Gaslight and Gasoline“Get me out—the car is on fire!”
My boyfriend’s childhood sweetheart had crashed into my car. The doors were jammed, and the emergency hammer in my hand was a pink plastic toy.
“Someone switched the hammer!”
Maeve smiled.
“That was me. Cute, right?”
Smoke thickened behind the windshield.
Declan looked straight at me.
“It’s just a fender bender. Get out yourself.”The Wife on the Autopsy Table“Enough of your ridiculous games!” my husband snapped through the phone.
“Vanessa’s cat is missing. I don’t have time for your little dramas.”
The line went dead.
Two weeks later, I stood in the morgue and watched my husband examine a body sealed inside a concrete wall.
“One of the victims was pregnant,” his brother said quietly.
My husband’s face darkened.
“Elena is always lying about things like that.”
I looked down at my own body on the autopsy table.
“Honey,” I whispered, “this time, I wasn’t.”Game Over, Mr. BrooksMy employee badge had been placed inside a silver raffle drum.
The man who drew it was Ethan Brooks, heir to Brooks Group.
He was also my fiancé in name only.
He planned to make me fall in love with him within thirty days. Then he would dump me in front of the entire company at the anniversary gala.
He wanted a management trainee with no connections to admit that she had seduced the Brooks heir to secure a permanent position and move up in the company.
What Ethan did not know was that I had not joined Brooks to land a job.
I was there to decide whether Ethan would receive Hale Capital’s $2 billion investment.
I also wanted to see whether the fiancé I had never met deserved a place in my life.The Price of a Thousand DaysFor three years, I lifted my paralyzed father, changed his clothes, fed him, and slept beside his bed. When he died at three in the morning, I was the only child there.
My brother arrived asking for the property deed. My sister arrived with perfect makeup and dry eyes. At the will reading, they fought over a city apartment and hundreds of thousands in cash while I sat forgotten in the corner.
They believed the youngest son who had sacrificed a thousand days would receive whatever scraps remained.
Then the attorney reached the final item.
My father had kept a record of every hour, every payment, and every act of care they never saw. The inheritance was not simply money. It was his final judgment on the children who came home only when there was something to divide.
They counted his assets. He counted who stayed.The Call He Never Answered“We need a divorce.”
Arthur laughed. “What about our daughter? Going to make her run off with Mommy?”
“She’s dead, Arthur.”
He checked her empty bedroom, then came back sneering.
“You actually hid her to sell this lie? You’re so jealous of Vanessa you’d fake your own daughter’s death. You’re sick.”
The door slammed behind him.
I began packing her things, but the familiar scent of her blanket broke me all over again.
Then the cemetery called.
“Mrs. Hayes, hurry! Someone is digging up your daughter’s grave!”
Shouting erupted on the other end.The Monster They MadeFor ten years, I loved my stepbrother. When I confessed, Julian called me filthy and sent me to a psychiatric hospital to “fix my brain.”
For three years, they starved me, beat me, locked me in darkness, and stripped away every piece of the girl who had once begged him to come back.
When Julian finally collected me, he complained that I looked thin. My mother prepared dinner for his pregnant girlfriend. My family praised me for learning not to overstep.
They were right about one thing: I had been cured.
I no longer wanted Julian's love. I no longer wanted a place in the Sterling family. And I no longer believed any of us deserved a happy ending.
Now Julian is kneeling for the heart he ordered others to destroy—but the only man I trust is waiting by the ocean, and my final escape may cost all of us everything. 
