Joy Brown

On a stormy night, I, Freya Austen, the Alpha heiress, was secretly poisoned by my sister Tiffany. A towering figure loomed over me. My legs instinctively wrapped around his waist. His cock, hard as steel, thrust into my wet, aching pussy, each brutal slam hitting deep, shattering my willpower and driving me to collapse in endless waves of pleasure.
The last thing I remember was my father's hand across my face and his voice: "Get out of this pack."
Five years later, I'm back as Crystal, the jewelry designer every East Coast pack wants to hire. I have three kids now, and I want blood.
The moment I walk into Crown & Gem, I run straight into Alexander Reid—my ex-fiancé, the strongest Alpha.
"You're still just exiled trash," Tiffany says, hanging off Alexander's arm with that fake sweet smile. And Alexander's harder to read—ice cold one minute, almost uncertain the next.
Our world has simple rules: betrayers pay, and Alpha blood doesn't lie. I'm taking back everything they stole from me. Maybe even the Alpha who should have been mine—and the father who doesn't know his children exist.
To everyone who destroyed my life: I'm back. Ready to see what a she-wolf's revenge looks like?
（This book contains mature content. Not suitable for minors.）

"Joanna, you can't escape!" Sebastian roars, gripping my wrist and yanking me against his chest. His lips crush mine—raw and searing—stealing the air from my lungs. I fight him, but my body betrays me, trapped between shame and a hunger I can't explain. Through tears, I whisper, "Am I just Elodie's ghost to you? Or something you own?" His eyes darken, silencing me with a kiss that leaves me hating myself for wanting more.

I'm Joanna Bennett, struggling to pay my mother's medical bills when Sebastian King stormed into my life because I resemble his dead girlfriend. He rules his empire with ruthless control, treating me like a pawn. At night, I hear him call her name, his voice breaking in ways it never does with me.

My brother Daniel watches with quiet rage, while Sebastian's enigmatic brother Zayne’s sudden interest feels far from innocent. Soon, I uncover shocking lies about my own past that threaten everything.

When Sebastian announces his engagement, I shatter—then he drags me to mansion, locking the door, reminding me what’ll happen to my mother’s care if I leave.

His fiancée Ava cuts me down with cruel jabs. Then Daniel’s journal reveals a forbidden love that broke him, destroying us both.

Until Sebastian finds me at our lakeside, dropping to his knees: “I was wrong.”

Can I forgive him—or myself if I do?

Yes, I jumped from that rooftop. Wind screaming in my ears as I fell, thinking it might finally earn me one fucking tear from them. Instead, all I got was "she's so dramatic."
Now I'm staring at fifteen-year-old skin in the mirror. Downstairs, their fake voices call my name—identical to that "welcome home" afternoon three years ago.
Yvette rushes to hug me, sugar-sweet venom dripping from her lips: "Remember who the princess is." I give her the same plastic smile right back.
I hear the voice in my head crystal clear: This time, I'm not fighting for their love—I'm taking back the life that was always mine.

I once believed that every click of Ryan's Leica shutter was proof of his love—a luxury villa, his exclusive muse—I was foolish enough to believe in this fairy tale. Until our engagement night, when Isabella appeared wearing an identical ring, and the media exposed his betrayal, I finally realized I was nothing but a carefully selected stand-in.

Have you ever spent three years of your youth living as someone else's shadow? When he held her and called me "just a cheap copy," I didn't break down. After all, isn't it more satisfying to turn the tables using the camera sounds he was so obsessed with, making him pay for his sins in his own madness? In this game of deception disguised as love, who really played whom?

I'm crouched on this fucking balcony clutching a pregnancy test, hands shaking like a leaf—two blazing red lines staring me in the face. I was such a goddamn fool thinking I'd tell Remy about our baby tonight. What a sick joke!
The banquet hall's roaring below and there's that bastard on stage, arm wrapped around Olivia, shouting "This winery has NO future without her!" Each word slams into me like a sledgehammer. TEN FUCKING YEARS! When he was drowning in debt, I sold every piece of Mom's jewelry to save his ass!
Then the son of a bitch hurls a box of abortion pills at me like I'm garbage: "Kill it, or Olivia's daddy pulls his money."
I'm glaring at that box and it hits me—ten years of my life pissed away on this piece of shit, and now even the innocent baby growing inside me is worth less than his blood money! I gave him everything and he's ready to murder our child for a fucking check!

