Branded By The Devil's Cruel Kiss
Elie Joyce’s entire life was controlled by Ebert Ewing, a ruthless billionaire who held her sick grandmother's survival and her family's freedom in his hands.
But on a freezing, stormy night, he forced her into a scandalous scrap of red silk and handed her over to a notorious, disgusting predator.
"You aren't an escort. You're just a free gift."
Ebert mocked her, using her as a disposable bargaining chip to secure a corporate funding round.
When the predator humiliated her, forced high-proof vodka down her throat, and violently pinned her to the floor, Ebert simply watched with dead eyes.
And when Ebert finally intervened to brutally beat the man, it wasn't out of mercy.
"She is my property. Even if she is trash that I threw away, a filthy pig like you doesn't get to touch her."
Afterward, he dragged her battered, barefoot body into his car, only to kick her out into the torrential rain, leaving her on the dark streets to die.
Standing in the storm, shivering and bleeding from broken glass, the last shred of Elie's hope shattered.
She had sacrificed her dignity and soul, enduring his violent bites and cruel control, just to keep her family alive.
Why did she have to suffer this endless, twisted humiliation for a psychopath who only saw her as trash?
But she didn't break.
Tearing a strip of his expensive shirt to bandage her bleeding foot, Elie gripped her broken stiletto like a knife.
With her eyes turning cold and calculating, she limped out of the shadows.
She was going to survive, and Ebert Ewing would soon realize she was no longer his obedient prey.
Chapters
Share
Chapter 3
Elie stood pinned against the heavy oak door. Her hands shook violently as she slowly bent down and picked up the red silk dress from the floor.
Ebert let out a cold scoff. He turned his back to her, walking back toward the floor-to-ceiling window. He pulled a cigar from a humidor, clipped it, and lit it. Thick, blue-grey smoke began to fill the air.
Elie clenched her jaw. She turned around to face the door. With stiff, freezing fingers, she peeled off her torn, wet sweater and pushed down her soaked, heavy jeans.
She quickly pulled the red silk dress over her head. The fabric barely reached her mid-thigh, and the front featured a dangerously plunging neckline that left almost nothing to the imagination. The dress had no zipper in the back. It was held together only by a series of thin, delicate straps that crossed over her entirely exposed back.
Elie reached behind her, trying to tie the silk strings, but her fingers were trembling too violently. She kept dropping them.
Ebert must have heard her struggling. He turned around. He stood there, cigar clamped between his teeth, his dark eyes fixed on the large expanse of pale, bare skin on her back.
He walked up behind her.
The intense heat radiating from his large body hit her back. His hot breath brushed against the sensitive skin of her nape. Elie's entire body went rigid. She stopped breathing.
Ebert's rough fingers brushed against her spine as he gathered the silk straps. A violent shiver wrecked through her. He pulled the strings tight, his movements rough and impatient, and tied them into a knot.
As the straps pulled tight, the red silk molded perfectly to her narrow waist and the curve of her hips. Ebert's eyes darkened.
He grabbed her wrist. His grip was like a steel vice. He didn't care that she was barefoot. He dragged her away from the door and out of the study.
They walked down the grand staircase. The maids and servants in the foyer immediately dropped their heads, staring at the floor, not daring to look at the humiliating scene.
Davin stood by the front doors. He held a pair of towering, rhinestone-encrusted high heels and a heavy, black men's overcoat.
Ebert snatched the coat from Davin. He threw it roughly over Elie's shoulders, completely covering the scandalous red dress and her bare skin.
Davin placed the heels at Elie's feet. Elie stepped into them. They were at least a size too large. The hard material made her feet slip dangerously with every step, offering absolutely no stability.
Outside, a black, armored Maybach sat idling in the pouring rain. A bodyguard held a massive black umbrella over the open rear door.
Ebert shoved Elie into the spacious back seat. He slid in right after her. The heavy door slammed shut, instantly cutting off the sound of the storm.
The Maybach pulled away from the estate, gliding smoothly toward the glowing skyline of Manhattan.
The silence inside the car was suffocating. Elie pulled Ebert's coat tighter around herself. The fabric was saturated with his scent-a sharp, cold mix of cedarwood and tobacco. It invaded her lungs with every breath.
