Lies

Anthony was the only guy I've ever wanted but couldn't. He was my brother's best friend. Besides, he always saw me as an annoying brat.


I felt him behind me. I saw him standing there, just as I remembered him.

"What's your name ?"

Holy shit, he didn't know it was me. I decided I could have this for myself.

"Tessa, what's yours?"

"Anthony, how would you like to go somewhere else?"

I di...

My fiancé, a ruthless mafia Capo, always had a convenient excuse for his betrayals.

Any trace of another woman was scrubbed clean.

Exhausted by the gaslighting, I planted a lipstick in his car just to see how deep the deception went.

When I confronted him, he put his phone on speaker.

The whole family stepped up to cover his tracks.

My brother claimed it was misplaced by my best friend. My be...

I thought I was the happiest woman in the world... until I clicked on that video.

The moment the screen lit up, my entire world came crashing down.

The woman on the bed was Calista - that girl who grew up with us since we were kids. And that hand caressing her skin was wearing the wedding ring I had personally put on Matteo's finger.

"I've missed you so much..."
"You drive me crazy, baby..."

T...

My wife found a tissue in my car, blotted with another woman's lipstick.

She looked at it for one second. Then she tucked it right back where she found it.

I wasn't worried. Audrey has loved me for fourteen years. She answers my texts in under a minute. She'd never leave me over some mistress.

So I took my mistress to Key West and stretched a long weekend into eight days, just to remind my wife...

On the night of my college graduation, Sloane Callahan, the biological daughter my Mafia family had only recently brought home, asked me what I planned to do next.

Before I could answer, my four childhood friends spoke up one after another.

One by one, all four showed me documents proving they were moving to California.

Then Graham Whitmore, heir to one of Chicago's most powerful Mafia families...

The five of us wanted to go to a concert.

I used four devices, with every ticketing app I could find open, and managed to get five tickets.

But on the day of the show, when I met everyone outside the arena, my best friend had brought another girl.

“This is Lily, my coworker. She's been a Luke Morgan fan for twenty years!” Jenna said. “When she heard we had five tickets, she asked if we could sp...

Nico Castellano knelt in front of thirty made men to save my life. Everyone in Chicago knows the Don’s son would die for his wife.

So nobody thought to tell me about the girl in the apartment on Lake Shore Drive.

They talked about her right in front of me. In Italian. They were sure I’d never understand a word.

They were wrong.

I didn’t scream. I didn’t make a scene. I paid a man on Halsted to...

On the day of my marking ceremony, my mate, Ryan Mercer, is caught kissing my sister, Paige Frost, in the dressing room. The whole pack gets to laugh at my humiliation.

Then Alpha Ethan Vale steps forward. With everyone watching, he gives me his mark.

Once we're married, Ethan couldn't be kinder to me. But we can't conceive a pup. At last, I try IVF, and I finally get pregnant.

He becomes even ...

Draven Hale had always loved me like drowning — total, breathless, nothing held back.
But the day Lenora Veyra's oncologist stamped terminal across her diagnostic dossier, that devotion changed direction.
He reached into his coat pocket and pressed a capsule into my palm.
A targeted memory-suppressant serum.
"Three days, Vesper," he said. "Lenora's dying. Let me give her a wedding. That's all she ...

“Poppy, I want you to stage a private jet crash for me. That way I can get away from Elias for good.”
When my best friend Poppy heard my request, her jaw nearly hit the floor. She wondered if she’d misheard.
"Are you out of your fucking mind, Molly?" she deadpanned.
"I’m entirely serious." I said, keeping my voice dead flat.
"Molly, you're married to Elias Blackwood." Poppy stood up, running a h...

"The Draganovs are moving on Celeste tonight. I'm taking her to the safe house. We'll do the claiming after this, Orla. I promise."
That's what my husband said the seventh time he chose Celeste over me.
Celeste. The girl he'd loved since before he had a wife to ignore.
The first time, she heard footsteps outside her window at two in the morning. Rafael sent his whole detail to sit on her house and...

My water broke in the basement where my mafia husband had locked me up. Upstairs, doctors were waiting on his brother's widow.

I begged him over the guard's phone to let me go to a hospital. He heard me crying. Then he told the guard to keep the door shut until her baby was born.

I pressed a hand against my belly. Our daughter was still moving.

When footsteps stopped outside the cell, I called ...

"Thanksgiving's at Garrett's new place this year!"

My sister Paisley dropped a location pin in the family group chat, followed by a string of party emojis. My fiancé, Garrett, ran a real estate company, and the pin pointed to a model home they'd just finished building.

That evening, I grabbed a pumpkin pie fresh out of the oven and caught a rideshare to the address. When we got there, the driver...

I waited ten years for Ethan.
He was in London getting his PhD.
I was back in the States, teaching.
I taught alone, moved alone, sat alone in the ER with an IV in my arm.
He said that when he came home, he'd marry me.
But the day he came home, he brought her with him. The woman who'd followed him all the way to London.

The day we moved into the new estate on the hill, every bedroom had a name next to it. The master suite for my parents. The east wing for my brother, Luca. And the best room in the house, the south suite overlooking the Hudson, was labeled Sofia's Room. My name wasn't anywhere. Out in the hallway, a workman was screwing brass nameplates onto every bedroom door. None of them said Chiara. Ten years ...

When my parents and my fiancé Gilbert asked me once again to donate my kidney to my cousin Yvonne, who was hospitalized with kidney failure, I didn't cry or scream.

I simply said one word: "Okay."

My parents and Gilbert were stunned. They rushed to have me sign the voluntary donation form, afraid I’d change my mind.

Some days later, they sent me to the operating room.

Dad said, "Yvonne will fi...

My daughter was running a fever. When I carried her downstairs, my sister-in-law was already waiting beside my husband Ethan Cole's car with her son in her arms.

Ethan hesitated. “Do you want me to take you?”

Before I could answer, Claire cut in.

“Ethan, it's Zack's preschool open house today. We're going to be late.”

“Besides…didn't we agree you weren't going to help her financially for a few...

On our wedding day, my fiancé died in a terrible car accident on his way to pick me up.

I was left a widow, carrying a child who would never know its father.

The shock left me severely depressed. I wanted to end my life more times than I could count. Everyone told me to keep going for the baby.

On the day of his funeral, his older brother returned from Africa with his wife to pay their respects...

Whenever my husband, a Mafia don, needs me to back down, out come the divorce papers. When my parents, practically Mafia royalty, want the same thing, they threaten to cut me out of the family.

The demand never changes. Whatever I have, my twin sister should get it.

There was a time when I argued. When I cried and asked why I was always the one who had to give something up.

Then a doctor pushes...

I didn’t come from money, so Julian’s friends decided I was a gold digger.

His best friend, Sloane, was the worst. She liked to say she used to be a gold digger herself, so she knew my type.

To prove her wrong, I spent three years with Julian without accepting a single expensive gift.

Sloane had an answer for that, too: “She says she doesn’t want anything, but she’s really waiting for him to of...