When I woke up in that hospital bed, legs wrapped in casts and burning like hell, everything came flooding back. This time, I wasn't the naive fool I'd been before.
Tyler, my brother Ryan, and that bitch Savannah—they destroyed me. Turned a gymnastics prodigy into a cripple.
Tyler had the nerve to grab my hand, begging me to forgive Savannah for ruining my legs. My brother chose outsiders over me, screaming about "family reputation."
Fuck their love. Fuck family.
This time around, I've got evidence of the $1.2 million they owe me. I know all their dirty secrets. Round two has started, and I'm done being their victim.
Those three bastards are going to pay back every damn cent they stole from me.

The Alaskan winds cut across my face like knives, but only one thought consumed me—why hadn't Madison shown up to get me? In ten years, my sister had never failed to be there.

Until I walked in on my brother-in-law tangled up with some blonde bitch, and my world shattered. "Fallen through ice in a blizzard"? What a goddamn lie. They cut open her eight-month pregnant belly to steal her baby—while she was still conscious. They let her suffer for 47 excruciating minutes before she died.

I didn't break out of the psych ward to cry about it. I came back so these monsters can pay their blood debts in full. They think I was born wicked? Fine. Let me show them exactly how it feels to have your living body sliced open.

I thought that after twenty years with the Sterlings—even as an adopted child—I'd at least count as family. But the day they found their biological daughter Victoria, they announced they were throwing me out and planned to humiliate me at the family gathering. Based on what right?

Even more disgusting was how my almost-fiancé Blake immediately started fooling around with Victoria, eager to watch me get kicked to the curb!

When everyone was lining up to step on me, it was Alexander—the one I'm supposed to call "stepbrother"—who protected me. In his apartment, when he stood behind me gripping my hand as I chopped vegetables, his breath grazing my ear before he finally bent down to kiss me... my heartbeat went completely erratic.

When I scrolled across that photo of Tyler with his arms wrapped around Rachel at 2 AM, I nearly shattered my phone against the wall. That bastard—maintaining our "just scratching an itch" arrangement while wooing her with soulmate bullshit?

With anger burning through my veins and my skin flushing hot, I stormed off to the jazz bar determined to expose him.

But who could have guessed that in the middle of this dramatic showdown, I'd discover the truth about Seth—the one secretly marking up my sheet music, the one who decked Tyler for me?

Maybe this gut-wrenching betrayal was actually the universe's twisted way of pointing me toward something real.

The day I walked in on my boyfriend screwing that blonde tramp, I dropped the homemade tiramisu right there on the floor—our two-year relationship smashed to bits, messier than the splattered cream.

I ducked into a bar, slamming back whiskey, when this guy in a sharp black suit sidles up, his voice smooth as silk laced with bourbon. I spat out, "Help me forget him," but ended up totally lost in the presidential suite. He backed me against the wall, tore open my blouse, his tongue circling my nipple before biting down hard, leaving me breathless. "You taste like candy, baby—tonight, I'm gonna eat you up."

But then my boyfriend FaceTimes, spots the guy behind me, and loses it, screaming, "Dad!"

I went ice-cold—my hookup was my boyfriend's stepdad? Even worse, this thirty-three-year-old powerhouse was Brooklyn's deadliest mob boss.

What began as a vengeful fling spiraled into a forbidden nightmare?

My husband Michael's father and my own father shared the same name—Robert. His was Robert Carter; mine, Robert Smith. I once thought it a sweet coincidence, until that 3 AM phone call turned this quirk of fate into a living nightmare.
The nursing home called to say Robert Carter had died, but when Michael returned from his business trip, he assumed it was my father who had passed. "Old Robert's finally gone," he smirked. "Should've moved him to the cheaper nursing home ages ago." Can you believe it? His own father—the man who'd left him an inheritance—and there he was, helping his medical intern mistress cover up malpractice, dismissing the death as "just some useless old man."
He has no idea he's protecting his father's killer. No clue I've seen through his cold-bloodedness all along.
I wonder, when the truth finally hits him, how will this absurd tragedy end?

My locker door swings open and the hate mail tumbles out like confetti from hell. Murderer's daughter. Your dad killed kids. Die like them.
Three weeks since the news broke, and they just keep coming.
I'm on my hands and knees, frantically shoving the notes into my backpack while the hallway erupts in laughter. Sarah steps over me like I'm roadkill.
The first time I drowned, I thought it was an accident. The second time, I thought I was losing my mind. But by the third time—watching Blake's lifeless body sink next to mine in that chlorine-burning water—I finally got it. Time isn't moving forward. It's stuck, like a broken record, spinning back to the day Blake could still dive like an Olympic champion, before the accident stole everything from him.
This time, I won't let him jump in after me.
I have to save Blake from me. But I'm drowning in more than just pool water, and I don't know how to surface. I don't know how to stop this endless loop of death and guilt and love that's killing us both, over and over again.
How do you break a curse when you're the one who cast it?

