Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 77051 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77051 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
They called her worthless.
They never expected her to fight back.
River Quinn is done playing nice. After enduring years of online harassment from a pack of anonymous cowards, she’s hit her limit. The insults. The threats. The sick messages that keep her up at night. When the hate turns physical—doors left unlocked, shadows that shouldn’t be there—River turns to the only place the dark web.
She isn’t looking for justice.
She’s looking for vengeance.
Enter him. A masked vigilante who offers protection in exchange for secrecy. He’s dangerous. Silent. Untraceable. And he promises one thing—he’ll make them cry.
But River doesn’t know the man behind the mask is someone she already knows. Someone she loathes. Her cocky, arrogant coworker, Gage Dawson, who pushes all her buttons and steals the last cup of coffee. The one man she’d never willingly accept help from.
Too bad he’s been obsessed with her for years.
Too bad he’s the only one standing between her and the monsters who want to break her.
Too bad he's about to show her just how deadly he can be—for her enemies... and her heart.
Dark secrets. Masked desire. And a revenge plan that might just end with love.
Make Them Cry is a steamy, twisted enemies-to-lovers vigilante romance full of sharp banter, dark humor, and one possessive hero with a vigilante streak and a very dirty mouth. Buckle up. This one’s going to hurt so good
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
PROLOGUE
RIVER
I tell people I love my job and watch their shoulders drop in relief. As if passion is a shield. As if saying it out loud makes it true all the time.
Most days it is. I’m a video game developer at NovaPlay Studios, and there’s a high I chase that nothing else touches. Like the moment a broken loop finally runs, the second an enemy AI chooses exactly what I taught it to and my whole screen feels like fireworks. I live for the hum of the office before sunrise, the burn of coffee gone cold, and the tiny triumphs that string together into a world.
And then there’s the part where the world strings me up.
The first messages a year ago were gnats—annoying, harmless, buzzing around my DMs. “Hack.” “Try harder.” I swatted and kept coding. Then the gnats became hornets. Organized. Mean. They learned my name. They learned my face. I’m the visible one on our dev diaries, the cheerful voice in the behind-the-scenes. When someone hates a feature, they hate me with their whole chest. Threads spin out under my interviews like oil slicks—shiny, poisonous, impossible to clean.
I mute. I block. I pretend I’m Teflon. But Teflon scratches.
They critique my work. Then my body. Then my voice. Then my right to exist. It’s ridiculous how quickly your brain will nod along to strangers armed with avatars and bad grammar. It’s easier to believe the worst because the worst is familiar; it’s the voice I already use on myself when I’m tired and the code won’t compile.
Some nights I stare at my ceiling and negotiate with the dark. If I push harder, if I smile wider, if I disappear entirely—would they stop?
They don’t.
I keep going anyway. I plant my feet. I promise myself I won’t give a mob of ghosts the satisfaction of watching me quit the one thing that makes me feel like I’m more than a pair of hands at a keyboard.
And then the comment lands.
Not on my feed, but on Cathedral, the social network for our developers and players. A username I don’t recognize. Five words and a photo.
River Quinn lives here.
A grainy shot of my porch. My black-and-white welcome mat. The cracked flowerpot I never replaced. My ribs cinch so tight I can’t pull a full breath. I check the locks even though I’m already inside. I pull the blinds even though they were already closed. Terror makes you do things in duplicate. Triple.
My phone keeps buzzing, the notifications stacking into a tower I can’t climb down from. I scroll until my thumb aches, until the screen blurs, until my reflection—tired, puffy-eyed, not the cool girl from the dev diaries—stares back at me like she’s asking what we did to deserve this.
I’ve loved things that hurt me before, but never like this. Never where the thing I love—building worlds, finding the logic thread and following it out of the maze—becomes the very reason people think I should stop breathing.
“Don’t read the comments,” everyone says. As if the comments aren’t in my inbox, in my mentions, in my mailbox. As if they aren’t in my head.
I tell myself to code. To work. To focus on the boss fight tuning or the pathfinding bug in Level Twelve. But my hands hover above the keys, useless birds.
There are reasons I love and hate this job, and lately they stack like bad Jenga pulls. One more piece and the whole thing will topple. And then there’s the reason in human form—the one I’d rather not examine too closely because it complicates everything.
Gage Dawson.
He’s the kind of gorgeous that makes you forget your own name for a second—dimples, green eyes, all sun-through-glass and sharp edges. He’s also a walking red flag: brilliant, cocky, and the exact wrong person to make my heart trip when he leans over my shoulder to point at my code. He’s praise and threat in the same breath. He’s a problem I don’t have bandwidth for, and somehow the only person whose voice can cut through the noise in my head.
I hate that I notice him. I hate how much I want him to notice me back.
Another ping. Another laugh-cry emoji. Another “we know where you live” whispered through a screen.
I square my shoulders. I put my fingers on the keys and tell myself that if fear wants my life, it will have to pry it from my code-stained hands. My heart still sprints. My throat still burns. The mob still chants.
But the game needs me.
And, God help me, I need the game.
I need something steady when everything else shakes. Even if the ground I’m standing on is cracking. Even if the devil with dimples is smiling from two desks over.
ONE
RIVER
There’s a sign above the NovaPlay Studios office coffee maker that says PLEASE BE CONSIDERATE in Comic Sans, which tells you everything you need to know about the moral fiber of this place.