Pampered by the Ruthless Boss: A Deceptive Sweetness

From the back cover

My last memory was the smell of ancient celluloid in a 21st-century archive, then a sharp chest pain. I woke up to the stench of gin and stale perfume, trapped in a stranger's body, in 1920s Chicago. My own mother, a faded vaudeville dancer, sold me to a notorious gang boss, Artie Gallo, for a sapphire cloche hat.

I found a flicker of connection with Leo, the kind projectionist, and risked everything to steal medicine for the starving poor. But when Artie discovered our secret, Leo, the only person I' d dared to trust, pointed a trembling finger at me. "She made me do it." The betrayal was a physical blow, worse than the whip that lashed my back in Artie's cursed cellar.

They threw me back in my room, broken and left to fester. The film, my last connection to my old life, gone with him. My body healed, but my soul was twisted into something cold and hard. How could he? How could the one pure thing I found in this nightmare turn out to be the cruelest blade?

When I finally emerged, adorned in garish makeup and a deceptively sweet smile, the old Clara was gone. I would become the woman Artie wanted, the woman this brutal world demanded. And I would make sure everyone who ever wronged me paid the price, even if it meant burying every last piece of my humanity.