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When my roommate Sutton woke up from a wet dream, she was literally glowing. She claimed it was the most mind-blowing romantic experience of her life—the man’s silhouette, his scent, his body heat felt impossibly real.
Even crazier? When she checked her phone, there was a strange new number saved in her contacts. It belonged to the man from her dream.
While the rest of us shrieked about destiny, our moody roommate Jessamine just stared at the screen and dropped a chilling warning: "Things that come looking for you in dreams should stay buried."
We all wrote her off as a jealous freak.
That is, until I started noticing Sutton’s face growing more haggard by the day—and the fact that her "perfect boyfriend" refused to speak a single word to her.

I ranked first and snagged the most prestigious job offer in the city. Yet, not a single person congratulated me.
Because for the past twenty years, every top student who received this offer from the medical school "committed suicide" that very night.
Reporters blocked the school gates, grinning as they asked if I planned to jump off a building or swallow a bullet. My roommate grabbed my collar, screaming curses, wishing me dead.
Too bad they all completely miscalculated. I come from a filthy rich family, I’m perfectly sane, and top psychologists have signed off that I have zero suicidal tendencies. I have no reason to die.
So, I looked straight into the live cameras and declared: "If my body is found tomorrow morning, it’s not suicide. It’s murder!"
After all, for that final exam, I turned in a blank paper.

For six years, my mother Isolde believed I had committed an unforgivable sin. Under the guise of "reforming my character," she continuously injected me with neurotoxic antibiotics, confining me to a wheelchair to act as a crippled companion to my sister, Alondra.
My entire family silently condoned this punishment, favoring my sister who was merely faking her paralysis. I had long since surrendered all my dignity, numbly enduring every injustice.
On my nineteenth birthday, I humbly begged her to stop the injections for just one day. I didn't want to look pathetic in front of my childhood sweetheart, Joren.
Moments later, I uncovered the cruel truth on the balcony: my sister’s legs had healed long ago. Six years of agony had been nothing but a staged performance.
The long-accumulated drug toxicity suddenly erupted inside my body. I tumbled to the floor together with my wheelchair. Summoning the last ounce of my strength, I managed to reach a bottle of pills meant to alleviate the toxicity.
As my consciousness faded, a faint, hopeless wish lingered in my heart: I thought that if I just fell asleep, I might regain feeling in my legs when I woke up.
When I opened my eyes again, I realized with horror—I was already dead.

My fiancé, Nathan, always said that decisions shouldn't be based on closeness, but on urgency.
At a car crash scene, he rushed my best friend, Roxanne, to the hospital first because her cuts looked deeper. When my mother was dying of cancer, he gave her hard-won experimental medication to Roxanne’s mother instead, claiming her condition was more critical.
Time after time, I convinced myself he was just being fair. He was just being rational.
On Roxanne’s twenty-ninth birthday, she cried that her secret boyfriend had stood her up. I stayed behind to drink with her. Knowing Nathan was on his way to pick me up, I hid behind the sofa, planning to jump out and surprise him.
But when he pushed the door open and didn’t see me, he didn't look for me. He walked straight to Roxanne, pulled her into his arms, and kissed her fiercely.

On our wedding day, Jovan Caruso—Don of the Caruso family, and the man I’d loved since I was eighteen—died in a car bomb on his way to the church.
Three weeks later, his estranged twin came home to take his place. Same eyes. Same voice. Same hands that used to hold mine.
Then I heard him through his mother’s door.
Jovan isn’t dead. He faked it—for another woman.
I only ever asked him for one thing. He broke it.
So I’m going to give him exactly what he gave me: a funeral.

