Trapped By The Phantom: His Little Lamb
I woke up to the screech of a megaphone and realized I had transmigrated into a YA novel called *Roses Under Thorns*.
I wasn't the beloved heroine. I was Chloe Carrillo, a disposable scholarship student whose only purpose was to die in a tragic car crash to advance the plot.
Desperate to survive, I tried to become invisible. But fate played a sick joke, making me the roommate of the female lead and drawing the suffocating, obsessive attention of her powerful brother, Dean Gibbs.
While desperately avoiding Dean's controlling grasp, my nightmare worsened. An untraceable cyberstalker began hunting me.
He called me "Little Lamb." He left a burner phone in my secret library hideout, sent photos of me taken from ceiling vents, and texted me the moment I stepped out of the dorm shower.
"The water looks warm. Enjoy your shower."
The police couldn't help, and asking Dean meant trading one terrifying cage for another. I didn't understand why this was happening. I was supposed to be a nobody, yet I was trapped in an invisible web, monitored every second of my life.
Refusing to be a victim, I tracked down the university's legendary phantom hacker, Ashton Bridges.
I handed him my devices, begging him to trace the stalker, thinking I had finally found a safe ally.
I didn't know that as soon as the lab door closed behind me, he pulled up a live camera feed of my bedroom, his lips curving into a predatory smile.
"Little Lamb, you walked right into my arms."
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Chapter 10
My voice echoed in the damp air of the basement. The humming from inside the lab was the only reply. Hannah squeezed my arm, her eyes wide.
"Maybe he's not here," she whispered.
But I had to know. This was my only option. I pushed the door all the way open and stepped inside.
The lab was vast, but cramped. Server racks lined the walls from floor to ceiling, their blue and green lights blinking in the dim room. Cables snaked across the floor like vines. The air was frigid, a stark contrast to the humid hallway, and smelled of ozone and cold metal.
In the center of the room, a figure sat with his back to us. He was wearing a gray hoodie, the hood pulled up. His fingers flew across a keyboard, the clicking sound the only indication of movement.
He didn't turn around.
"Ashton Bridges?" I asked, my voice shaking slightly as I stepped closer to the glow of his monitors.
The clicking stopped. For a long moment, there was only the hum of the servers. Then, the chair swiveled around with a soft squeak.
The face looking back at me was sharp and clean. He had high cheekbones, pale skin, and eyes that were an unnerving shade of gray. They were devoid of warmth, scanning us with a clinical detachment.
"Your devices are compromised, Chloe Carrillo," Ashton Bridges said, his voice flat and mechanical. "The intrusion is sloppy, but effective. You're being watched."
It was a logical deduction, but hearing him say my name, confirming my worst fears so calmly, made my skin prickle. He hadn't been expecting me; he had simply observed the data and drawn a conclusion.
"You know about the stalker?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper.
"I know someone is bouncing signals off your network," he said, gesturing to a screen filled with scrolling lines of code. "Show me the messages."
I pulled out my shattered phone. "I broke it."
Ashton didn't even flinch. "Smart. But useless. He's already in your cloud data. He has everything."
Hannah stepped forward, pulling out her phone. "I took screenshots ," she said, her voice surprisingly steady. "Just in case."
She handed the phone to Ashton. He plugged it into a dock and his fingers flew across the keyboard again. The code on his screens shifted and re-formed. He studied it for a few minutes, his expression unreadable.
"He's using a rotating proxy," he said finally. "It masks his IP address. It makes him untraceable to the police. But not to me."
"Can you find him?" I asked, my voice desperate.
Ashton turned his chair to face me. His gray eyes locked onto mine. "I can. But I don't work for free, and I don't work for the police."
"I have savings," I started, but he cut me off.
"I don't want your money, Chloe." He leaned forward, his gaze intense. "I want the puzzle. This guy is good. But he's not me. Finding him, exposing him... that's the payment."
It was a strange request, but I didn't care. He was offering me a way out. A way that didn't involve Dean Gibbs.
"Do it," I said. "Find him."
Ashton reached into a drawer and pulled out a small, black flash drive. He held it out to me. "Install this on your laptop and your new phone. It's a monitoring program. It will track any incoming data and trace it back to the source. It will also act as a firewall, blocking his access."
