My stepfather was drugged. I became his only cure. When he woke up, Grandfather told him we weren’t blood‑related and ordered him to marry me. But Lucian believed an arranged marriage would ruin his one chance at real love. He got drunk and lay down on the train tracks. I saved him off, but I lost both my legs for him. He finally agreed to the wedding, his eyes red. But on our wedding night, he locked me in The Cage—his underground club where men paid to use women like broken dolls. They strapped me to a bed. They gave me injections and whipped me. He just sat in the shadows, smoking, watching like it was entertainment. After endless rounds of that, I found my chance. I set the curtains on fire. The whole place went up—him and me together. Then I opened my eyes. I was back on the night he was drugged. *This time, My father, I’m letting you have your real love story.* — A man’s hand on my waist yanked me awake. I opened my eyes flew open to meet Lucian Ashford’s bloodshot gaze. His eyes were thick with hunger—bottomless, primal. The kind of look I remembered from The Cage. Instinctively, I looked around. No rusted shackles bolted to the walls. No stained mattress reeking of sweat and iron. No muffled screams bleeding through concrete. No unnameable smell of sweat and blood and cheap perfume hanging in the air. Just his save private apartment, the bodyguard’ heavy boots shifting behind the door. This wasn’t The Cage. Lucian’s fingers dug into my hip bone hard enough to bruise. “Can’t you understand me? Take off your clothes!” He was too close. So close that my vision blurred and I was dragged back to my past life—to The Cage. To the men he’d sent in. The weight of bodies pressing me into that filthy mattress. Foul breath against my neck. Greasy hands tearing fabric from skin while the sound of his lighter flicked somewhere in the dark—click, click—the ember of his cigarette glowing like a single red eye watching from the corner of the room. I forced the memories down and sank my teeth into Lucian’s arm with everything I had. “Get off me!” The sharp pain snapped him back. His gaze dropped to my crooked collar, something unreadable flickering behind his eyes before disgust swallowed it whole. “Elara Ashford, you’re revolting.” His voice dripped with contempt—the voice of a man who ordered executions without blinking. “Don’t think that sleeping with me will make me want you.” A stab of pain lanced through my chest. I thought of how I had died in my previous life. The flames eating through The Cage. The smoke filling my ruined lungs while Lucian burned beside me. I wanted nothing more than to grab the gun I knew he kept in the nightstand drawer and put a bullet between his eyes. But I couldn’t. Grandfather liked him. In this life, I wasn’t going to destroy myself for him again. I swallowed the nausea clawing up my throat. “Where’s your mistress? I’ll go get her.” Lucian froze. Even drugged out of his mind, the calculating instinct of a man who ran an empire never fully shut off. “How do you know I have a girlfriend?” “Is now really the time for that?” He stared at me for two long seconds, his eyes sharp with suspicion even through the haze of whatever was coursing through his blood. Then he gave me an address. “Thirty minutes. I want to see her.” I said nothing more. I took the armored sedan from the garage—the one with bulletproof glass and the Ashford crest discreetly etched into the door panel—and drove like a madwoman the entire way. In the rearview mirror, a black SUV tailed me for three blocks before peeling off. One of Lucian’s men, making sure the Don’s stepdaughter wasn’t running. I made it back with her in twenty. Serena Cross’s legs were trembling when she stepped out of the car. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her voice pitched to a delicate quiver. “Lucian, I don’t know what I did to offend her—she drove so fast the whole way, I was terrified.” Gone was the cutting edge she’d used on me in the car—the sneer, the hissed warning to *stay away from what’s mine*. And the surprise on her face when she saw Lucian’s flushed skin was perfectly measured. Not a fraction too much, not too little. “Lucian, are you alright? Are you feeling unwell? Let me take you to the hospital—” Before she could finish, he pulled her inside. The door slammed shut in my face. The deadbolt turned. Through the thick wood, I heard the sound of fabric tearing. My heart finally settled. My hands were still gripping the steering wheel, white‑knuckled. This time, the twisted fate between Lucian Ashford and me would go no further. —
Serena Cross was my classmate. She was on a hardship scholarship—couldn’t even afford a couple of dollars for a hot meal most days. I always lied and said I’d ordered too much food so she’d eat with me. When she said she spent the holidays alone, I brought her home to Ashford Estate. Past the iron gates. Past the guards with holstered weapons who nodded at me without expression. Even though we had Mrs. Clark (Ashford Estate housekeeper) to cook for us, Serena would wake up early every morning to help in the kitchen. In the evenings, she’d ask each person’s preferences and prepare dinner herself. I thought I’d found a lifelong friend. Until the necklace Lucian had given me vanished. I tore through the entire estate before finding it shattered on the kitchen floor. That necklace was his gift to me—one of the few things that proved the man who now commanded killers had once been capable of tenderness. I’d treasured it like nothing else. Only Serena had known where I kept it. And she was the only person I had ever told about my shameful feelings about my stepfather. When I confronted her, she knelt outside the front door in thin clothes, insisting it was an accident, saying she had nowhere else to go. I had her things thrown out anyway. She rose from the ground and limped toward the gate. And ran into Lucian at the entrance. He was coming back from whatever business of mafia handled at two in the morning—his knuckles raw, his shirt cuffs rolled to the elbow. He saw her shaking, barely able to stand, and his pity got the better of him. I was furious—but more terrified that he’d learn about my feelings and pull away from me forever. So I let her scheme succeed. I just never imagined they would become lovers. Serena started sending me photos of them together. Intimate ones. His lips on her neck. Her hand on his chest. The kind of photos that made my stomach turn. Each image a knife twisted slowly between my ribs. I tried to tell Lucian what she had done. His eyes went cold. He dismissed me with a wave of his hand. “People like you, who only understand arranged marriages and family alliances—you don’t know what real love is. Stay out of my business.” Things turned ugly. Lucian moved out of the Estate entirely—took a safehouse on the east side of the city. Grandfather said nothing, but I saw the disappointment in his eyes. Tonight, Grandfather had asked me to deliver documents to him. That was the only reason I’d stumbled upon his drugged state. But remembering the provocative look Serena shot me before walking through his door—that slow, victorious smile—I understood. This had all been her trap. A girl from nothing, with ties to bottom-feeder gangs, scheming her way into the most powerful crime family in Northgate City. Drugging the Don was the most direct route. In my past life, I had ruined her plan. This time, I would watch Lucian walk right into it. —
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