Buried To The Hilt

Three years ago, I broke up with my girlfriend—Audrey Hades—while she was on the verge of going bankrupt. Immediately after, I got engaged to her biggest rival, Clara Sterling. Later, she turns into a celebrated and adored rising star of the business world. She allows people around her to mock and label me as a gold-digger who leeches off rich women. But what she doesn't know is that I've been dead for three years.

That winter, the Silver Moon Pack holds its annual ski hunt. An avalanche strikes without warning, and the three of us are trapped in a lift pod. There's only one thermal suit left. My mate, Ryan Mercer, gives the thermal suit to me. I survive, but his childhood sweetheart, Eve Hurst, is buried forever beneath the endless white of the mountain. No body is ever found. However, he gazes at me with devotion and says, "Celine Bartlett, you are the love of my life." I soak in those words, believing them. But I have no idea this is the beginning of my nightmare. For the next five years, he speaks to me only with cruelty. "You killed Eve. You're a murderer!" He locks me in the basement and whips me with lashes soaked in wolfsbane. Then, he pretends to show pity and feeds me with a silver fork. When I refuse, he stabs me with silver nails across my legs, carving deep red lines into my skin. "This is what you owe her, and you will repay it!" When I ask for a reject, he stabs a silver dagger into my chest, dragging me into death with him. When I open my eyes, I find myself back on the day of the avalanche. This time, I hand the survival gear to Eve without hesitation. This time, I owe her nothing. And now, I want to see whether they will get their happy ending without me around.

All of Italy knew Kayson Moretti was obsessed with me. He was the untouchable Don of the Moretti family, a man who never lost control in public, yet he broke every rule for me. He declared his love at a gathering of the most powerful mafia families in the country, then bought an entire private island just to build me a glass-domed garden when he proposed. For years, he laid the world at my feet—power, jewels, territory, status. If I wanted something, Kayson didn’t promise it. He made it mine. That was why everyone believed I was the luckiest woman in Italy. They were wrong. Because the same man who swore he would die for me was sleeping with his private secretary behind my back. Worse, he got her pregnant. The day she sent me her ultrasound, their bed photos, and every intimate secret she thought would destroy me, I didn’t cry. I didn’t beg. I didn’t confront him. Instead, I erased every trace I had ever left in his world. My name. My accounts. My records. My past. I staged my death. I let the world believe I had died in a private jet crash.

My marriage to Lucian Hawke was hailed as the most perfect union in the mafia world. As the daughter of the Sinclair family and him being the sole heir of the Hawke family, our marriage united the two most powerful mafia families in the Northeastern. I thought we were unbreakable. Then, I was diagnosed with terminal cancer. As if life couldn’t get any worse, my husband's first love returned—on the very same day. That night, the man I’d been married to for years didn’t come home. The next morning, his voice was cold, distant. Indifferent. “I’ve got the divorce papers ready. When can you come sign them?” I hesitated, struggling to steady my voice. “I’m still at the hospital.” He didn’t even pause. “I don’t care if you're on your deathbed, Elara. Come home and sign the goddamn papers.” My heart shattered, but I refused to let it show. “As you wish, Lucian.” What he didn’t know was that I was dying—literally. A week later, at my funeral, Lucian wearing a tuxedo, weeping at my grave, whispering regrets he should have voiced when I was still breathing. Ironically, my funeral day, was also his wedding day with his sweetheart. But it was too late, my love. This time, you’ll never see me again.

On my birthday, the dining table was loaded with all my favorites. My mom had been cooking and baking the entire afternoon, insisting everything be perfect for when Mike got home from work so we could celebrate together. But then, he called and said his first love had been drugged at a bar, and he had to go help her. I stopped him and begged him not to go. Mike snapped at me. "Jesus, Em, don’t pull this jealous wife crap. She’s alone, defenseless, and unconscious—I can't let some random dude take advantage of her!" My mother heard those words and was so enraged that she had a heart attack. She died on the spot. Just like that, my mom died on my birthday. I called Mike, asking him to attend my mom's funeral. But before he could reply, I saw Cathy Miller's latest Instagram post, captioned: [Mikey… after all these years, it was always you.] Mike had liked it. My thumb moved before my brain caught up, typing out the only words that mattered: [A homewrecker and a lying bastard. Hope you rot together.]

