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.
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Chapter 7
Elie stared at the plastic hotel key card. Her brain completely short-circuited.
She instinctively took a step backward. Her shoulder blades slammed hard against the frosted glass of the bathroom door.
"No," Elie whispered, her voice trembling violently. She shook her head. "No, that's impossible. Ebert wouldn't agree to that."
Mortimer let out a wet, ugly snort. He took another heavy step forward, trapping her completely in the narrow alcove. His massive stomach pressed against her. He looked down at her, mocking her naivety.
"In Wall Street, sweetheart, there is absolutely nothing that a Series C funding contract can't buy," Mortimer sneered, dropping his voice to a dirty whisper. "Including you."
The last brick of Elie's psychological wall shattered into dust. Pure, animalistic panic took over.
She ducked her head and lunged forward, trying to squeeze through the small gap between Mortimer's arm and the wall to escape back into the main suite.
But she forgot about the oversized high heels.
She took two frantic steps before her right ankle twisted violently. A sharp spike of pain shot up her leg.
Mortimer reacted with surprising speed. His thick hand shot out and grabbed a fistful of her long, dark hair.
He yanked backward with brutal force.
Elie let out a piercing scream. It felt like her scalp was being ripped off her skull. The sheer force of the pull threw her off balance, and she fell backward.
She hit the thick carpet of the hallway floor hard. Her elbow slammed into the wall, sending a shockwave of numb, blinding pain up her arm.
Mortimer loomed over her like a mountain of flesh. The thrill of the hunt, the excitement of her resistance, made his eyes gleam with sadistic pleasure.
He crouched down. His thick hands grabbed her bare ankle. He began to drag her roughly across the carpet toward him.
Elie kicked wildly with her free leg. The oversized high heel on her left foot flew off, smashing against the expensive wallpaper.
She reached out, her hands desperately clawing at the wooden doorframe of the hallway. Her fingernails dug into the wood so hard that two of them bent backward, tearing the nail bed and drawing blood.
"Ebert!" Elie screamed at the top of her lungs. "Ebert, help me!"
Right at that moment, the heavy bass of the club music in the main room surged, a deafening drop in the track that completely drowned out her desperate screams.
Her screaming annoyed Mortimer. He raised his thick, meaty hand and brought it down hard across her face.
Smack!
The sharp, explosive sound of the slap echoed in the small space. Elie's head snapped to the side. Her ears rang violently. The metallic taste of blood instantly filled her mouth as her lip split open.
The blow left her dizzy and disoriented. Her grip on the doorframe loosened. Mortimer yanked her ankle, dragging her entirely under him.
He threw his heavy leg over her, straddling her thighs, pinning her to the floor. His hands grabbed the neckline of the red silk dress.
With a violent jerk, the delicate silk tore. The sound of the ripping fabric was the sound of her doom. Elie squeezed her eyes shut, hot tears streaming down her face as she waited for the end.
Suddenly, a massive, deafening crash came from the main room. It sounded like a heavy glass table being smashed to pieces.
The light spilling into the hallway was abruptly blocked by a towering, broad-shouldered silhouette.
Mortimer froze, his hands still gripping her torn dress. He looked over his shoulder, his face twisting in annoyance. "Who the hell is looking to die?"
The next second, a custom-made leather oxford shoe shot out from the darkness with terrifying speed.
The heavy shoe connected squarely with the side of Mortimer's face.
Mortimer let out a sound like a slaughtered pig. The force of the kick lifted his two-hundred-and-fifty-pound body completely off Elie. He flew through the air and slammed heavily into the opposite wall.
The suffocating weight on Elie's chest vanished. She gasped for air, clutching the torn pieces of her dress over her chest, and opened her terrified eyes.
Ebert Ewing stood in the shadows of the hallway. He looked like a demon crawling straight out of hell.
He had taken off his suit jacket. His tie was ripped loose. His chest heaved, and his eyes were a terrifying, bloodthirsty crimson as he stared at the groaning Mortimer on the floor.
Ebert bent down. His large hand grabbed the collar of Mortimer's expensive shirt. With a terrifying display of raw strength, Ebert lifted the massive man off the floor like a dead dog.
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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.