Yours, Stepdad
"He's my stepfather. Technically. But we have history from high school. He was my first love. My first everything." I stare at my hands because I can't look at her face while I say this. "Now he's forcing me to pole dance for him while he watches."
"Watches?"
"Yes." The word sticks in my throat. "He watches, touches himself and then he... marks me. Without touching me anywhere else. Just watching and then claiming me like I'm his territory."
Three weeks ago, I walked out on my husband. Eleven months of rejection, of wondering what was wrong with me, of lighting candles for a man who was saving himself for my best friend. When I finally heard the truth from his own mouth, I packed one bag and I left.
I thought I was starting over.
Instead, I drove straight into my mother's mess. Gloria, the woman who raised chaos and called it motherhood, married a billionaire, cleaned out forty-seven million dollars from his accounts and disappeared without a word to me. Now his lawyers are at my door and I am the only thing she left behind worth collecting.
My new employer is Richard Moore. Billionaire. Tycoon. The most dangerous man I have ever met.
He is also the boy who took my virginity at seventeen and broke my heart in the same breath.
He wants a year of service. Pole dancing, forced proximity, and all the dark things written in fine print I didn't have a lawyer to read for me. He wants to punish my mother and I'm the only punishment available.
I hate him. I want to survive him. I want to get through this year with my mind and my heart intact.
But what happens when surviving starts to feel a lot like wanting?
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Chapter: THE SOUND FROM THE OTHER ROOMMICHAELAThirty-two weeks.Wednesday. Marcus arrives at seven with a bag of the lemons I mentioned once, and Kane arrives ten minutes later because I asked him and because Wednesday has apparently expanded to hold whoever turns up.The four of us eat at the kitchen counter, which requires an extra stool from the dining room that nobody has taken back for three weeks.It is loud.That is the thing I keep noticing. This apartment used to have the acoustics of a museum.. every sound arriving clean and separate into all that marble, nothing overlapping. Tonight there are four people talking over each other about a documentary two of them have seen and one of them has strong feelings about, and my father is laughing at something Kane has said, and Richie is losing an argument about the documentary that he does not appear to mind losing.I sit at the end with a hand on my stomach and I do not say much.I am tired in the good way. Thirty-two weeks is a full-time job with no breaks and I am a
Last Updated: 2026-09-12
Chapter: THE AISLEMICHAELAWednesday dinners started without anyone deciding they would.My father came over on a Wednesday in April to drop off a chair he had found for the nursery, and stayed for food because it was there, and then came the following Wednesday because I texted him about something unrelated at four in the afternoon and he read it as an invitation. By the third one it was a fixture. Nobody has ever said the words every Wednesday out loud. It would break it.Tonight he arrives at seven with a folder.An actual folder. Cardboard, with a rubber band around it."What is that.""Venues," he says.We spread it across the kitchen counter.He has been to four of them. In person. Alone. He has taken photographs on a phone he does not really know how to use and printed them at actual size, and written notes on the back of each one in handwriting that slants exactly the way mine does.Two of them are wrong in ways he already knows about and has annotated. Too big. Too formal. One is a hotel with
Last Updated: 2026-09-12
Chapter: THIRTY WEEKSRICHIEShe sleeps on her left side now.Not by preference.. by instruction, and by the specific arithmetic of a body at thirty weeks that has begun making decisions without consulting anybody. Left side, a pillow under the bump, a second one between her knees, one arm folded up under her cheek.It takes her about four minutes to arrange herself and she is deeply irritated by every second of it.I have been awake for an hour.There was a period when I would not have allowed myself to do this.Not out of restraint. Out of accuracy.. because I knew exactly what watching her was, when I was doing it through a screen in a study at two in the morning, and I was not going to lie to myself about it while I did it.I watched her on a security feed for four months. I have never pretended that was anything other than what it was.This is different and the difference is not subtle.She is eighteen inches away. The room is hers as much as mine.. her book, her glass of water, her hair tie on the ni
