One Night With The Cold Billionaire Boss

I guarded my father's grave—a hero who died saving our pack. One night, I found his runestone replaced by cheap pink marble. His ashes dumped in the flooded Under-Crypts. The one who ordered it? Kael. My fated mate. The future Alpha. He did it to bury a dead dog for Selene—an Omega from a foreign pack he was trying to impress. When I confronted him, he rolled his eyes. “Your father is just a collection of old bones. It's not as if he can feel the cold.” He thought I was a weak Beta who managed graves. He didn't know I carry the bloodline of the White Wolf. I didn't cry. I gathered evidence, walked to the Supreme Council, and filed three petitions. One to strip his title. One to exile his accomplices. One to reject him completely. It was time he learned who he had betrayed.

I gave up my champion swimming career and my pride to be the loyal wife of the most ruthless Don in the American Cosa Nostra. But when his runaway mistress faked drowning in our estate pool, my husband didn't see me trying to save her. He hauled her from the water, swaddling her in a thick towel, and stood over me as I bled on the hot flagstones. To break my pride, he dragged me up ten flights of stairs by my wet hair. "Please, she jumped!" I begged. But he just stared at me with cold loathing and shoved me into the freezing rooftop water tank. I fought desperately for my life, but he stood at the edge like carved granite, stomping on my hands until my bones cracked and my lungs burned for oxygen. The last thing I saw before I sank to my watery grave was my husband walking away to comfort the woman who framed me. I had spent eight long years cleaning up his messes and playing the perfect Mafia Queen. Why did my absolute devotion only buy my brutal execution? Now, trapped as a ghost in our penthouse, I watched him trail kisses down her neck while my rotting body tainted his tap water. But as he desperately tried to destroy the security footage of my murder, a cold fire burned in my hollow chest. Even in death, I was going to tear his empire apart.

Tonight was the Mating Run, the sacred night my fated mate, Alpha Lucas, was supposed to finally accept my ribbons and claim me. Instead, he dodged my advance, letting me crash into the dirt and shatter my crippled leg in front of the entire pack. Then, he walked right past me and knelt before Jessica, a fake city wolf, offering her the Luna scarf. He stripped me of every ounce of dignity. He even took the protective rogue fang-the charm I had sacrificed my own finger to win for him-and fastened it around Jessica's neck. But the true betrayal came when a rabid rogue wolf attacked us in the mountain fog. Lucas didn't shift to protect me. He ripped my only silver dagger from my hand, shoved me to the ground, and dragged Jessica away. He left me bleeding in the snow to be eaten alive. As the beast's heavy claws tore through my flesh, the eight years I spent loving him shattered into cold dust. I didn't understand how the Moon Goddess could pair me with a man who would so ruthlessly trade my life for a cheap grifter. But I didn't die in that snow. At his grand Luna Ceremony, I arrived not to grovel, but standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the billionaire Lycan King. Looking down at the Alpha who abandoned me, I calmly spoke the forbidden words. "I, Sierra, reject you, Lucas, as my mate."

I woke up in a freezing exile wagon as Elara Vance, the only "wolfless" member of a disgraced werewolf family. We were thrown out into the brutal Frostfang Wilds to die. The ruthless Alpha of the Black Moon Pack, Kaelen Blackwood, took one look at my fragile body and assigned us a rotting, splintered hovel at the edge of the camp-a deliberate execution to weed out the weak. My father was a broken, catatonic Alpha waiting for the end. My starving mother wept as she tried to force her last frozen crumb of food between my blue lips, while my brothers used their own battered bodies to shield me from the howling blizzard. The Luna Queen who exiled us expected us to perish quietly in the snow. The other warriors mocked us, waiting for the cold to claim our lives so they could strip our corpses. "She's lost to the cold madness!" my mother shrieked when I began clawing at the ice with my bare, bleeding hands. They all looked at me with pity and disgust, thinking my lack of an inner wolf made me a useless burden. They treated me like a fragile piece of glass destined to shatter in this frozen hell. But they didn't know a modern engineer's soul now lived inside this fragile shell. I didn't need claws or fangs to survive. I picked up a jagged stone, smashed the permafrost, and decided to build my own fortress. This wasn't an exile; it was my new beginning.

To save my crumbling family, I was married off to Julian Moretti, the terrifying Underboss of the Chicago mafia. But he didn't even wait for the wedding reception to end before slipping Rohypnol into my champagne. I woke up on the cold marble floor of the penthouse, only to see my new husband sleeping with his long-time mistress right in front of me. He dragged my unconscious body there just to let me wake up to this humiliation, to show me I was nothing but discarded trash. When I escaped and returned home for help, my father threw a heavy crystal glass at my head. "You ruined us, you stupid bitch! Go back and beg for his mercy!" My stepmother cursed me for not knowing my place, while I discovered they had been embezzling my dead mother's trust fund to pay off debts. Even worse, the mistress in my husband's bed was actually my father's illegitimate daughter. My own family had served me to a Capo's bed just to beg for scraps, sacrificing my life for their beloved bastard. They all thought I was just the obedient, fragile Rossi princess they could easily manipulate and feed to the wolves. They expected me to cry, surrender, and let them bleed me dry. But the fragile mafia princess they knew was already dead. In her place, the dormant instincts of "Seraph"—the lethal Mossad operative I used to be—snapped awake. I wiped my husband's blood off my knuckles, stepped over his groaning body, and made a deal with his deadliest rival. This time, I'm going to burn their entire empire to the ground.

I was drugged and sent to a hotel room to be compromised, but I ended up in the presidential suite with a stranger. I didn't know the man I clung to in my hallucinogenic haze was my own husband, Devaughn Winters, a man I hadn't spoken to in a year. When I woke up the next morning, the terror of what I’d done hit me like a physical blow. I fled, leaving behind nothing but a shredded dress and a lingering sense of dread. I thought I’d finally escaped the cold, suffocating contract of our marriage when I signed the divorce papers, but I was wrong. My mother-in-law arrived at my apartment, freezing my sick mother’s medical funds and threatening to ruin me for the "infidelity" she claimed I’d committed. She dragged my secrets into the light, leaving me with no choice but to fight back with a knife in my hand and a 911 call on speaker. But just as I thought I was free, the man I’d spent the night with—the man who was supposed to be my stranger—tore up our divorce papers and declared that I was his to keep. I was a pawn in a game I didn't understand, trapped between a ruthless father who wanted to sell me for corporate secrets and a husband who demanded I belong to him in life and in death. How did he not know who I was that night, and why is he suddenly claiming me as his own? I’m done being a victim, and if he thinks he can own me, he’s about to find out exactly what happens when a cornered woman decides to burn it all down.