Pampered by the Ruthless Boss: A Deceptive Sweetness

Pampered by the Ruthless Boss: A Deceptive Sweetness

Gavin

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My last memory was the smell of ancient celluloid in a 21st-century archive, then a sharp chest pain. I woke up to the stench of gin and stale perfume, trapped in a stranger's body, in 1920s Chicago. My own mother, a faded vaudeville dancer, sold me to a notorious gang boss, Artie Gallo, for a sapphire cloche hat. I found a flicker of connection with Leo, the kind projectionist, and risked everything to steal medicine for the starving poor. But when Artie discovered our secret, Leo, the only person I' d dared to trust, pointed a trembling finger at me. "She made me do it." The betrayal was a physical blow, worse than the whip that lashed my back in Artie's cursed cellar. They threw me back in my room, broken and left to fester. The film, my last connection to my old life, gone with him. My body healed, but my soul was twisted into something cold and hard. How could he? How could the one pure thing I found in this nightmare turn out to be the cruelest blade? When I finally emerged, adorned in garish makeup and a deceptively sweet smile, the old Clara was gone. I would become the woman Artie wanted, the woman this brutal world demanded. And I would make sure everyone who ever wronged me paid the price, even if it meant burying every last piece of my humanity.

Introduction

My last memory was the smell of ancient celluloid in a 21st-century archive, then a sharp chest pain. I woke up to the stench of gin and stale perfume, trapped in a stranger's body, in 1920s Chicago. My own mother, a faded vaudeville dancer, sold me to a notorious gang boss, Artie Gallo, for a sapphire cloche hat.

I found a flicker of connection with Leo, the kind projectionist, and risked everything to steal medicine for the starving poor. But when Artie discovered our secret, Leo, the only person I' d dared to trust, pointed a trembling finger at me. "She made me do it." The betrayal was a physical blow, worse than the whip that lashed my back in Artie's cursed cellar.

They threw me back in my room, broken and left to fester. The film, my last connection to my old life, gone with him. My body healed, but my soul was twisted into something cold and hard. How could he? How could the one pure thing I found in this nightmare turn out to be the cruelest blade?

When I finally emerged, adorned in garish makeup and a deceptively sweet smile, the old Clara was gone. I would become the woman Artie wanted, the woman this brutal world demanded. And I would make sure everyone who ever wronged me paid the price, even if it meant burying every last piece of my humanity.

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Contract With The Devil: Love In Shackles

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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.

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