I took the drive. It was cold in my hand. "That's it?"
"For now," he said, turning back to his screens. "I'll contact you when I have something. Don't contact me. And don't tell anyone about this. Especially not the Gibbs family. They have a tendency to... complicate things."
I nodded, clutching the drive like a lifeline. I turned to leave.
"Hannah," I said, my voice low as we reached the door. "You can't tell your brother about this."
She looked at me, her eyes conflicted. "Chloe..."
"Please," I begged. "Ashton is the expert. If Dean finds out, he'll take over. He'll make it a Gibbs family project, and I'll be right back in the cage. I need to handle this on my own. Promise me."
Hannah bit her lip, glancing between me and the silent figure of Ashton. Finally, she sighed. "Okay. I promise. I won't tell him."
We left the lab and climbed the stairs back to the surface. The afternoon sun hit my face, warming my cold skin. I took a deep breath of fresh air. For the first time in days, the tightness in my chest eased slightly. I had a weapon now. I had a plan.
I didn't look back at the basement door. If I had, I wouldn't have seen anything. But I also wouldn't have known that behind that heavy, sealed door, the gray-eyed boy had turned his chair back to his main monitor. On it was a live feed from a tiny camera hidden in the ventilation grate above my desk at home. His lips, which had been a flat line, were now curved into a slow, predatory smile.
"Little Lamb," he whispered to the empty, humming room. "You walked right into my arms."
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7.7
Nora's life turned into a nightmare after she was banished from her pack by her own husband. She was subjected to mockery, abuse and humiliation before being cast out with nothing.
Faced with the cruelty of a world that had never once been kind to her, the moon goddess decided to bless her with her fated mate.
The same man she watched slaughter others without a single trace of mercy. The man who was twice as cold and twice as ruthless as the husband who destroyed her.
Yet he would not let her go. She found herself stuck between the husband who used her and the ruthless mate who wanted her but refused to admit it. Two powerful men. One woman who was never supposed to survive any of it. And a moon goddess who was not done with her yet.
7.2
Elara Vex had everything-a flawless ice core, the title of prodigy, and a place at the pinnacle of the High Tower. But in one brutal night, it was all ripped away. Her mentor tore the core from her chest. Her fiancé drove a sword through her back. Her own sister smiled as she bled out on the cold marble floor.
When Elara wakes, she's years in the past, mere hours before her core is scheduled to be stolen. This time, she won't be anyone's sacrificial lamb. She shatters her own core with forbidden blood magic and forges something far more terrifying in its place-a bottomless, ravenous Chaos Core that devours magic itself.
Now, branded a worthless cripple and cast into the deadly Abyss, Elara is pulled from the darkness by the outcasts of Elysium Academy-a school for heretics, psychopaths, and everything the Tower despises. Under the tutelage of a reclusive principal who knew her murdered mother, Elara will master her forbidden power and uncover the Tower's darkest secrets.
When the Five Academies Ranking Tournament arrives, Seraphina Vex stands in the arena, draped in white saintess robes, ready to claim ultimate glory. She doesn't know that a ghost from her past has clawed her way back from hell. She doesn't know that Elara is coming-and this time, the prodigal sister isn't asking for mercy. She's bringing chaos.
8.4
My mate, Alpha Santino, brought another woman into our home. She was a pregnant Omega, the widow of his fallen Beta, and he swore to protect her above all others.
He gave her my seat of honor, left our bed cold each night to soothe her feigned nightmares, and ignored me completely. I was the Luna of the Blackstone Pack, but I was becoming a ghost in my own life.
The final betrayal happened in my own bedroom. She stood over my vanity and deliberately shattered my mother's sacred moonstone necklace, the last piece of my family I had left.
When Santino burst in, he didn't see my heartbreak. He saw only her fake tears.
"What did you do to her?!" he roared, his voice laced with the Alpha's Command, a sacred power he used to crush my will.
Then, for her, he did the unforgivable. He raised his hand and struck me, his mate.
In that instant, the love I had desperately clung to turned to ice. The man I had sworn my life to had not only betrayed me but had defiled the sacred bond the Goddess herself had blessed.
As the pain of his betrayal ripped through me, something ancient and powerful awakened in my blood. I rose to my feet and spoke the words that would destroy his world and begin mine.
