Khalil Payne/ Painkiller Novels & Stories

Kaelan noticed I hadn't filed a single medical or living expense request in the pack’s resource channel for a week. He must have thought I’d finally kicked my greedy human habits. At dinner, he tossed a black card at me. It cut a cold arc through the air, landing beside my plate. “Your father’s treatment for next month. The wolf gene serum, the lab fees—it’s all approved.” His voice was pure Alpha command. An order, not a suggestion. “Bringing you and your father here was a risk. I fought the Elders for you. You are my mate. Stop begging for pack funds like a common stray. It’s a bad look.” He didn’t know my fingers were ice-cold when I picked up the card. The papers to sever our mate bond were already signed. So was my will. The hoodie I wore when I left was a faded thing he’d tossed at me three years ago. No one would believe it. The fated mate of an Alpha who ran a corporate empire… had to send a photo of a $10 painkiller receipt to a Beta assistant for approval. All because he thought a fragile human like me was a leech who couldn’t be trusted with cash. But a week ago, when my father’s lupus caused his organs to fail, I needed $50,000. He needed a dose of pure gene repair serum, synthesized in the pack’s high-tech med-bay. I begged him on my knees. His childhood friend, Seraphina, just laughed. She froze my request, saying she was helping me break my bad habit of “cashing in on my mate status.” Kaelan never knew I endured that humiliation just so my father could stay alive in his top-tier medical lab. Now, my father was dead. The medicine was cut off, and his ashes were already in the ground. I didn’t need to be his obedient little pet anymore.

I was known as a good girl in high society, and the most rebellious thing I ever did was to refuse to marry Asher Jonas, the head of the Ace family. When I was kidnapped by enemies, I thought I would be assaulted and hurt. Unexpectedly, Asher fought against the kidnappers to protect me. When rescue arrived, Asher, covered in blood and on the verge of death, finally let out a sigh of relief, "Don't cry. I'll be sad." I fell in love with this man at that moment. After we wed, he doted on me, and I soon became pregnant. However, I overheard his conversation with his underboss. "Don Jonas, you made a bet with Mr. Anderson Payne that you would win the heart of the good girl, Elle Sachs. You deliberately set her up to make her fall for you. Now that you've been married for two years, are you still going to keep pretending?" Asher paused for a moment and muttered, "I can't be with Lucy Snow, so it doesn't matter who I marry." The underboss asked in confusion, "Didn't you always complain that Donna was too dull and uninteresting? Even though you can't be together because Ms. Snow is your stepsister, you can choose any girl you want." "Elle is very well-behaved. She won't hurt Lucy. That's why I chose her." It turned out that all the happiness I had experienced over the past two years was fake. My husband had been deeply in love with another woman all along. I wiped away my tears, silently packed my luggage, and left the fake prison that had been built for me, carrying the baby that I had only just conceived. I would disappear from Asher's world and never cross paths with him again.