I died on the day I was supposed to marry Grayson.
Because my sister Delilah had her heart "broken," my family decided to bring her to our farm in Ashwood to heal through horseback riding. The wedding was postponed.
I lay in the stable at the Clarke family farm, dialing my mother's number with blood-covered fingers.
All she said was: "What kind of game are you playing now? You think if you act pitiful we'll come running? Vivienne, enough!"
My fiancé Grayson was even more brutal: "It's just a postponement, not a cancellation. If you can't handle that, then let's just call the whole thing off—I'll marry Delilah instead."
This was the last time they would disappoint me.
And the last time I would call for help.
I lay in my own pool of blood, already without breath. They thought I was just throwing a tantrum, hiding somewhere to sulk. They thought if they ignored me long enough, I'd come crawling back to apologize.
But they didn't know.
I was already dead.

Ever since the day I was born, my parents blamed me for every stroke of bad luck that befell our family, calling me a cursed child.
In my past life, when I became pregnant, a child’s whisper began ringing inside my head, and time after time, I chose to trust it.
The first time, I listened to its warning and blocked my parents’ phone numbers. That decision led to them dying in a horrific car crash while trying to reach me.
The second time, seduced by its words, I rushed to a hotel to catch my husband cheating, only to crash a crucial meeting and ruin his multi-million-dollar deal, leaving an unbridgeable fracture in our marriage.
The third time, that gentle voice persuaded me to sign the divorce papers, walk away penniless, and foolishly wait for my husband to come back to me.
In the end, I landed in prison, gave birth in a cold cell, and met a miserable death.
When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day of my pregnancy checkup.

The night my sister, Quinn, got her registered nurse license was supposed to be Jude's big moment—down on one knee, proposing.
Instead, Garrett showed up. The same animal who assaulted Quinn in the redwood forest six years ago and drove our mother to her death in the ocean.
Her future mother-in-law took back the ring on the spot, and her fiancé trailed after her like a kicked puppy.
The entire town of Hawkins went from pity to disgust when they looked at us.
Seven days later, the deputy sheriff stood in my kitchen, staring at the twenty-second batch of bubbling meat sauce...

During routine rounds, I never gave Linus Crewe a second thought. Nineteen years old, diagnosed with persistent hallucinatory disorder, just another trust fund kid tossed into the psych ward like garbage by his own family.
But that day, he locked eyes with me and claimed that the moment his skin touched someone else's, he could see their deepest, darkest secrets.
I scoffed. As a female doctor who married into money, harbored a thirst for revenge, and kept a secret lover on the side, someone seeing through my facade was my ultimate nightmare.
I thought he was just playing mind games.
Until he recounted, word for word, things even my husband didn't know. He just smiled and said: Then tell me, Dr. Hollister... why is your heart racing when you look at me?

When my husband admitted he'd fallen for Ophelia—the girl my parents raised in my place—I divorced him and went home to the woman who raised me.
Darius tried everything to win me back. I said no every time.
Then Mom's heart gave out. The ambulance pulled up to our door, and Darius stepped in front of it.
"Bronwyn, I know you can't stand Ophelia. I'll put her on a plane tonight. Just come home, and you can have anything you want."
"Are you really going to stand here and watch your mother suffer because you're too proud?"
She was gray on the stretcher, barely breathing. I said yes.
After that, he did whatever I asked. He put shares of his company in my name. Even my birth parents—who'd spent ten years punishing me for not being Ophelia—suddenly couldn't do enough for me.
I believed them. I was one signature away from handing Darius the patent that could save Calder Capital.
Then, on my birthday, I stopped at a bakery to pick up the cake I'd ordered for myself—no one else ever remembered—and glanced through the window of the restaurant next door.
Darius was in there, celebrating Ophelia's birthday. A little boy sat on her lap—three, maybe, with Darius's dark eyes. And Genevieve, my mother, was sliding a stack of papers across the table: the transfer of the Croft family shares.
"Ophelia, darling, you've been through so much. When can you finally come home to us?"
Darius caught her wrist. "Genevieve, watch what you say around Bronwyn about the transfer. Hugo almost blew it last time."
I went very still.
Then I smiled, tucked the cake box under my arm, and walked in.