"I, Alessia Bianchi, reject you, Santino Moretti, as my mate."
7.1
The captain is dead to the world. And I'm the only one holding the kill switch.
Ethan Carter, the "Glacier of Silvercrest," was the most feared Alpha to ever step onto the ice. Now, he's nothing but a shell-a broken, comatose legend trapped in his own body.
My life? It was supposed to be simple. Graduate, survive the pack's bottom-tier status, and pay off my father's ruinous blood-debts. Instead, the pack elders handed me a contract soaked in cold, hard malice: I am the designated "Stabilizer." My only job is to touch him, scent him, and keep his wolf from flatlining.
I thought I was just a glorified nurse. I didn't realize the Alpha was listening.
When Ethan finally wakes, he isn't the hero the Kingdom of Valeria remembers. He's a starving predator with amber eyes that burn holes through my defenses and a temperament that makes the frost in the mansion seem warm. He hates the bargain, he hates the pack, and-most dangerously-he hates the way his scent turns wild whenever I'm near.
He wants me out of his sight. I want to be out of his reach.
But in a pack built on secrets, someone is still trying to finish the job they started on his life. Now, the man who wants me gone is the only one who can protect me. And as the rink turns into a battlefield, I'm realizing the most dangerous thing about the Alpha isn't his temper... it's the fact that once he claims a mate, he doesn't know how to let go.
Frozen hearts are meant to shatter. But in the fire of this pack, we're both going to burn.
7.3
For a thousand years, the Vora beastmen have been cursed by a madness-a burning sickness in their blood that only one thing can soothe: the legendary 'Blood-Blessed,' a human female whose very scent is a living cure.
When a virus wiped out nearly all females, their desperate hunt for this mythical girl turned into a brutal conquest. They crushed our fallen human kingdoms, reducing us to breathing meat under their cruel "Livestock Codex."
To save my little sister from being branded for their elite breeding auction, I took her place in the male-only death draft.
Disguised as a boy, I was thrown into a pitch-black labyrinth, a living sacrifice meant to feed their ultimate nightmare: the feral, half-dragon Mad King.
He tore our steel cage apart like wet paper. I pressed my back against the freezing wall, watching in horror as he slaughtered the screaming men around me.
He ripped the filthy coat from my body, exposing my true gender. As his crimson eyes locked onto my throat and he opened his jaws for the kill, my rage burned away my fear.
I was a pureblood heiress of a dead empire, but I would not die cowering like an animal. I gripped a shard of glass, ready to aim for his eye.
But as he lunged, the glass sliced my palm. The moment my blood hit the air, the legend became my reality. The sweet, intoxicating scent that flooded the dark wasn't just my pheromones-it was the living cure.
The terrifying, apocalyptic tyrant froze mid-strike. He dropped his massive body to his knees, his fangs retracting as he gently, desperately licked my bleeding hand.
His chaotic red eyes darkened with an absolute, world-ending obsession as he pulled my fragile body against his burning chest.
"Mine."
I was meant to be his final meal. They called me the Blood-Blessed. He called me his Queen.
7.7
I trusted the wrong people in my past life.
My supposed lover and my sweet sister conspired against me, locking me inside a burning warehouse to die.
But the man I had spent my life hating, my ruthless captor Damien Sterling, rushed straight into that inferno and burned alive just to try and save me.
In my past life, I was utterly blind. I believed Julian's forged documents and Scarlett's fake affection. I even tried to assassinate Damien with a silver dagger they provided, breaking the heart of the only man who truly loved me. I died choking on thick ash, realizing too late who the real monsters were.
Why was I so incredibly foolish? Why did I let their vicious manipulation turn me into a weapon against the one person who would sacrifice absolutely everything for me?
Opening my eyes again, the phantom smell of smoke vanished.
I was sitting in the bloody water of Damien's bathtub, right after my staged suicide attempt.
When my sister sneaked into my penthouse suite and handed me the dagger to kill him again, I didn't hesitate.
I grabbed her hand tightly and plunged the sharp blade directly into my own shoulder.
"Please don't kill me, Scarlett!"
This time, I will ruthlessly ruin them both, and I will never let Damien go.