He calls me Sage, a blank canvas he reshapes to fit his whims. My Alpha, Kieran—the King of the North—blindfolds me each night, his whispers soft against my ear as he breathes my name.

Yet his intense stare cuts right through me, fixated on the distant moonlight he craves but can never touch. The irony stings—he looks at another through my eyes, just as I scour him for echoes of my fiancé, lost to me ten years ago. We serve as flawless stand-ins for each other, offering warmth in this prison of hate and longing, even as we tear at one another's wounds.

When the harsh truth strips away our last veil of illusion, how will this deceitful game we've played finally unravel? "You are not my Alpha," I whisper, "you are just my moon." But when that moonlight dims, can our shattered spirits still navigate the infinite shadows to find home?

I once believed fleeing my engagement would set me free, only to fall headlong into a web of betrayal spun by my closest friend and faithless lover.

Now, granted a second life just a week before that fateful wedding, I stand before the man I betrayed—Alexander Stone, the unyielding soul who ended his life in my previous existence, all because of me.

This time, I've sworn to mend what I shattered. But as I reach out to him, his voice cuts like ice: "You don't need to know me. This marriage is purely transactional."

Yet if he's as indifferent as he claims, why did he linger by my hospital bed for two sleepless nights? Why do his eyes flicker with a devastation that could unravel worlds, and why does he shudder at my touch, whispering, "Are you afraid of me?"

As the shadows of old betrayals creep back, will I pierce his frozen mask to safeguard this fragile love reborn? And that haunting whisper in my mind—"Alexander Stone died because of you"—does it seal a destiny I can't escape?

I was six years old when Mom took my brother and me by the hand, leading us into a mansion that looked like a palace. She told us this was our new beginning, after all the hardships we'd been through. But no one warned me that this so-called better life would mean giving up everything I had.

My scholarships, my prom dress, even my Stanford acceptance letter—they all turned into bargaining chips just to keep my stepfather and his daughter Sienna happy. Then, the night before my wedding, they even asked my fiancé to "temporarily" give himself to her as well.

I've always been the one giving everything, pouring myself out until there's nothing left, yet I've never heard the words, "You're enough." If love means endless sacrifice, why am I never the one on the receiving end?

Maybe only when I vanish completely will they remember my name—for the first and last time.

Have you ever been treated like a stand-in for your dead sibling by your own mother? I have.

Have you ever been murdered by your own mother? I have.

My name is Aira, and today is my sister Lily's birthday. It's also the anniversary of my death—the day the washing machine became my coffin.

"Why couldn't it have been you who died?"

After four long years, my mom finally got her wish.

My husband and I've been married for three years, and he's been messing around with her the entire time.

Hugging and kissing her on set, whispering flirty lines in interviews.

Everyone online calls me a pathetic stand-in.

I never get mad. I just smile and help him smooth over every rumor.

That is, until I accidentally got pregnant and secretly had an abortion.

He was furious, his heart shattered, demanding to know why.

I cupped his face and said calmly: "Because I don't love you."

The one I truly love is his dead brother.

I gave up five years of my marriage for nothing.

My son is dead. He died on his fifth birthday, waiting for his father to come home. But instead of his dad, a car accident took him. And his father? He was a thousand miles away, with another woman.

For five years, I put up with my husband's coldness and his family's constant humiliation. I thought having a child would melt his icy heart. I was wrong—so terribly, laughably wrong.

He couldn't even focus at our son's funeral—his eyes were only for his old flame, his "true love." It wasn't until I was on my deathbed that he finally shed those fake tears of regret. But it was too late. My child was gone. My love had died. And soon, I would be gone too.

This marriage, this whole life—it's all been one big joke. I just want to find my son as soon as I can. To tell him that his mother never gave up on him. To promise him that in another world, we'll never be apart again.

I swear, I hate my husband.

At my birthday party, my husband whispered to his mistress in French that he missed her. His voice was low, but I heard it all—the black lingerie, the bit about how pregnancy makes you more sensitive. His French clients around us were laughing. He turned and put his arm around me, claiming he was just helping his clients come up with sweet nothings.

