Charlene
10 Published Stories
Charlene's Books and Stories
The Don's Regret: Choosing The Wrong Queen
Mafia For three years, I was Dante’s shadow, the woman who took a bullet for the heir to New York’s most powerful crime family. I believed him when he said we would rule together.
But while I was bleeding for his empire, he was secretly finalizing a merger to marry Sofia, a pristine Mafia Princess.
I found the encrypted report on his desk. It didn't describe me as his partner. It called me a "useful shield" and a "necessary diversion" to protect his real bride.
When I tried to walk away, he didn't let me go. He humiliated me.
Worse, when Sofia staged a fake attack and blamed me to cover her own lies, Dante didn't ask for proof.
He dragged me out of my hospital bed, fresh from surgery, and hauled me to the estate fountain.
He shoved my head underwater, drowning the woman who had once saved his life, while Sofia watched from the balcony with a smirk.
"You touched what is mine!" he screamed, choosing a liar over the soldier who loved him.
I left that night, bleeding and broken, vanishing into the storm without a trace.
Two years later, I am a celebrated artist in Paris, and the man standing beside me looks at me like I am the sun, not a shield.
Dante stands outside my gallery in the freezing rain, looking ruined, begging for a second chance.
He tells me he knows the truth now. He tells me he loves me.
I look at him, then at the engagement ring on my finger—one given by a man who never had to break me to love me.
"I didn't erase our history, Dante," I say, rolling up the car window.
"I survived it." The Bottom Line: His Suffering
Modern My husband Gabriel's affair with his young protégée, Kaia, had already cost me everything. Our marriage was a hollow shell, and his cruelty had even led to the miscarriage of our child, leaving me broken.
But the day he defended Kaia by slapping my ten-year-old niece, Bea, so hard he ruptured her eardrum, something inside me finally snapped for good.
He stood over her small, unconscious body and screamed, "She deserved it!"
He had already financially ruined my brother and now had brutalized a child-all to protect his mistress.
The man I had loved for sixteen years was a monster.
All the pain and grief I'd carried for so long burned away, leaving only cold, hard resolve.
He expected tears. He expected hysterics. Instead, when I found him at the hospital, I walked straight up to him and slapped him across the face. "My family is my bottom line, Gabriel," I said, my voice dangerously calm. "You crossed it. And now, I will make you suffer." A Love Betrayed, A Future Reclaimed
Modern The phone buzzed, pulling me from a complex guitar passage.
It was Jake' s assistant, frantic: "There' s been an accident. Jake' s at St. Mary' s. He needs a transfusion. You' re the only match."
My world tilted.
I raced to the hospital, heart hammering, and gave my blood, my love, to save him.
An hour later, Jake' s assistant reappeared, looking annoyed.
"It was just a prank," he said, not meeting my eyes. "Jake' s fine. He' s at a party."
My blood ran cold.
I found my discarded blood, half-full, tossed like garbage, next to a service exit.
Then I heard laughter.
Jake, perfectly fine, emerged with Chloe, his childhood friend.
"Did you see her face?" Chloe cackled. "So pathetic."
Jake chuckled, a sound that now turned my stomach.
"She' d do anything for me, Chloe. It' s been three years. I told you I' d make her pay for what she did. For stealing that scholarship."
The scholarship. The red wine on my performance dress. The missed audition. All cruel jokes.
He never loved me. I was a tool, a target in his meticulously planned revenge.
The pain was a physical weight, but beneath it, a cold resolve hardened.
I clutched my phone, a single tear tracing a path down my cheek.
I called my brother.
"Liam," I said, my voice dead. "That offer… to study with the Maestro in Europe. Is it still open?"
"Of course, Liv. Why?"
"I' m taking it. I' m leaving. Tonight."
He thought he had destroyed me. He was wrong. I was just getting started. Five Thousand Dollar Betrayal
Billionaires My father, David Miller, a quiet indie game developer, lay dying in a county hospital, needing a $5,000 surgery.
Meanwhile, my mother, Sarah Jenkins, a tech CEO with her face on magazine covers, poured millions into a startup for her high school sweetheart' s son, Kevin, and bought him a new gaming console.
When I begged her for my father' s surgery money, her voice was crisp and distant, dismissing it as "non-essential," while Kevin, celebrating his perfect SAT score, mocked me and offered a measly twenty-dollar bill for my father' s funeral.
How could she watch my father wither and die for five thousand dollars, while lavishing millions on a boy she barely knew, mocking his memory and shattering his legacy?
With the taste of humiliation and grief still fresh, I took the twenty dollars, a down payment on a debt I swore to collect in full. My Wife, My Enemy
Romance Five years into our child-free marriage, a rule my wife Sarah adamantly enforced, she introduced me to Luke and Annie, identical three-year-old twins, claiming they were "ours now."
My heart, longing for a family despite a vasectomy two years prior, a sacrifice for her, soared with a confusing mix of shock and overwhelming hope. I believed she had changed her mind, the silent sadness I carried finally seen.
But that hope shattered when my doctor revealed the devastating truth: my procedure wasn't a simple vasectomy; my seminal vesicles had been completely removed five years ago, leaving me permanently infertile.
Then, a whispered conversation between Sarah and her brother confirmed my worst fears: the twins were Mark' s, her "dying" lover, and my seminal vesicles had been transplanted into him. My love was never enough; I was merely a tool.
The house, once my home, became a battleground of deceit. Sarah, the master manipulator, twisted every truth, using the very children born of her betrayal to isolate and hurt me.
