Lies

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 ...

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 ...

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...

"Who are you, really?" Lewis, the ruthless Mafia Godfather, cornered me in the elevator, his eyes filled with a twisted obsession as his fingers grazed the black butterfly tattoo on my collarbone.

He is completely addicted to my new face, my coldness, and my ruthless Wall Street tactics.

He is even willing to kick his beloved mistress out of the boardroom just to keep my attention.

If only he ...

I was once the most exquisite rose in New York's underworld.
Leander Castello's wife. The mafia godfather's treasured queen. The woman everyone envied.
I thought he would be my salvation, my forever.
Until he snapped me in half with his own hands and threw me into the filthiest pit like trash.
He said he needed to teach me what betrayal costs.
So I was handed over to the Mexican cartel boss, Carlo...

Typically, brides swap bouquets for good luck when wedding motorcades cross paths.
But in Liam’s Southern hometown, they had a twisted tradition: they swapped brides.

When our limousines met bumper-to-bumper, Kinsley leaned right past me. She pressed a lingering kiss to my fiancé’s cheek.
"Hope you don't mind, Rachel," she purred with innocent malice. "I’m stealing your groom."
The groomsmen ho...

My father is the youngest chief of cardiac surgery in the country, the ace of his field.
His hands were the best in the business. Yet on the day my mother had a sudden heart attack and needed an emergency transfer, he turned her away, claiming every operating room was full.
Later, someone photographed him on a sunlit lawn at a country club on the edge of town, showering another woman's daughter wi...

For eighteen years, Ethan Caldwell was the person I trusted most. Then, on the night meant to celebrate my future, he handed me another woman's hotel key and asked me to protect her reputation.

I gave him one final chance: meet me at the airport and choose our promised trip. Instead, he lied about a car accident while I watched him wrap a matching scarf around Vanessa Reed's neck.

By the time Et...

"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...

To celebrate his startup's funding, my boyfriend Liam forced me to eat a cake baked by his female best friend, Mia.

I immediately smelled peanuts. He knew I was deathly allergic, but he pressured me to take a bite anyway.

When the reaction hit—my throat closing, hives burning my skin—I reached for my EpiPen.

Mia snatched it first.

She turned my only lifeline into a party trick, tossing it in t...

I dropped out of Harvard and took on massive debt to save my dying brother.
For five years, I starved. I worked five jobs a day. I let debt collectors break my ribs just so I could afford his "life-saving" meds.
Until I saw him at a VIP club.
No wheelchair. No illness. Just a bespoke suit and a glass of expensive whiskey.
"You've faked this terminal illness for five years," his friend laughed. ...

Six months ago, a deadly dose of ricin was secretly dropped into my drink. The toxic substance has been relentlessly destroying my body ever since, and my time is nearly up.

Today, my physical strength has completely faded, leaving me with only seventy-two hours to draw breath.

On the brink of my impending death, I gave in and consented to give my remaining kidney to my sister. Overflowing with ...

The man on the other side of the frosted glass paid a hundred million dollars for my amnesia serum. I warned him there was no antidote. He laughed.
“If I can buy the poison,” he said, “I can buy the cure.”
He didn’t recognize my voice. Why would he? In five years of marriage, Rhett Calloway never once asked what I did before I became his wife.
Days later, he divorced me and pressed that same vial ...

The morning of our wedding, Dante Russo led the hit that wiped out my family.
Branded a traitor, stripped of my name, I spent three years scrubbing blood from dog kennels at the docks. I lost my hands, my music, and three babies I never got to hold.
Then I learned the truth: there was no hit. My parents and the man I loved staged it all—to teach me a lesson, because my adopted sister Isabella crie...