He doesn't know I understand every single word. Just like he doesn't know that inside my body, I'm carrying his other surprise. And his mistress—she's pregnant too. Two wombs, one secret.

Confrontation would be too cheap. Tears are worthless. I quietly started cataloging the hidden networks my father left behind, activating the Swiss accounts.

In seven days, Zoey Smith will cease to exist. And what will my husband's reaction be?

After Nicholas got engaged, his assistant handed me a plane ticket.

"Leave. Don’t ever show your face in Silverlight City again."

"Otherwise, Mr. Jackson has more than enough ways to ruin you."

All those years I spent by his side, I was admired by everyone, living in the spotlight.

Yet when I finally left, I was reduced to a pitiful, laughable sight.

I said, "Fine."

But that very night, the flight plunged from over thirty thousand feet in the air.

My husband's first love was in trouble.
When the news came, I was lying on the operating table.
Dr. Miller put down his scalpel and said to Dr. Johnson, "I'll leave my wife's surgery to you."

"If I don’t go now, I might regret it for the rest of my life."

With that, he turned and walked away.
Watching my husband's retreating figure, I couldn't hold back—tears fell.
The next second, the cold blade of a scalpel touched my skin.

Dr. Johnson spoke calmly, "Why the tears? With me here, you'll be fine."

My husband abandoned a billion-dollar deal and flew back overnight for me.

Everyone envied Mrs. Harris and her perfect life.

Only I knew that when he knelt by my bed, holding my hand, his cuff was still stained with another woman's breastmilk.

He thought I'd just taken a fall.

He didn't know that while he was cradling his bastard child with that tender smile, our baby had already dissolved into a pool of blood and left me forever.

This time, I won't make a scene. I won't love him anymore.

I slipped the suicide note I'd written long ago into the drawer.

And on this rainy night, I began planning a "death" that would belong to me alone.

That night six years ago, he was drunk. I thought what happened between us meant something.

I was wrong.

Six years of marriage where I was his dirty secret. Where our son calling him "Dad" made him cringe.

On our son's birthday, he took her to dinner. I waited with a birthday cake until dawn.

He signed the divorce papers like they were nothing. Threw us out to make room for his mistress.

Only when I'd moved on—new city, new life—did he come crawling back.

Too late.

He destroyed my love night after night, year after year.

Now it's my turn to walk away.

I gave five years to my husband's ambition—and got betrayal in return.

Forty-three days without a break on the Imperial City project. I collapsed from exhaustion and woke up in the hospital. He never picked up the phone.

He was too busy celebrating his mistress's birthday.

The blonde hair wrapped around his jacket was like a slap to the face. I'd cut my own hair short years ago because he said long hair wasn't "professional." He just meant it wasn't professional on me.

He promised we'd move to Imperial City together once he succeeded. But he was always too busy—except when it came to touring my project sites with her.

I'd had enough.

I froze the accounts. Pulled the funding. Took back everything I'd built.

He tried to push me out of my own position, so I reclaimed the patents and withdrew my support.

He called a press conference to save face. I attended—as an executive at his largest competitor.

I watched him crumble.

For five years, I held him up. And for five years, he treated me like something disposable.

He forgot that the empire he thought he built was never his.

It was always mine.

My husband, Zachary, chose to save his sister-in-law right in front of the kidnappers.

The kidnapper pressed the gun to my temple and asked, "Choose your wife or your sister-in-law?"

Zachary didn't hesitate. "Let Valerie go," he said.

He actually chose to save his sister-in-law! In that moment, even the baby in my belly seemed to stop kicking.

Later, they locked me in the basement. Drugs to delay labor were pumped into my veins over and over. Zachary wanted to save the "firstborn son" status for his sister-in-law's child.

When warm blood finally soaked through my skirt, I dialed the number I knew by heart with shaking hands.

"Zachary," I whispered into the phone, "our child... can't wait any longer."

A witch prophesied at my birth—I carried special blood, I could bear the strongest children.

Two Alphas I'd loved for ten years—the Wolf King's sons—swore they'd protect me forever.

Then she showed up. Maggie. My cousin. All wide-eyed innocence, claiming she had the same gift.

Suddenly, I was the jealous one. Every trap was mine, meant to hurt her. Every wound on me was fake. She cradled the silver fox I'd killed, tears falling right on cue.

They handed me the moonflower wine. Bryan said, "Don't ruin the mood."

When they accused me of treason, Ronald said, "Exile."

They dragged me past the borders themselves. Poison fire in my veins, bones breaking under moonlight.

I hit the ground. The last thing I saw was Maggie's smirk...