She turned her head to look at him. She had to break the silence.
"Who are you taking me to see?" she asked, her voice barely a whisper.
Ebert leaned back against the plush leather seat. He crossed his long legs. He didn't look at her.
"Mortimer Finch," he said, his tone entirely casual.
The blood drained from Elie's face. Her heart plummeted into her stomach. Everyone in New York knew Mortimer Finch. He was a venture capital titan, and a notorious, disgusting predator.
She snapped her head toward him, her eyes wide with horror.
"Are you making me... escort for him?" she demanded, her voice rising in panic.
Ebert let out a low, cruel laugh. He leaned closer to her. His long fingers reached out and pinched the hem of the coat she was wearing.
"You think too highly of yourself," Ebert mocked. "You aren't an escort. You're just a free gift."
Elie violently slapped his hand away.
"I won't do it. I won't go," she spat. "Let me out."
She reached for the door handle and pulled. It didn't budge. The central locking system was engaged. She was trapped.
Ebert watched her panic with absolute calm. He adjusted his cuffs slowly.
"Your grandmother is currently undergoing an experimental targeted therapy at Manhattan General," Ebert said softly.
Elie froze. Her hand dropped from the door handle.
"And your uncle's H1B visa renewal application," Ebert continued, his voice like ice. "It is currently sitting on the desk of a senior immigration officer. A man who happens to owe me a very large favor."
The two threats hit Elie like physical blows to the chest. They were two sharp knives, instantly severing every single ounce of fight she had left in her.
Because of the US healthcare system, her grandmother's treatment cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Because of the strict immigration laws, her uncle's visa was the only thing keeping their family from being deported and ruined. Ebert controlled it all.
Elie's hand slid off the door. Her entire body went limp. She collapsed back into the leather seat, all the life draining from her eyes.
She closed her eyes. A hollow, broken laugh escaped her lips.
"As you wish, Master," she whispered into the dark car.
You may also like
9.3
Halie woke up to a sharp pain and a terrifying reality. She was in a new body, her face covered in a hideous web of scars, and her spiritual power reduced to a pathetic D-Class.
Before she could even process the memories of being framed, her bedroom doors were violently kicked open.
Her sister Seraphina sauntered in with a venomous sneer, followed closely by Halie's S-Class fiancé, Jett.
"Look at the disgrace of the Avila family. What a waste," Seraphina mocked, throwing a mirror at her bed.
"I can't be tied to a cripple. As an S-Class, I have to break our engagement," Jett added, his gaze full of disgust.
The nightmare didn't stop there. Her father called, screaming about how she had shamed the family name. He officially stripped her of her inheritance, froze all her accounts, and exiled her to the decaying Southern District to rot.
To make matters worse, a cold, mechanical voice suddenly echoed in her skull, warning her of an impending genetic collapse. Without an immediate energy infusion, she would face total organ failure in thirty days.
A ruined face, a treacherous family, a world that wanted her dead, and a literal death clock ticking in her brain. The original owner had died in absolute despair, a tragic victim of sheer cruelty.
But if they thought she would just sit there and die, they were severely mistaken.
Armed with a mysterious system and her brilliant scientist mind from her past life, Halie packed her bags. She chose the craziest survival quest: head to the slums, find the exiled, sterile S-Class "madman" Coleman, and cure him to harvest his life energy. It was time to start her counterattack.
9.3
Born into privilege, Eleanor never imagined her life could shatter in a single night. Then her father disappeared with his mistress, her mother fell from a building and slipped into a coma, and everything she once owned turned to dust.
Determined not to ruin Jonathan's future with her family's disgrace, she ended their relationship and became the bride of a man trapped in a vegetative state.
She believed that was the last time their paths would cross. But two years later, Jonathan pinned her in the dark and whispered, "Long time no see, my sister-in-law."
7.3
I woke up strapped to a cold steel chair in a neon-lit city that wasn't my reality. A voice in my head called The Warden told me I was bound to a digital hell called the Sandbox.
Before I could even process it, my handler casually sentenced me to death. He scheduled my "digital marriage" to a corrupted error program just to harvest my life for a fourteen percent bandwidth boost.
