One Night With The Unstable Billionaire
Arla was supposed to marry Clinton Freeman, the perfect fiancé who had promised to love her and protect her five-year-old son.
But instead, the cold steel of a dagger pierced her chest.
As she collapsed onto the freezing basement floor, she watched her adoptive sister Blair laugh.
"Look at her," Blair sneered, kicking her son's small, blue, lifeless body.
Clinton stood there, calmly wiping the bloody blade on a pristine handkerchief.
In her dying moments, the horrifying truth became clear. Her fiancé and her adoptive family had been plotting all along to steal her massive trust fund.
To break her, they had secretly tortured her child. Clinton had watched Blair pierce the little boy's arms with sewing needles, rewarding him with candy to keep him silent.
Arla's lungs burned with the taste of copper and ash.
She couldn't understand why the family she trusted could be so monstrous, or why they had to brutally murder an innocent child just for money.
The darkness swallowed her whole, drowning her in suffocating hatred and absolute despair.
Then, she gasped for air.
The concrete floor was gone, replaced by the silk sheets of a hotel penthouse suite.
Arla had been reborn to the exact night six years ago—the very day Blair first dragged her son into the dark attic.
This time, she picked up a solid silver letter opener, ready to burn them all to the ground.
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Chapter 8
Arla pulled the thick duvet up to Caden's chin, making sure he was completely tucked in.
Just as she pulled her hand back, the cell phone resting on her nightstand vibrated with a harsh buzz. The screen lit up the dark room.
Arla picked it up. It was a text message from an unknown number. She stared at the glowing screen, her heart hammering against her ribs. She had used cash for the cab, but she had hailed it through the city's digital transit app on her phone. Someone with terrifyingly high-level clearance must have hacked the dispatch grid the second the cab dropped her off.
The message was short. Arla Noel. You can't run.
Arla's heart skipped a beat. The image of the man in the hotel room-the steel handcuffs, the bloodshot, predatory eyes-flashed violently in her mind.
She walked quickly to the window, pulling back a tiny corner of the heavy curtain. She stared out into the pitch-black, rain-soaked grounds of the estate.
There was nothing out there but the wind thrashing the trees. But the heavy, suffocating sensation of being hunted by an apex predator crawled up her spine.
Arla didn't hesitate. She blocked the number immediately. She opened her banking app and wiped the digital receipt for the yellow cab, doing everything she could to erase her digital footprint.
Fifty miles away, deep beneath the bustling streets of Manhattan.
The elevator doors slid open, revealing a massive, hyper-modern underground command center. The air was cold, smelling of ozone and server racks. This was the nerve center of Task Force Chimera.
Ewald stepped out. He had changed into a tight, black tactical shirt. The deep gashes on his wrists were carelessly wrapped in black medical tape.
He walked toward the massive holographic display dominating the center of the room. His assistant, Jalen, was typing furiously at a terminal, his face pale in the blue light.
"Boss. We have it," Jalen said, spinning his chair around. He held out a physical file folder stamped with a bright red 'TOP SECRET' seal.
Ewald snatched the file. He flipped it open.
A high-resolution surveillance photo of Arla Noel stared back at him. Her face was slightly pale, her expression guarded.
Ewald's thumb brushed over the glossy paper, tracing the line of her jaw. His jaw muscles clenched tight, his eyes dark and unreadable.
"Arla Noel," Jalen read from his screen. "Officially the adopted daughter of the Sargent family. Currently engaged to Clinton Freeman, heir to the Freeman estate."
The word 'engaged' hit the room like a drop in atmospheric pressure. The air turned freezing. Ewald's eyes snapped up, flashing with a lethal, territorial aggression.
"Keep talking," Ewald ordered, his voice a low, dangerous rumble.
"Traffic cameras tracked her cab. She went straight back to the Sargent Manor in Long Island," Jalen swallowed hard, pointing to a blinking red dot on the map. "Also... the file shows she has a son. Five years old. Name is Caden."
"Five?"
Jalen hesitated. Then, carefully, he added: "Sir... I pulled the child's photo from the Sargent family's private social accounts. I don't mean to overstep, but..." He turned his screen toward Ewald. "Look at the boy's eyes. The bone structure. And the timing—"
"The timing," Ewald repeated, his voice flat.
