, as she casually uttered words that shattered my reality: "Lily was an accident. I never wanted a child. And with her illness… I took care of it." Then came the brutal confession: "The trip to Switzerland wasn' t for some miracle cure… It was for euthanasia. Now we can finally be together, Mark. No more secrets. No more baggage." My beautiful daughter, my brave girl battling for life, had been murdered by her own mother, who now mocked me, calling me a "leech" for spending "her family's money" on Lily's "treatment." How could she? How could the woman I loved, the mother of my child, commit such an unspeakable act and then gloat about it? My grief turned into a cold, hard resolve. I knew then what I had to do. I would use my life's work, my groundbreaking Regenesis technology, to strike back at the people who stole everything from me.

The scent of rosemary and garlic used to be my comfort, a promise of a future I was meticulously crafting. My Ashton Culinary Academy application, almost complete, sat waiting for my signature dish video. Then, my step-sister Brittany waltzed in, phone already recording. "Welcome back to the 'Ultimate Prank Challenge' !" she announced, her cruel smirk widening. This wasn' t my audition; it was my entry for her "Worst Chef Wannabe" contest. Laughter erupted, sharp and loud, from her clique, including Liam, my childhood friend, who just stared at his shoes. They'd "accidentally" spilled water on my application. My meticulously written essays blurred into meaningless inkblots. My chance was gone. They hadn't just destroyed my dream; they' d turned me into a prop in their game for social media likes. The reflection in the oven showed their triumphant faces, a circle of hyenas enjoying their kill, while I was a ghost in my own kitchen. The warmth was gone, replaced by the sting of betrayal. My mom' s voice later confirmed: Ashton had withdrawn my application. No anger, no sadness, just a factual pronouncement. She didn' t ask what happened, or if I was okay. I was just a problem to her. They wanted peace? Fine. I would find my own way, with people who actually respected me. I was done understanding.

It was my 28th birthday, spent alone in a lavish mansion, a single cupcake my only company. My husband, Ethan, a media mogul, saw me as little more than a convenient accessory, oblivious to the aggressive brain cancer secretly consuming me. So I signed the divorce papers, faked my own demise with my best friend' s help, and vanished, releasing him from a marriage he barely acknowledged. He went on to pursue his college sweetheart, thinking himself finally "free" – but soon, his perfect life unraveled as he realized the vacuum I' d left, plunging him into a torment of regret as he believed I was dead. Months later, I woke up in a different hospital, given a second chance at life by an experimental treatment and a caring doctor, but with no memory of my past, particularly of Ethan, the man I' d loved in secret. My new doctor claimed to be my loving husband, and together we built a beautiful life, complete with a joyful daughter, while Ethan desperately searched for the "dead" wife he never truly saw. Now, imagine his raw despair when he finally finds me, radiant and thriving, only to hear me say, "I'm sorry, sir, I don't know you," embracing my new family and utterly refusing to let his painful past haunt my hard-won peace.

Her endless troubles began due to a mere misunderstanding. Everyone in the city believed that she was dissolute, a slave to vanity, who used her fiance's family property to fulfil her own selfish needs. Her fiance dumped her and retrieved his investments, which led her company into bankruptcy. Her father was immersed in debt and ended up in prison. Soon, she became the target of public criticism. Left with no choice, she left her hometown to get away from the predators. Three years later, he ran into her once again. A storm of mixed feelings swirled inside him and he gradually removed the veil of misunderstanding. But she didn't want anything to do with him, the pain of his betrayal still fresh in her heart. But he didn't give up. He married her forcefully and swore to never let go of her again.

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 was the "Caged Canary" of the underworld, a biological asset designed to merge two crime families. My fiancé, Bryant Barnes, didn't love me. He loved the power I brought, and he loved his mistress, Kalia. The night Kalia broke into my penthouse and stomped on my hand, crushing the bones and my fashion career, Bryant didn't help me. He told the police she was my guest and warned me not to embarrass him with a cast. That was just the beginning. When Kalia lied about feeling unsafe, Bryant dangled me off a balcony. When she faked a kidnapping, he locked me in an industrial freezer for six hours until I turned blue. And when I fell into the marina, he swam right past me to save her, leaving me to drown in the freezing water. He destroyed my body and my dignity for a woman who was stealing my designs and faking a pregnancy. He thought I was just a broken obligation he could discard. But he made a fatal mistake. He didn't make sure I was dead. I dragged myself out of the water and made a call to his greatest rival. On the night of our grand merger, I walked onto the stage wearing royal blue instead of white. I rolled up my sleeve to reveal the scars he gave me, looked him dead in the eye, and grabbed the microphone. "I hereby terminate my engagement to Bryant Barnes. And I am proud to announce my betrothal to the true King of this city."

