Marriage

My water broke in the basement where my mafia husband had locked me up. Upstairs, doctors were waiting on his brother's widow.

I begged him over the guard's phone to let me go to a hospital. He heard me crying. Then he told the guard to keep the door shut until her baby was born.

I pressed a hand against my belly. Our daughter was still moving.

When footsteps stopped outside the cell, I called ...

My mother gave me her kidney. The price was my husband.
As the orderlies wheeled me toward surgery, Mom gripped my hand and begged through her tears: “Promise me you'll divorce Ansel. Your sister needs him.”
My husband had already signed the papers. “Give me one year,” he said. “Once Tam's back on her feet, we'll get remarried.”
I survived the operation. I signed away my marriage. Then I vanished ...

I chose Adrian Cole for a strategic marriage because he understood boundaries.

For three years, he never gave me a reason to regret it.

Then his new assistant fed him from her fork, took my seat in his car, and appeared on his arm at a charity gala while society reporters called them a perfect match.

I gave my husband three chances to remember that I was his equal. He used every one—then adm...

For five years, Reese was dead certain I couldn't survive without him. That arrogance was why he dared to strap me to a polygraph chair on my birthday. Why he looked me dead in the eye and said he regretted marrying me. Why he transferred the tickets for my birthday getaway to his first love, letting her lounge in my pajamas, sleep in my bed, and flaunt the heirloom my mother left me before she di...

He divorced me for a girl who reminded him of who I used to be.

For five years, I played the perfect wife.

I traded my motorcycle for a luxury car, my camera for boardroom meetings, and my freedom for the suffocating rules of his old-money world.

I changed everything about myself to make him happy.

But when he looked at me, all he saw was a cold, calculating socialite.

He told me he missed...

My daughter was running a fever. When I carried her downstairs, my sister-in-law was already waiting beside my husband Ethan Cole's car with her son in her arms.

Ethan hesitated. “Do you want me to take you?”

Before I could answer, Claire cut in.

“Ethan, it's Zack's preschool open house today. We're going to be late.”

“Besides…didn't we agree you weren't going to help her financially for a few...

The day Eamon got promoted to Associate Attending, I received an anonymous AirDrop.
It was a Live Photo.
Inside the physical therapy clinic, the same hands that slipped a wedding ring on my finger were gripping his ex-girlfriend’s waist.
He gave her a deep, lingering look before pressing his body weight against her.
In the brief loop of motion, her fingers were tangled in his hair, and her eyes fl...

When I was seven weeks pregnant, my husband, Jacob, seated his mistress and their secret son at the head table of our anniversary dinner.
In front of everyone, he said, "Ella hasn't given me a child in four years. Why should I keep waiting?" His mistress was already tired of waiting to take my place.
So I gave them what they wanted. I faked my death in the car crash his mistress had planned and wa...

I had been Lucan Ferretti's wife for five years. I had also been the woman who took a bullet meant for him.
Four years of fertility treatments. Four years of empty rooms where a nursery should have been. Then, the day I finally get a positive test, I find something else: two secret sons, funded by my husband's money, waiting in a house I was never supposed to find.
Their names? The ones Lucan and ...

Whenever my husband, a Mafia don, needs me to back down, out come the divorce papers. When my parents, practically Mafia royalty, want the same thing, they threaten to cut me out of the family.

The demand never changes. Whatever I have, my twin sister should get it.

There was a time when I argued. When I cried and asked why I was always the one who had to give something up.

Then a doctor pushes...

I spent six years trying to warm an emotionally distant husband and raising a son who learned to copy his coldness. On the day my civil assault case went to trial, they flew to Switzerland to comfort my husband's ex-girlfriend. When my five-year-old admitted he had deleted the strongest video evidence because he didn't want Vanessa to cry, the last bit of love in me went quiet. By the time they re...

"Who are you, really?" Lewis, the ruthless Mafia Godfather, cornered me in the elevator, his eyes filled with a twisted obsession as his fingers grazed the black butterfly tattoo on my collarbone.

He is completely addicted to my new face, my coldness, and my ruthless Wall Street tactics.

He is even willing to kick his beloved mistress out of the boardroom just to keep my attention.

If only he ...

I was once the most exquisite rose in New York's underworld.
Leander Castello's wife. The mafia godfather's treasured queen. The woman everyone envied.
I thought he would be my salvation, my forever.
Until he snapped me in half with his own hands and threw me into the filthiest pit like trash.
He said he needed to teach me what betrayal costs.
So I was handed over to the Mexican cartel boss, Carlo...

Typically, brides swap bouquets for good luck when wedding motorcades cross paths.
But in Liam’s Southern hometown, they had a twisted tradition: they swapped brides.

When our limousines met bumper-to-bumper, Kinsley leaned right past me. She pressed a lingering kiss to my fiancé’s cheek.
"Hope you don't mind, Rachel," she purred with innocent malice. "I’m stealing your groom."
The groomsmen ho...

Ten years into my marriage, I'd traded my paintbrush for a spatula and turned into Mrs. Holloway.

Ever since my sister Brooke moved in, my husband Bennett and my daughter Lucy had picked up a habit. Anytime Brooke and I disagreed, they put it to a vote.

On my birthday I wanted steak. Two hands went up for the salad bar Brooke liked. When I hadn't slept in weeks and wanted to see a therapist, the...

The night I found out I was pregnant, my seven-year-old son pointed at a little girl in a mommy vlogger's video on his iPad and said, softly:
"That's my sister."
I laughed and flicked his forehead.
The vlogger lived all the way down in New Orleans. He'd never even met them.
"She has a million followers, sweetie. Don't make stuff up."
"If you want a sister that badly, how about Mommy gives you one?...

For five years, my husband claimed he could not understand emotion.

I believed him, excused every broken promise, and taught myself to survive on scraps of attention.

Then I went to his office with news of our unborn child and heard him laughing with the woman who had helped him deceive me.

He had married me for a pureblood heir. Once the baby was born, he planned to throw me away.

He wanted...

Three years ago, Grant divorced me while I was pregnant.
That same day, I was in a car accident, and our baby didn’t survive. Grant never found out because he was celebrating another woman’s birthday.
Three years later, he decided that the son I had raised was his. He took the boy away without permission and exposed him to a cat, triggering a severe allergic reaction that nearly killed him.
When G...

Grant postponed our engagement three times. First, because Vivian was in the hospital. Second, because she was feeling low. Third, because her concert mattered more than our future.

So I asked the man who’d always been there—Adrian Kessler.

“Are you interested in marrying me?” He said yes without hesitation.

We set the date for the same night as Vivian’s concert.

While Grant was clapping for h...

Being born a Moretti daughter means one thing: the family owns you.

In my past life, Vivian thought she had what it took. She promised Dad she could handle it, swore up and down she'd make him proud. Six months later, she'd burned through three generations of work and left us with nothing but an empty shell. Our enemies found her eventually. Broke both her legs.

And me? I married Marco Rossi.

E...