"You're not Isabella. But you will be. Starting tonight." Elara has nothing. No family. No money. She grew up in foster care. She cleans toilets for a living. Until the night she scrubs the penthouse bathroom of Alexander Blackwood, a billionaire CEO. He walks in drunk, sees her face, sees the star-shaped birthmark behind her ear, and calls her Isabella. Isabella is his wife. She disappeared six months ago. She was declared dead. And she looks exactly like Elara. Now Elara is forced to wear a dead woman's clothes, sleep in her bed, and pretend to be someone she never met. The mansion is full of secrets. The housekeeper watches her every move. The charming brother offers help that feels too calculated. And Alexander knows more about Isabella's disappearance than he admits. But Elara survived foster care by staying quiet and watching. Now she's watching them. And she's going to find out what happened to her sister—even if it means tearing the Blackwood family apart from the inside. She came to clean their toilets. She's staying to bury their secrets.

For six years Lila has played the perfect invisible daughter... plain, quiet, and worthless... just to survive her cruel, status-obsessed family. While her golden sister shines in the spotlight, Lila secretly thrives as the rising actress Liora Vale. No one knows the woman she really is. Starved for even a scrap of love, she has learned to disappear so completely that she almost believes the lie herself. When her sister refuses to marry the “Broken Heir” Damien Blackthorn, Lila is sacrificed in her place. Everyone expects her to become the silent, obedient wife to a man everyone pities. But the moment she accidentally falls into Damien’s lap, he sees straight through her mask... and chooses her. Now trapped in his mansion, Lila discovers Damien isn’t broken at all. He’s being slowly poisoned by his own uncle, and he’s far more dangerous than anyone realizes. At the same time, Damien realizes the quiet wife forced on him is actually a brilliant actress living a double life. Two masked predators are now bound in marriage, each hiding lethal secrets, while Lila’s family and Damien’s uncle close in to destroy them both. In a union built on performance, betrayal, and forbidden desire, can two people who have never been truly seen by anyone learn to trust each other... or will they destroy one another before the masks finally come off?

Three years of my loyalty. My body. My silence. My whole heart wrapped up and placed in hands that never deserved it. And the night I found out I was carrying his child — I found him in our bed with my best friend instead. He didn't beg. Didn't explain. He looked me in the eye and said I was never his first choice. Then he filed the rejection papers before I could finish crying. So I left. I buried Cora — the weak, devoted, foolish Luna who loved a man who saw her as a placeholder. Five years later, I'm someone else entirely. Someone with a life he could never have imagined for me. Someone with a son whose silver eyes are the only beautiful thing that man ever gave me without meaning to. Now his pack is dying. And I'm the only one who can save them. He's on his knees in front of me. The question isn't whether I'll help him. The question is — how much will it cost him first? Some women fall apart when they're broken. I rebuilt myself into something he'll never be able to bury again.

I was in San Aria Bay with my mom, enjoying a quiet, sunlit getaway, when my phone suddenly lit up with a string of messages from my husband's ever-arrogant secretary. She sent a photo. The woman in it had been stripped naked, her body covered in blood, the sight almost unbearable. A voice message followed, her tone dripping with disdain. "Jeannie, do people like you always take advantage of others like this? "Mr. Smith just bought this house, and you already had your mother move in for free? As his chief secretary, it's my responsibility to remove anyone living off him."

My brother, Theo Sorento, died in a plane crash on his way back home just to celebrate my birthday. They never found his body—only wreckage. Ever since, my parents forced me to kneel in front of his grave every year on my birthday, demanding that I repent for surviving when he didn’t. Then came my eighteenth birthday. I realized someone was following me. Panicked, I sent a few messages asking for help. Just then, Mom called, not to check on me but to lash out. “I know exactly what you're doing. You’re just making up excuses so you don’t have to kneel in front of your brother’s grave! You’re a liar. Why wasn’t it you who died instead of him? You’re a walking curse!” Before my phone was smashed under a boot, the last thing I heard was the cold click of her hanging up. Then, I was cut up into pieces, and what was left of me was tossed across the city. My father, the lead forensic pathologist on my case, didn’t even recognize me. Later, Theo returned alive with his wife, whom he had eloped with eight years ago. When they found out the pile of rotting flesh was me, they all went insane.