I was the spare daughter of the Vitiello crime family, born solely to provide organs for my golden sister, Isabella. Four years ago, under the codename "Seven," I nursed Dante Moretti, the Don of Chicago, back to health in a safe house. I was the one who held him in the dark. But Isabella stole my name, my credit, and the man I loved. Now, Dante looked at me with nothing but cold disgust, believing her lies. When a neon sign crashed down on the street, Dante used his body to shield Isabella, leaving me to be crushed under twisted steel. While Isabella sat in a VIP suite crying over a scratch, I lay broken, listening to my parents discuss if my kidneys were still viable for harvest. The final straw came at their engagement gala. When Dante saw me wearing the lava stone bracelet I had worn in the safe house, he accused me of stealing it from Isabella. He ordered my father to punish me. I took fifty lashes to my back while Dante covered Isabella's eyes, protecting her from the ugly truth. That night, the love in my heart finally died. On the morning of their wedding, I handed Dante a gift box containing a cassette tape—the only proof that I was Seven. Then, I signed the papers disowning my family, threw my phone out the car window, and boarded a one-way flight to Sydney. By the time Dante listens to that tape and realizes he married a monster, I will be thousands of miles away, never to return.

On our fifth anniversary, my husband slid a black velvet box across the table. Inside wasn't a diamond ring, but a fountain pen. "Sign the separation papers, Aurora," Ethan said. "Ilene is spiraling again. She needs to see we are over." I was the wife of the Mafia Underboss, yet I was being discarded for the Family Ward. Before I could answer, Ilene stormed into the restaurant. She shrieked that I was still wearing his ring and threw a bowl of boiling lobster bisque directly at my chest. As my skin blistered and peeled, Ethan didn't rush to me. He hugged her. "It's okay," he soothed the woman who had just assaulted me. "I've got you." The betrayal didn't stop there. When Ilene pushed me down the stairs days later, Ethan erased the security footage to protect her from the police. When I was kidnapped by his enemies, I called his emergency line—the one meant for life-or-death situations. He declined the call. He was too busy holding Ilene's hand to save his wife. That was the moment the chain broke. As the kidnapper's van sped onto the highway, I didn't wait for a rescue that would never come. I opened the door and jumped into the dark. Everyone thought Aurora Bruce died on that pavement. Two years later, Ethan stood outside a gallery in Paris, looking at the woman he had destroyed, finally realizing he had protected the wrong one.

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.

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."

I died on a Tuesday. It wasn't a quick death. It was slow, cold, and meticulously planned by the man who called himself my father. I was twenty years old. He needed my kidney to save my sister. The spare part for the golden child. I remember the blinding lights of the operating theater, the sterile smell of betrayal, and the phantom pain of a surgeon's scalpel carving into my flesh while my screams echoed unheard. I remember looking through the observation glass and seeing him-my father, Giovanni Vitiello, the Don of the Chicago Outfit-watching me die with the same detached expression he used when signing a death warrant. He chose her. He always chose her. And then, I woke up. Not in heaven. Not in hell. But in my own bed, a year before my scheduled execution. My body was whole, unscarred. The timeline had reset, a glitch in the cruel matrix of my existence, giving me a second chance I never asked for. This time, when my father handed me a one-way ticket to London-an exile disguised as a severance package-I didn't cry. I didn't beg. My heart, once a bleeding wound, was now a block of ice. He didn't know he was talking to a ghost. He didn't know I had already lived through his ultimate betrayal. He also didn't know that six months ago, during the city's brutal territory wars, I was the one who saved his most valuable asset. In a secret safe house, I stitched up the wounds of a blinded soldier, a man whose life hung by a thread. He never saw my face. He only knew my voice, the scent of vanilla, and the steady touch of my hands. He called me Sette. Seven. For the seven stitches I put in his shoulder. That man was Dante Moretti. The Ruthless Capo. The man my sister, Isabella, is now set to marry. She stole my story. She claimed my actions, my voice, my scent. And Dante, the man who could spot a lie from a mile away, believed the beautiful deception because he wanted it to be true. He wanted the golden girl to be his savior, not the invisible sister who was only ever good for her spare parts. So I took the ticket. In my past life, I fought them, and they silenced me on an operating table. This time, I will let them have their perfect, gilded lie. I will go to London. I will disappear. I will let Seraphina Vitiello die on that plane. But I will not be a victim. This time, I will not be the lamb led to slaughter. This time, from the shadows of my exile, I will be the one holding the match. And I will wait, with the patience of the dead, to watch their entire world burn. Because a ghost has nothing to lose, and a queen of ashes has an empire to gain.

