The Gang Lord's Sweetheart

Ella Bennett and her older brother Evan are twins. With a doctor for a father and a nurse for a mother, they were once an ordinary, happy family of four. That changed when Ella was sixteen; her father was inadvertently drawn into an internal power struggle within the "Black Hawks," the city's most powerful gang. A doctor friend of his—who served as the gang's in-house physician—had slipped the gang's core secrets to her father while attempting to defect, dying immediately afterward. Her father was abducted by the Black Hawks and vanished without a trace. Her mother was shot dead by gang members while searching for him. That day, Ella and Evan returned home to find their parents gone forever. There was no explanation. The two sixteen-year-olds were forced to face a brutal reality: they were orphans. Two years later. Eighteen-year-old Ella and Evan were scraping by, surviving the hardest two years of their lives on odd jobs. On Christmas Eve, they pooled their money to treat themselves to a deluxe pizza. Ella lost a game of rock-paper-scissors and headed out, scarf wrapped tight. At the pizza shop, while waiting for her order, her phone rang. It was Evan. She answered. On the other end came Evan’s scream—distorted by sheer terror: "Don't come back! Don't—" Then, a deafening crash. Then, the dial tone. Ella rushed home. The front door stood wide open. The living room looked like it had been ransacked. Evan’s phone lay beneath the sofa, its screen shattered. There was an unsent voice message: "Bring the item to ransom your brother—Black Hawks." Ella didn't know what "the item" was. But she knew who the Black Hawks were—the city's biggest gang. She hacked into the security camera at the entrance. The footage showed that less than fifteen minutes after she left, a squad of men in black had kicked down the door. Evan was dragged out and shoved into the trunk of a car. The leader’s wrist revealed a glimpse of a Black Hawk tattoo. Ella memorized that face. She rode her bicycle straight into Black Hawk territory—a fortress-like mansion. She scaled the wall, dodged patrol dogs, and crept inside by hugging the shadows—only to run headlong into a shirtless young man within the labyrinthine complex. He triggered the alarm. In a blind panic, Ella ducked into a laboratory with an open door. Inside a small refrigerator sat a row of exquisite little cakes. She was famished; she grabbed them and devoured every single one. The door was kicked open. A shirtless man—Cade, the gang’s second-in-command—stared at the empty plate with an expression of sheer horror. He turned to the person behind him and said, "She ate... all of the hallucinogenic cakes Leo concocted." The man behind him stepped inside. He wore a black shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his forearms and had striking blue-gray eyes. He looked down at Ella—cream still smudged at the corner of her mouth—and tilted his head slightly. He was Damian Crow, the young heir to the Black Hawk gang. She looked at him