Framed: The Dancer's Reckoning

I spent ten years as the ward of Kason Oneal, the ruthless Underboss of the city's most dangerous crime family. He saved me when I was a child, raised me, and made me believe I was his queen. But the moment his ex-girlfriend, Dalia, returned, the illusion shattered. Kason demanded I return the jade pendant—the one he had hand-carved for my sixteenth birthday—just so he could hang it around Dalia's neck. To him, I was suddenly nothing more than a placeholder who had kept his bed warm. The cruelty didn't stop there. He stood by and watched as Dalia shredded my clothes with scissors, laughing at my tears. When I collapsed on the floor in agony from acute appendicitis, Kason didn't call an ambulance. Instead, he dragged me to a shady clinic, accusing me of faking a pregnancy to trap him. He ordered the doctor to "terminate it" while I was dying of sepsis on the table. He called me trash. He called me property. He stripped away every ounce of dignity I had left, all to please a woman who was lying to his face. I realized then that the hero who saved me when I was ten was dead. I was done begging for scraps of affection from a monster. Trembling, I walked to the phone and dialed the number of the one man Kason feared most—his sworn enemy, Hadley Payne. "Tell him yes," I whispered into the receiver. "I accept the arrangement. I will marry him." Kason thought he could break me. Instead, he was about to watch his "property" become the Queen of the rival family.

I came ashore to save my Fated Mate from a genetic curse, but he locked me in a dungeon for three years. Alpha Silas believed my kind killed his parents. He drained my blood daily to feed his mistress, Emily, who claimed my essence was the only thing keeping their unborn baby alive. I endured the silver chains and the acid burns, hoping he would one day see the truth. But when my ten-year-old brother tried to rescue me, Emily smashed his skull with an iron bar right in front of Silas. Silas didn't arrest her. He didn't scream. He stood between us, shielding the murderer. "She was protecting our heir," he said coldly, looking at my brother's small, broken body floating in the tank. "You brought this on yourself." I held my brother’s corpse as my heart finally shattered. The bond between us snapped, and my body began to dissolve into sea foam. "I tried," I whispered as I faded into nothingness. Moments after I disappeared, the laboratory door opened. Silas’s parents, the ones he thought I killed, walked in alive and well. At the same time, the pack doctor rushed in, pale and trembling. "Alpha," he stammered, pointing at Emily. "There is no baby. She has been faking the pregnancy for months." Silas looked at his living parents, then at the empty pile of sea foam on the floor where his True Mate used to be. And for the first time, the Alpha screamed.

I was eight months pregnant with the heir to the Hayes pack when my husband, Michael, walked into the gala with another woman on his arm. She was wearing a blood-red dress and reeked of rotting orchids. In front of the entire Council, Michael looked at me with cold eyes and announced she was his Fated Mate. He rejected me. The force of the Alpha Command forced me to my knees, shattering the bond between us. To protect my unborn son from his cruelty, I told the greatest lie of my life. "The baby is dead," I whispered to him later. "Your rejection killed him." Broken by guilt, Michael fell from grace. My family stripped him of his wealth and status. He became a homeless Rogue, living in the dirt outside our estate walls, just to be near the place he thought his child was buried. He didn't know that the little boy playing in the garden, the one with golden Alpha eyes, was his son. He watched over us from the shadows for years, a ghost haunting his own life. Until the day the woman in the red dress returned. She held a silver dagger over my son's crib, ready to end my bloodline. And the man who had once rejected me finally found his redemption. He didn't hesitate. He threw his body between the blade and our boy.

My fiancé, Holden, married my best friend, Dominique, in Vegas. Tonight. Just hours before our lavish engagement party was set to begin. They announced it to our families and friends, calling it a "drunken mistake." Dominique, clinging to his arm, flashed a cheap ring and a triumphant smirk. She then proposed a high-stakes poker game to "celebrate," a cruel joke designed to humiliate me further. Holden, my fiancé of years, stood by her side. He even forced me to give up my grandmother's bracelet when I lost a hand, tossing the precious heirloom into a puddle of champagne. He told me it was just a game, that the bracelet meant nothing. But they didn't know my secret. I grew up in the underground poker scene. They thought they were playing with a fragile fiancée. They were about to lose everything to a shark.

I stood at the gala, draped in diamonds worth millions, playing the role of the perfect Mafia wife. But the illusion shattered when his mistress walked in wearing a necklace identical to mine—a cattle brand dipped in gold. When I confronted them, Liam didn't defend me. He shoved me aside to protect her. I hit the floor, and as my blood soaked into the white stage, I realized he had killed our unborn child. But the nightmare didn't end there. I woke up to find that Liam had ordered me sedated to "manage my hysteria." The complications from his control and the trauma had forced an emergency hysterectomy. He hadn't just killed his heir; he had stolen my future. Yet, he still tried to lock me in his estate, convinced he could force me to love him again if he just kept me hidden long enough. He thought I was broken. He thought I was his property. He was wrong. With the help of a doctor who had loved me from the shadows for years, I faked my death and vanished. Six months later, the great Don found me in a small-town bookstore, falling to his knees to beg for a second chance. I looked at the man who destroyed me and handed him a single dollar bill. "Loyalty is the only currency, Liam," I said, quoting his own vow back to him. "And you are bankrupt."

The pregnancy test showed two pink lines. After four years of a quiet marriage to Carter Leon, we were finally having a baby. I thought this was the final piece of our story. But when I went to the county clerk's office for a certified copy of our marriage certificate, I was told there was no record of our marriage. Instead, Carter was legally married to Erlene Fulton, my estranged stepsister and his high school sweetheart. My world shattered. I was nothing more than a mistress, a placeholder. Then, my family, including Carter, pressured me to "step aside" for Erlene, who was supposedly dying and wished to die as Carter's wife. I refused, revealing my pregnancy, only to be locked away by my father and stepmother. Carter later convinced me it was all a charade, a performance for a dying woman. I watched him marry Erlene, a ghost at their grand wedding. He spent his time with her, while I, like a fool, kept believing his lies. Until I overheard Erlene and Carter. He confessed he had always loved her, and that marrying me was just a plan to wound her pride and make her return. My four years, my devotion, my love-all a calculated move. I was a pawn, and so was my baby. The promises, the soft touches, the shared smiles-all fake. How could I have been so blind? How could he be so cruel? I had to save myself, and my child, from this poison. I ran, determined to leave the lie behind.