I was a ghost in my own life, watching the woman I loved play happy family with her real obsession, Mark. The pain of betrayal was a physical ache, yet a chilling clarity emerged: her carefully constructed world was about to unravel.
Who was this woman I married? Who orchestrated such a grotesque scheme, using my body, my fortune, to fulfill a twisted fantasy? The innocence of the life I thought I had was brutally stripped away, leaving only a raw, burning injustice. How could I have been so blind?
Lying alone in the guest room, the ashes of my old life scattered in the fireplace, I didn't cry. I made a plan. I wouldn't just leave. I would dismantle her world, piece by piece. The fight for my self-preservation had just begun. When Betrayal Kills Twice
Romance The roaring motorcycles ripped through Montana's quiet air, a sound I knew too well from a life already lived.
I stood on my porch, one hand on my pregnant belly, knowing this wasn't just a day; it was the past crashing into the present, threatening a tragedy I thought I' d escaped.
In my first life, Caleb, my husband, had killed me after his "true love" Amber died.
This time, when the mayor begged me to fetch him, I simply refused, protecting my unborn child.
But Caleb, blinded by obsession, had already spun a wicked lie.
He told Sheriff Brody I was having a jealous breakdown and had contacted the bikers myself.
Brody, Caleb' s loyal friend, believed him.
He handcuffed me, mistaking my pleas for insane ramblings.
Then, in his misplaced fury, he shoved me down.
I fell, a searing pain tearing through my abdomen.
On the dusty ground, I watched a dark stain spread, my baby gone.
Blamed for the town's massacre, for the deaths of innocents, accused of turning traitor by the very man who' d condemned me once before – how could my second chance be so much worse?
But just as despair threatened to consume me, sirens pierced the chaos.
State troopers arrived, armed with a confession: the true traitor wasn't me, but Caleb' s beloved Amber, the biker gang' s mole.
With my innocence revealed, a new, brutal fight for justice had just begun. Too Late For His Savior Complex
Romance My boyfriend Ben and I had been together for seven years.
He was the golden boy of our CS department, always helping everyone.
But then Jessica, a new junior, entered the picture.
His "mentorship" quickly escalated, from late-night, winky-face DMs to public declarations of needing his "heroic" help.
When I expressed discomfort, Ben dismissed me, accusing me of being "sensitive" or "dramatic."
He even publicly sided with Jessica during her fake apologies.
He cancelled our anniversary trip to "save" her hackathon project.
Jessica brazenly flaunted their cozy "study session" on social media, on my birthday.
Campus rumors soon turned into a full-blown smear campaign, discrediting my academic achievements.
The ultimate betrayal came when Ben weaponized my deepest trauma against me, calling me "paranoid."
Then he actively sabotaged my career and punished my best friend for defending me.
My heart shattered.
How could the man I loved for seven years become this cold, cruel stranger, so blind to manipulation?
I was heartbroken, but a cold anger ignited.
I wouldn't just sit there and watch my life crumble.
I quietly gathered every piece of evidence against Jessica's malicious scheme.
I poured all my shattered energy into securing the most coveted internship in tech-the very one Ben had always dreamed of.
The truth, and my triumph, were about to be revealed. Seventeen Again: The Day Everything Changed
Young Adult I died peacefully in my eighties, only to shockingly wake up seventeen again, still in my childhood bedroom. It was college application day, and everything felt eerily familiar, especially my lifelong dream with best friend Jack and boyfriend Kevin: Princeton, shared dorms, and a future intertwined.
But the comfort shattered an instant later. Kevin and Jack, my supposed "constants," calmly announced they were ditching the Ivy League. Their new plan? State University, staying local, all to "support" Brittany, the head cheerleader—a non-entity in my previous life—who claimed her family was in crisis.
The betrayal hit like a physical blow. Suddenly, my meticulously organized SAT notes, the very tools of *my* ambition, were handed over to Brittany without a second thought. They paraded her scores, reveling in *her* success, while publicly dismissing my shock and mocking my sudden declaration of choosing UC Berkeley. At the graduation party, they treated Brittany like royalty, their arms around her, their attention solely hers, while I became an irrelevant outsider. The yearbook, a symbol of our unbreakable bond, bore their dismissive scrawls, cementing my abandonment.
How could the boys who were my rocks, my future, obliterate *our* shared dream for someone they barely knew? Why did their chivalry translate into such a profound betrayal of me? The sheer injustice and confusion were a cold knot in my stomach.
But I wouldn't let their misplaced heroism define me. No longer the girl who silently absorbed their choices, I clutched my Berkeley acceptance, booked a one-way flight, and definitively chose my own destiny. This time, I was playing for myself. You might like
Contract With The Devil: Love In Shackles
Dorine Koestler 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. The Unwanted Bride Becomes The City's Queen
Breeze 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. Marrying His Rival: The Ex-Fiancé's Nightmare
Moria Anninger 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." His Unwanted Wife: The Genius Artist Returns
Zaccaria Linn 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. Marrying The Rival: My Ex-Husband's Despair
Fonz Nadherny 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. Too Late: The Spare Daughter Escapes Him
SHANA GRAY 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 Married My Ex-Fiancé's Ruthless Older Brother
EVA PINK 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." Too Late For Regret: The Mafia King's Runaway
Tangye Wanzi 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. Runaway Nurse: The Mafia King's Remorse
Hu Minxue 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. 
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