"If you count back nine months from his birth," Jalen said quietly, "you land in the middle of that storm. Six years ago. The night the hotel's surveillance blacked out. The night you missed your scheduled check-in with Command. The night I found you barely conscious and the room looked like a war zone."
Ewald's eyes snapped to the photograph on Jalen's screen. A small boy with dark hair and a stubborn chin. He wasn't looking at the camera—he was looking at something off-frame, his expression serious and watchful.
Like a soldier scanning for threats.
Ewald's heart, usually a slow, steady metronome, slammed hard against his ribs.
The scent. That vanilla scent in the suite tonight. The same scent from six years ago. The same scent that had pulled him back from the edge of a flashback that nearly destroyed him. He'd thought it was a hallucination—a trick of his fractured mind conjuring comfort where there was none.
But what if it had been real?
Ewald let out a slow, controlled breath—the kind he took before pulling a trigger.
"Who is the father?" Ewald demanded, his voice dropping an octave.
"The file says... father unknown," Jalen replied, pulling up another document. "Publicly, he's considered an illegitimate child. A scandal for the family."
Ewald's jaw locked. Unknown. Of course it was unknown. She had never reported it. Never come forward. Never tried to find him.
"Jalen," Ewald said, his voice cold and absolute. "Initiate level-one surveillance on the Sargent Manor immediately. I want eyes on the boy at all times."
He paused, his gaze burning into the photograph on the screen.
"Find a window of opportunity for a clean, non-contact sample acquisition. A hair follicle. Saliva. I want his DNA. Make it completely untraceable."
Jalen's eyes widened at the unprecedented allocation of military-grade resources for a civilian target. "Sir?"
"And lock this down," Ewald commanded, his tone leaving zero room for debate. "Highest clearance. No one sees the results but me."
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9.5
My boyfriend, Jefferson, convinced me to give up my Yale scholarship for him. He was my secret, my escape from the shame of my mother's past, and I threw away my future for our love.
Then, at a gala, he publicly announced his engagement to Aubrey Carroll-the girl who made my high school years a living hell.
He trapped me in his mansion, forcing me to become her personal servant. She tortured me daily, culminating in her brutally killing our dog, Charlie, with a garden trowel.
When her friends arrived, they joined in, stripping me half-naked and live-streaming my panic attack for the world to see.
The man who once promised to protect me watched as they destroyed me.
But as I lay bleeding out on the floor, it wasn't an ambulance that arrived. It was the private security of Alexzander Stevens-my estranged, billionaire grandfather.
He revealed I was his sole heiress, and now, we were going to make them pay for every last tear.
8.9
For three years, Alana acted as the sole tactical brain for the Dawnbreaker squad, keeping them alive despite being labeled a useless "Dud" Conduit.
But right before the crucial Ascension Trials, squad leader Cash handed her a corporate sponsorship contract. The condition? She had to become the "private companion" to a greasy corporate heir just so the squad could get high-tier gear.
When she refused, the teammates she had bled for unanimously voted to kick her out.
"You're just window dressing, a liability."
They revoked her safehouse access, burned her belongings, and the academy advisor even tried to force her into a state-sanctioned breeding program. They left her to freeze in the slums, betting she would desperately crawl into the rich man's bed.
What they didn't know was that her inability to summon an Eidolon wasn't a lack of talent. Her teammate Dallin had been secretly sabotaging her rituals for years, crippling her potential just to keep her chained as their free tactician.
Stripped of everything and pushed to the absolute brink, Alana's despair morphed into a deadly resolve.
Using a million-credit black market loan and a forbidden blood matrix, she forcibly anchored an Apex-Tier cosmic wolf disguised as a harmless silver pup.
When her ex-squad tried to publicly humiliate her and burn her new "pet" alive in the cafeteria, a flash of silver light severed Dallin's hand instantly.
Looking at her screaming former teammates, Alana finally smiled.
8.0
She has thirty days. Ten billion dollars. And a quantum space that can swallow anything.
Kinsey Elliott died cold, starving, and betrayed—pushed into a frozen abyss by the uncle who stole her fortune.
Then she woke up.