I was a Vitiello, sold to the Morettis to secure an alliance. For five years, I quietly loved Dante, counting down the minutes until our wedding at St. Patrick's Cathedral. But it ended with a single text three minutes before the ceremony. "Stay at the apartment. Sofia is awake. Don't make a scene." His ex-girlfriend, the love of his life, had woken from a coma with no memory. Just like that, I was erased. For thirty days, I waited in the shadows while Dante played hero to a woman who didn't remember him. He told me he was protecting her fragile mind. But then I found the truth. I stood outside the doctor's office and heard Dante refuse a treatment that would restore Sofia's memory. "If she remembers, she might leave again," Dante told the doctor. "Elena will wait. She's a good soldier. Let me have my fantasy." He wasn't protecting her. He was keeping her broken to feed his ego, banking on my submission. He thought I was furniture he could put in storage. He was wrong. I didn't go back to the apartment. Instead, I dialed a number every made man in New York feared. "Matteo," I said to Dante's lethal older brother, the King of the underworld. "I am done waiting. I want to be a Moretti bride. But not Dante's."

I watched my husband, the most feared Capo in New York, sign away our marriage with the same cold indifference he usually reserved for ordering a hit. The nib of his Montblanc pen scratched against the paper, drowning out the rain hitting the coffee shop window. He didn't bother to read a single word. He thought he was signing routine shipping manifests for the family business. In reality, he was signing the "Dissolution of Union" papers I had hidden beneath the cover sheet. He was too distracted to check. His eyes were glued to his encrypted phone, frantically texting Sofia—the widow, the tragic beauty, the woman who had haunted our marriage for three years. "Done," he grunted, tossing the stack into his armored SUV without even glancing at me. "Business is concluded, Elena. We leave." Moments later, his phone rang with her special emergency tone. His demeanor shifted from cold boss to frantic protector instantly. "Driver, divert. She needs me," he roared. He looked at me with zero affection and ordered, "Get out, Elena. Luca will take you home." He kicked me out of the car into the pouring rain to rush to his mistress, completely unaware he had just legally granted me my freedom. I stood on the curb, shivering but smiling for the first time in years. By the time the Don realizes he just signed his own divorce, I will be a ghost in San Francisco. And he will have nothing left but his shipping logs and his regret.

For seven years, I served as the eyes for Dante Vitiello, the blind Capo of New York. I pulled him back from the edge of madness, tending to his wounds and warming his bed when everyone else had given up on him. But the moment his vision returned, the years of devotion turned to ash. In a single phone call, he decided to marry Sofia Moretti for territory, dismissing me as just "the maid's daughter" and a "comfort" he intended to keep as a mistress. He forced me to watch him court her. At a gala, when a chaotic accident caused a tower of champagne glasses to shatter, Dante threw his body over Sofia to protect her. He left me standing there, bleeding from the glass shards, while he carried her away like she was porcelain. He didn't even look back at the woman who had saved his life. I realized then that I had worshipped a broken god. I had given him my dignity, only for him to treat me like a disposable bandage now that he was whole. He arrogantly believed I would stay in the penthouse, grateful for his scraps. So, while he was out celebrating his engagement, I met with his mother. I signed the severance agreement for fifty million dollars. I packed my bags, wiped my phone, and boarded a one-way flight to Australia. By the time Dante came home to an empty bed, realized his mistake, and began tearing the city apart to find me, I was already a ghost.