Last Updated: 2026-09-12
Chapter: HER NAME ABOVE THE DOORMICHAELAWe open on a Tuesday.That was not an accident. I looked at the calendar and I saw a Wednesday that would have worked better logistically and I chose the Tuesday anyway, because every single thing that has ever mattered in my life has happened on one, and I am superstitious in exactly one direction and I have made my peace with it.The unit is the one beside Honey's.It was a hardware shop for nineteen years and then it was empty for four, and I found the number for the landlord taped inside the window in handwriting that had faded almost to nothing, and I called it myself from the car with my hand shaking.I negotiated the lease myself.That sentence is doing a lot of work and I want it to. I read the terms myself and I did not understand about a third of them and I paid a lawyer in the next town four hundred dollars to explain the third I did not understand, and then I went back and asked for two changes and got one of them.I am aware of what that is. I am aware that a wom
Last Updated: 2026-09-12
Chapter: HARRISON, AGAINMICHAELARichie comes to find me on a Thursday evening.I am on the sofa in the piano room with my feet up and a novel I have read the same page of three times, and he comes in and does not sit at the piano. He sits on the sofa. At the other end, facing me, one arm along the back.That is how I know before he opens his mouth."There's a piece being written," he says.He tells me all of it, in order, without editing.Harrison has spent four months building something. Not a legal action.. he tried that lane at the gala and it went nowhere. This is a magazine piece, the kind that runs in a particular publication read by a particular three thousand people, where reputation is the only currency anybody is actually trading in.It is about the arrangement.Specific. Sourced. Somebody inside Richie's orbit has talked.. somebody with enough access to know about a contract, a studio, a pole, and a woman who moved into the penthouse in November as payment for a debt.He tells me what the piece w
Last Updated: 2026-09-12
Chapter: YESMICHAELAI wake up before the alarm and lie still for a moment in the dark.He is asleep beside me on his front with one arm across the space between us, the way he sleeps, his hand somewhere near my hip. His breathing is slow. In about forty minutes he will get up without waking me, because he thinks he manages this and he has never once managed it, and he will go and put the kettle on.I lie there and let myself have the last few minutes of not having said it.Not out of hesitation. Out of a kind of savoring. There is a specific pleasure in holding something you already know you are going to give away.Then I get up.He is in the kitchen at half past six.Coffee. Reading glasses. A stack of papers he is annotating with the fine black pen he keeps in his shirt pocket. Bare feet on the marble. Hair still doing whatever it does before he addresses it.This is the version of him almost nobody alive has seen.Not the man in the office who made me sign fifty pages. Not the man at the gala
Last Updated: 2026-09-12
BLOOD, LIES, AND THE ROMANOV HEIR
Isabella Romanov thought her body was broken. She thought the man holding her while she bled was the only thing keeping her alive but she was wrong about all of it.
The pills in her green juice, the best friend in her bed, the forged signatures waiting in a lawyer's desk, Marcus Whitfield didn't just betray her. He hollowed her out and sold what was left.
But Marcus made one fatal mistake. He forgot who her father was.
When Isabella walks out of her suburban prison and back into the world of blood and power she was born into, she finds an unlikely ally in Luca Moretti, the most dangerous man on the East Coast. He'll destroy Marcus and burn every bridge her ex-husband ever built. But his protection comes at a price: her hand, her name, and her presence in his bed.
Isabella isn't stupid enough to trust another powerful man. She's just desperate enough to marry one.
As she rises from discarded wife to mafia queen, Isabella uncovers a conspiracy far darker than infidelity, stolen embryos, Russian bounties, and a family ledger worth more than the city itself.
The deeper she digs, the more she realizes that everyone around her wants something, and the man who swore to protect her might have wanted it first.
In a world where blood is currency and love is leverage, Isabella must have to decide what she's willing to burn to get back what was taken from her and whether the man beside her is worth keeping.