Back in her penthouse. Back in her perfect body. Back with a silver mark on her wrist that lets her store entire warehouses of supplies in a dimension where time stands still.
The world has thirty days until a global ice age freezes everything.
Her family has thirty days to try to lock her away, steal her money, and have her killed.
And Kinsey? She has thirty days to turn ten billion dollars into an invisible fortress—and burn every last one of them to the ground.
She's not surviving the apocalypse.
She's building it.
9.0
Seventeen years after going missing, Brooklyn was finally brought back to her ultra-wealthy biological family.
But instead of a tearful reunion, her parents and sisters treated her like infectious garbage, mocking her cheap clothes and calling her a country bumpkin.
They dumped her into a remedial class to hide her away, cut off her allowance, and threatened to lock down her trust fund to force her into absolute submission.
One night, Brooklyn stood in the shadows of the estate and overheard a conversation that shattered everything.
She hadn't wandered off as a child.
Her parents had deliberately thrown her away because a fake fortune teller claimed her birth chart was a jinx to the family's wealth.
They felt zero remorse, only plotting to banish her again the moment she turned eighteen.
Her biological father thought he was putting a leash on a helpless, uneducated girl by cutting off her pocket change.
He had no idea that Brooklyn was the anonymous VIP who casually dropped sixty million dollars on an emerald at the city's most exclusive auction.
He didn't know she was the elusive medical genius that the world's most powerful billionaires were currently tearing the city apart to find.
The last microscopic shred of hope for a family withered into cold ash in her chest.
"Lock down my trust fund?"
She pulled out her encrypted phone and activated her shadow networks, severing herself entirely from their pathetic surveillance.
Since they believed she was a jinx, she was going to show them exactly what a real curse looked like.
8.5
As Aurora lay dying of organ failure in the freezing ICU, she used her last ounce of strength to call her husband on their son's fifth birthday.
Instead of his voice, she heard the pop of champagne and the sweet laugh of his mistress, Jessica.
Conrad snatched the phone, impatiently ordering Aurora not to "ruin the mood" with her irrelevant calls.
But what truly pushed her into cardiac arrest was her five-year-old son's excited voice ringing through the speakerphone.
"I wish for Auntie Jessica to be my new mommy!"
"As long as you like it, Daddy will give you anything," Conrad promised without a second of hesitation.
Aurora gagged on her own blood and flatlined, the heart monitor erupting into a piercing red alarm.
She had swallowed her pride and wasted five years playing the perfect, submissive housewife, only to be thrown away like garbage by the two people she loved most.
She couldn't understand why her absolute devotion ended with her dying completely alone on a sterile mattress.
But she didn't die. Snatched from the jaws of death by a mysterious billionaire from her past, she woke up in a luxury suite, fully healed.
Looking at her pale, cold reflection in the window, the pathetic old Aurora died.
She packed her battered suitcase, signed a brutal postnuptial agreement waiving every single cent of her husband's wealth, and dropped the divorce papers on the table.
This time, she was leaving for good.
7.5
My biological mother finally came to the rundown trailer park to take me to her wealthy new family in New York.
But instead of the good life she promised, I was treated worse than a stray dog.
My stepbrother broke my legs with a golf club just for fun, while my perfect stepsister smiled and watched.
My mother didn't even try to stop them. She let them lock me in a car and set it on fire.
I was burned alive, the smell of gasoline and toxic smoke filling my lungs as they walked away with my life.
Until my last agonizing breath, I couldn't understand why my own flesh and blood hated me so much.
Why did I have to die just so her new family could thrive?
Opening my eyes again, the smell of smoke vanished, replaced by the cheap coffee of the diner I worked at.
I was seventeen again, on the exact day the black Bentley pulled up to take me away.
This time, I wasn't going to be their victim.
I deliberately stalled our departure, saving us from the massive highway pileup that was supposed to be my grave.
And when my stepbrother threw a metal dart at my face on my first day back, I didn't just dodge.
I let New York's most ruthless billionaire step in, ruining his ten-million-dollar watch in the process.
"Since that hand likes to throw things, I will take the hand as payment."
Watching my arrogant stepfamily fall to their knees and beg for mercy, I knew my revenge had just begun.