Her Last Game

On our tenth mating anniversary, I stood outside my Alpha husband's office with his favorite coffee, only to be hit by the cloying scent of rotting peaches—a female in heat. Through the mind-link, I heard him promise his mistress he'd deal with the "boring formalities" regarding me tonight. I walked in to find him plotting with his pregnant assistant, Jami. Instead of apologizing, Dustin sneered at me. "She gave me in three months what you couldn't give me in ten years. A strong lineage." He conveniently forgot that I was the one who built his empire, designed his impenetrable wards, and funded his lifestyle by selling my own family heirlooms. When I confronted him about the betrayal, he didn't just dismiss me; he shoved me. I crashed into a silver nightstand. For a normal wolf, silver is an irritant. For me, a descendant of the White Wolf bloodline, it is acid. As my flesh sizzled and blood poured down my face, blinding me, Dustin didn't even flinch. He stepped over my convulsing body—his wife of a decade—to ask his mistress if she was stressed. Lying on the floor, watching him comfort the woman wearing my mother's stolen ring, the bond finally died. He thought I was a broken, barren Luna who would accept his scraps just to keep her title. He was wrong. I didn't call the police. I called a specialist extraction team. "I am the architect of this pack's security and financial systems," I told the crew. "Decommission everything." I wasn't just leaving. I was taking my empire with me.

I lost my leg saving my husband, Kingsley. My ballet career was over, but my dying mother had secured a perfect heart transplant for my sister, Julia. We had hope. Then Kingsley gave her heart away. He and his mistress traded it for a business deal. Julia died. When I confronted him at the hospital, he shoved me against a wall. The fall didn't just shatter my world; it caused me to miscarry the baby I never knew I was carrying. In a single night, he took my sister and my child. As I lay bleeding on the floor, I looked at the man I once sacrificed everything for and made a promise. "You will regret this for the rest of your life." I divorced him and disappeared. A year and a half later, he found me, a broken man begging for forgiveness. I looked him in the eye and gave him my final answer. "There are no second chances for murder."

For three years, I was Dante Moretti's secret. I was the Underboss's property, the cure for a violent curse that plagued him. He promised that if he wasn't married by his twenty-fifth birthday, I would be his bride. But on the eve of that birthday, he ended our arrangement. He brought home another woman, Sienna, and introduced me as "the help." Sienna, with feigned innocence, knocked a precious memento from my hand, shattering it. When I confronted her, Dante slapped me twice in public, the humiliation searing my soul. Later, I discovered Sienna had framed me for kidnapping her, a lie Dante readily believed. To force a confession, he had my mother tied in a sack and thrown into the freezing lake to drown. He left her there to die. That was the moment the girl who loved him died, too. I saved my mother, and we fled the country, seeking refuge with my childhood friend, Julian. I thought I had escaped. But then Dante appeared in Australia, begging for forgiveness. I rejected him, choosing a future with Julian. I thought it was over. Until a car, driven by a vengeful Sienna, barreled towards us. The last thing I saw was Dante throwing himself in front of me, taking the full impact.

The doctors gave me three years to live. I used every last bit of my strength to marry Cedric Moon, the man I loved. On our wedding night, he abandoned me for another woman. He brought her into our home, forcing me to serve her. He made me apologize for crimes I didn't commit. His family despised me, but they adored her. Then came the staged kidnapping. To save her, Cedric traded me—his pregnant wife—to the man holding a knife. As the blade pressed against my throat, I heard my husband's voice yell at the police. "Shoot!"

Nathan Cross, the infamous underworld boss, married Jane Rivers on the day her family's wealth collapsed. He had harbored a secret love for her for a decade. After their marriage, he treated her like royalty. Jane believed she had found the right man, until their fifth year together. She discovered she was pregnant, but Nathan, who had always cherished her, demanded she terminate the pregnancy. She overheard him speaking with a friend and learned that Nathan had betrayed her with another woman, and for the woman, he forced Jane to get rid of their child. Worse, she learned he had engineered her family's downfall, driving her parents to their deaths. Out of no choice, Jane contacted Nathan's sworn enemy abroad and faked her death to escape. After she was gone, Nathan wept, pleading for her return. But it was too late. The pain he inflicted would be repaid a hundredfold.

The moment I told Jake Reynolds we were over, he didn't believe me. He just laughed like I was joking. We had been together for five years, living in his penthouse with my mom. I never thought our life would change. It all started when his ex-girlfriend, Brittany Davis, showed up. He asked me to cook for them, but I couldn't. My mom was in the hospital, fighting terminal cancer, and I was with her. That was my first mistake. Three days later, my mom's health insurance, which was under Jake's company plan and kept her pain manageable, was canceled. I begged him, called him repeatedly, left desperate voicemails, but he blocked my number. He never answered. Two weeks later, my mom died; she spent her last days in agony because she couldn't get her medication. The day after her funeral, I saw a picture of Jake and Brittany on a yacht in the Caribbean, arm-in-arm, smiling. The caption read, "An escape with my one and only." I went to his penthouse, the place I once called home, to tell him it was over. He sneered, "I was just teaching you a lesson. You can't just say no to me." I told him simply, "You killed my mother." He knew exactly what he was doing when he cut her off. He did it because I wouldn' t cook a meal for his ex-girlfriend. A life for a dinner. This made no sense. I returned to his penthouse to retrieve my mother' s last painting. Jake and Brittany were there. When I asked for the painting, he told me to get Brittany a glass of water. Then, she deliberately ruined my five years of artwork, my sketchbook. He then took my mother' s sunflower painting, the one she painted with shaking hands, and snapped it over his knee. The crack of the wood echoed like a gunshot. He threw the pieces at my feet. But in that moment, something shifted. I started to laugh, realizing he had nothing left to take from me.