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Chapter: The VisitISABELLA The heavy steel door clicks shut behind me, the metallic thud echoing off the cinderblock walls. The interrogation room is windowless, suffocatingly small, and bathed in the harsh, buzzing glare of a single fluorescent bulb. There is a bolted metal table in the center of the room. A county guard stands completely still on the other side of the glass observation mirror. And sitting across the table, shackled to a metal ring bolted to the floor, is Marcus Whitfield. I stop exactly three feet away from the table. I look at the man who was my husband, my warden, and my executioner for three years. He looks entirely diminished. The flawless, ten-thousand-dollar tailoring is gone, replaced by a stiff, oversized orange county jumpsuit that swallows his frame. The silver at his temples, which used to look distinguished, now just looks exhausted and gray. His skin is pale, the arrogant polish completely stripped away by two weeks on the run and three days in a concr
Last Updated: 2026-06-06
Chapter: Loose EndsISABELLAMarcus Whitfield isn’t found by Enzo's tactical team or dragged out of a Volkov safe house in the dead of night.He’s found by a bored Delaware state trooper at a two-star roadside motel.Two weeks after going completely underground, Marcus is arrested attempting to cross state lines. He’s caught carrying a forged Canadian passport and a cheap canvas duffel bag packed with two hundred thousand dollars in cash.The exact amount of the "good-faith advance" Sergei Volkov wired him during their intercepted phone call. Because Enzo's tactical team breached the server location in Queens hours before the Russians arrived, Volkov never wired the remaining four point eight million dollars. Marcus was left completely stranded, bleeding cash, and desperate enough to get caught sleeping in a cheap motel.The arrest is public, immediate, and spectacularly humiliating.I stand in the surveillance room of the fortress, watching the local news coverage cycle across the high-definition moni
Last Updated: 2026-06-06
Chapter: The First CommandISABELLAThe digital map of the Newark shipping yards glows against the steel table in the war room.My father documented this specific smuggling pipeline fifteen years ago. He tracked the container rotations, the bribed customs officials, and the dead-drop schedules. According to the translated cipher, Sergei Volkov is still running the exact same route. Arrogance creates patterns, and patterns create targets."Container 404-B," I say, tapping the screen. "It is an active Volkov weapons cache. If we seize it, we paralyze his supply chain and announce to the entire council that my seat is not ceremonial."Luca stands on the opposite side of the table. He does not offer to lead the strike. He offers his men, his transport logistics, and then he steps back. He defers entirely to my operation design.I spend the afternoon planning the raid with Enzo.As we map the entry points and extraction vectors, a quiet, profound realization settles over me. I do not think like Luca. I do not poss
Last Updated: 2026-06-06
Chapter: Behind Closed DoorsISABELLAThe door of the armored SUV closes, sealing us into the dark leather interior.The engine hums to life. Up front, the driver puts the vehicle into gear. Between the front seats and the back, the black privacy partition glides upward with a quiet hum.The very second it clicks shut and locks into the ceiling, the hours of agonizing restraint completely evaporate.I'm on him before the tires even hit the end of the Marchetti driveway.I don't say a word. I straddle his lap, my hands grabbing the lapels of his black tuxedo jacket, pulling him violently forward. My mouth crashes into his neck, my teeth finding the jagged ink of his thorned tattoo.Luca lets out a harsh, ragged sound that is half groan, half growl. His large hands drop immediately to my waist, gripping hard enough to bruise.Every single restrained touch at the gala, the hand pressed to my lower back, the knee under the linen tablecloth, the thumb dragging slowly across the inside of my thigh, was foreplay. We bot
Last Updated: 2026-06-04
Chapter: The Marchetti GalaISABELLAExactly forty-eight hours after Mara intercepts Sergei Volkov’s order to activate the "secondary asset," an invitation printed on heavy cream-colored cardstock arrives at the fortress.The war is not in a lull. It is a pressure cooker, vibrating with the invisible, ticking threat of an unknown operative coming for my bloodline.Don Arturo Marchetti is hosting his annual gala at the Hudson Valley estate, and that means that attendance by the heads of all five council families is required. It’s part social event, part high-stakes political theater. But tonight, for Luca and me, it is a hunting ground. A room full of Volkov’s quiet allies, shadow investors, and fixers all present.One of them might know the identity of the asset coming for Sarah’s baby.I prepare for it with the exact same ruthless precision I brought to the council session, but a gala requires an entirely different kind of armor.I stand in front of the mirror in the fortress master suite. I am wearing a floor
Last Updated: 2026-06-04
Chapter: Pure BloodedISABELLAMara taps the screen of her tablet, and the intercepted audio file begins to play.The sound of Marcus's voice fills the quiet study. He sounds pathetic like a cornered animal trying to convince a predator that it has teeth.He demands five million dollars and safe passage out of Teterboro, offering Sergei Volkov the exact location of an encrypted backup server containing the medical records and genetic profiles of my stolen embryos.Mara pauses the playback.I don't erupt. I don't throw the heavy crystal decanter against the wall. I look across the mahogany desk at Enzo."Do you have the coordinates?" I ask, my voice completely stripped of emotion, leaving nothing but diamond-hard authority."Mara traced the burner phone to Queens," Enzo confirms. "She's pinging the server location based on Marcus's data footprint now.""Take a tactical team," I command. "I don't care if Volkov wired him an advance. I want that server secured and brought back here before the Russians even kn
Last Updated: 2026-06-01
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