I barely escaped immediate erasure by smashing his skull and jumping from a high-altitude hover-train into the monster-infested lower sector. But the nightmare was just beginning. I was hunted by glitching data monsters and cornered by Dameon, a psychotic AI target who choked me and promised to delete me piece by piece. Even when Jayson, an elite system agent, intervened to save me, his partner Ellen held a pulse pistol directly to my chest.
"She's a spy. If you don't execute her right now, I am dissolving this team."
If they found out I was actually a real human from the outside world, their core logic would classify me as a virus and execute me on the spot. I was trapped in an underground bunker with three apex predators, one mistake away from permanent digital erasure.
So, I did the only thing I could to survive. I ripped my sleeve to reveal hideous, fake code-scars, looked up at Jayson with terrified, tear-filled eyes, and began to manipulate their core programming.
9.3
The first sign I was going to die wasn't the blizzard. It wasn't the bone-deep cold. It was the look in my fiancé's eyes when he told me he had given my life's work-our only guarantee of survival-to another woman.
"Kelsi was freezing," he said, as if I were being unreasonable. "You're the expert, you can handle it."
He then took my satellite phone, shoved me into a hastily dug snow pit, and left me to die.
His new girlfriend, Kelsi, appeared, wrapped snugly in my shimmering smart blanket. She smiled as she used my own ice axe to slash my suit, my last layer of protection against the storm.
"Stop being so dramatic," he told me, his voice full of contempt as I lay there freezing to death.
They thought they had taken everything. They thought they had won.
But they didn't know about the secret emergency beacon I had stitched into my sleeve. And with my last ounce of strength, I activated it.
9.2
When Alma's father stood in front of the bulldozers to protest, the energy company's thugs beat him half to death in the mud.
Instead of arresting the attackers, the police handcuffed her bleeding father and threw him into a cruiser.
"Stay back, kid," the officer barked, shoving Alma away.
Her father was denied bail and framed for assaulting an officer. The corrupt mayor just smiled and told her not to cause a scene. Meanwhile, the company mailed her weeping mother a severance check that barely covered a month of groceries.
Alma was forced to watch her family be completely destroyed by men with money and power.
Kneeling in the cold dirt where her father's blood had spilled, she didn't shed a single tear. The panic in her chest died, replaced by a cold, absolute hatred.
She realized that crying wouldn't do anything. In this world, justice didn't exist for the weak.
Years later, Alma stepped onto a prestigious Ivy League campus, her cheap backpack slung over her shoulder.
She was surrounded by the arrogant children of the very executives who ruined her life.
She lowered her head, hiding her dead eyes, and put on the perfect mask of a timid, helpless charity case.
Undergrad was just a training ground, and these elite kids were just her practice dummies. The hunt was officially on.
7.2
I am a top-tier Alpha from another universe, but a spatial jump error dropped me straight into a high-security military isolation chamber.
Right in front of me was a terrifying, silver-haired wolf-beastman Admiral, completely losing his mind to a lethal biological heat cycle.
To survive in this strange dimension where my powers were restricted, I had to pretend to be a helpless, terrified girl.
Surprisingly, my mere presence and scent instantly cured his incurable madness.
But this backfired horribly. He became obsessively possessive, treating me like a fragile, priceless treasure.
When I managed to sneak out to the city's lawless slums to gather intel and accidentally saved a dying panther boy, the Admiral went completely feral.
He brought an entire war fleet, blotting out the sky, just to "rescue" me.
He nearly slaughtered the boy out of blind jealousy, forcing me to throw myself into his arms and cry fake tears to stop the bloodshed.
"I'm taking you home. No one will ever hurt you again."
He brought me to his flagship's secret medical bay and ordered the Empire's chief doctor to run a full genetic classification test on me.
I panicked. If they discovered my true identity as an off-world Alpha, I would be dissected or executed.
I immediately commanded my AI system to fake my blood data, aiming for a perfectly average, forgettable Omega result.
But as the machine processed my blood, the alarms blared, and the system overloaded.
The old doctor fell to his knees in absolute worship, and the terrifying Admiral looked at me with wild, starving eyes.
My system had overcompensated. I wasn't registered as average. I was just classified as the only SSSSS-grade Omega in the history of the universe.