Ruined By Design Novels & Stories

After a beat, he frowned and said, "Never mind. Just get the medicine." The ward next door remained empty. No one else had taken the room yet. Sean approached the bedside table and picked up a small lion sculpture. There were cracks on it; it had been glued back after it had been broken. It looked ugly. Suddenly, he coughed violently, and the lion slipped out of his hand. He subconsciously threw himself onto the floor to catch it before it could hit the ground. As he did so, he ended up knocking his head on the foot of the bed, and blood trickled down his face.

As the person in charge, Joe was publicly criticized for his misconduct, which created a stark contrast between his design concept and reality. Customers were no longer interested in purchasing from Fulham Jewelry, and they wanted him out of the jewelry business. He turned from a great designer with a bright future into a cheating bastard hated by everyone. Joe suffered greatly for this. His life's work had been destroyed.

“We know better. We know what happens when controls fall away. We know what happens when lines are crossed. We have seen empires crumble, lands burn, generations lost — all because someone thought they knew better than the wisdom of the past.” “You have seen ruin,” I said gently. “But you have mistaken the cause. Ruin never came from people being whole. Ruin came from people being broken. Ruin came from forcing things apart, cutting things off, hiding things away. You blame the union — but you have only ever known the separation. You have never once tried the other way.”

it was the most satisfaction Ethan had felt in four years of architecture school. “He did look quite pale,” Ethan admitted. “He looked like he was going to vomit,” Liam laughed, a rich, genuine sound that filled the cramped room. “Come on. One night. We go to The Foundation. No blueprints, no talk of load-bearing walls, no blue tape. Just the win.” Ethan looked at the pile of textbooks on his desk. He looked at the joint account balance on his phone. Then, he looked at Liam—the man who had sabotaged him, fought him, and eventually designed a masterpiece with him.

“The part where someone starts mattering enough to ruin me.” Her breath caught. The rain outside intensified, thunder rumbling somewhere far across the city. Sienna reached for his hand slowly, threading their fingers together. “You’re not ruined.” “You don’t know that yet.” The sadness hidden beneath the joke nearly destroyed her. For the first time since meeting him, Sienna realized Luca wasn’t fearless at all. He was terrified. Terrified of needing someone, of loving someone. Terrified they would eventually leave anyway. Sienna squeezed his hand gently.

⸻ The next morning… Charlotte walked into her office carrying breakfast for all three of them. She stopped. Her smile vanished. Her office had been destroyed. Drawers emptied onto the floor. Books ripped from shelves. Glass shattered. The painting behind her desk slashed cleanly down the center. Nothing had been stolen. Only ruined. James and Darrien reached her seconds later. Neither spoke. Charlotte slowly stepped into the wreckage. Her gaze settled on one object that had been carefully placed in the center of her desk. A single white rose. Its petals stained with crimson paint. Beneath it lay a handwritten note.

But underneath all of that was the sharper, unfinished ache Richard had left behind—the phantom press of his fingers, the low promise that he could ruin me deeper than his son ever would. I showered longer than necessary, scrubbing until my skin felt raw, as if I could wash both of them off me. It didn’t work. When I looked in the mirror, my lips were still slightly swollen and there was a fresh reddish mark high on the side of my neck that I couldn’t quite hide with my hair. I chose a high-neck sweater anyway.

Thorne pressed, "the council rejected this woman three years ago on the grounds that she was unfit to influence pack leadership. Now she's sitting across from you negotiating twenty percent of our territory, and you expect us to believe that's a coincidence?" "I expect you to remember," Kade said, voice going cold in a way that made even Thorne go quiet, "that the council's grounds for rejecting her three years ago were wrong. She wasn't unfit. She was underestimated, by every wolf in this hall, including me. And I have spent three years living with the consequences of that mistake." He turned to address the wider chamber now, not just Thorne, his voice carrying to every corner of the room.

Everyone tensed. "Relax," he said, looking at my dad. "I'm not here as a colonel anymore. I quit this morning." He tossed a folder onto the mud at my feet. It slid open. Photos — concrete walls, broken doors, claw marks ten feet high. "Site 7 had a breach at 0600," he said. "Not from outside. From inside. Level three." My dad picked up a photo, went pale. Jonah whispered, "What is it?"

I felt like crawling under a rock and hiding. But then I knew something must have gone wrong, I had my designs, but what could possibly have gone wrong? I didn’t want to let her words get to me, even though they did but I couldn’t create a scene aside from the one I just created. "I'll have the design ready tomorrow," I said confidently. Aiden nodded. "I'm looking forward to seeing it." I went back to my desk and tried to retrieve the file, but it showed that it was corrupted. I was devastated. How could this happen?