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 to London without a word.
Four years later, I walk into my old tailor's shop in Chicago and run straight into the happy family: my ex, my parents, and my very pregnant little sister. They're sure I've come crawling back. They're sure I'm still bitter, still alone, still desperate for the man they handed to her.
So when I tell them I'm married now, they laugh. When I tell them my husband and daughter just landed at O'Hare, they call me a liar.
And when they decide to lock me away “for my own good,” they're about to find out exactly whose family they just declared war on.

The rain glistened over the harbor asphalt the night I meant to tell him I was pregnant — to lay out all my quiet hopes for our wedding and our future. That was the night I was stolen away.
I screamed for help from a city stitched with police tape and hollow warehouses, where every thread of trust had already frayed. The man who should have trusted me brushed my pleas aside.
As answers began to surface, what we once called love soured into guilt, consuming obsession, and cold, calculated cruelty. Blue gemstones glint amid burned‑away proof, storm‑lashed docks bear witness. And I am the voice they will never manage to bury.

Lysander’s ex-girlfriend, Evangeline, suggested a hiking trip. Out of obligation to me as his fiancée, he brought me along.
We got lost in the woods and trespassed onto the territory of his half-brother, Orion.
When Orion pointed a gun at us and forced him to choose—
In my past life, he chose me.
As a result, Evangeline was sold to a rival, Matthias, and was tortured to death. I spent the rest of my life bearing the full weight of Lysander’s hatred.
In the third year of our marriage, I lay in a hospital bed after a miscarriage. He stood coldly beside me and said, "Now you know how it feels to lose the love of your life."
Reborn into this life, as Orion’s gun points at me and Evangeline once again, I make the choice for him.
I’m leaving the chance to survive to his true love.

In bed, he gripped my hips, whispering, "Principessa." In public, he was Cosimo—the ruthless mafia don who dismissed me with an icy, "Piccola."
For three years after he bought me, he never touched me. But a year ago, when Caterina returned, everything changed. He became a man possessed, tearing my dresses to shreds in the dead of night, claiming me with wild fury. He even promised to marry me in seven days.
On a storm-drenched afternoon, clutching my positive pregnancy test, I rushed to his private club to surprise him.
But as my hand touched the doorknob, Cosimo’s cold warning drifted through the door.
"Marcellino, know your place as a double. My things—especially Serenella—are strictly off-limits."
My blood ran cold. I peeked through the gap.
Cosimo sat on the sofa, completely indifferent. And by the pool table stood a man with a face identical to his.

They pulled my husband Beckett’s car out of the Avery River at four in the morning.
I was sitting in the reception area of the Ardenvale police station, having waited all night. Everyone thought I was just the pathetic wife—the one who had been humiliated at her mother-in-law’s birthday banquet, went home early, and panicked when her husband never returned.
No one knew that from the moment I dialed 911, this was exactly the news I had been waiting for.
He was dead. And I was the one who made it happen.

On the night my grandmother died, my husband Kael came home trailing blood.
His leather motorcycle jacket was soaked dark red, yet he flashed a savage grin: "I wiped the floor with those bastards tonight!"
For three years, he had treated our home as nothing more than a pit stop between reckless street races.
I’d finally had enough. "After the funeral, we're getting a divorce."
Before the words fully left my mouth, my phone rang. It was his riding partner, Lunn, his voice choking with sobs: "Sera... Kael drove off the cliff tonight. They only recovered bloody pieces of his helmet!"
But the "dead man" was standing right in front of me...

I got off work two hours early, hoping to surprise my boyfriend whom I had just bailed out for $30,000.
I pushed the bedroom door open. The surprise was on me—my stepsister Chloe was straddling Dorian. The same man who, just three days ago, sat crying on the police station floor swearing "I only have you," now slowly lit a cigarette and asked if I wanted to join them.
I thought that was the worst moment of my life.
I was wrong.
When the hand that had just been caressing Chloe gripped my throat and hoisted me into the air, I finally saw the truth. Dorian Vane, the guy who humiliated me at our high school prom ten years ago, hadn't changed at all.

My adopted sister, Cordelia, conspired with her biological mother to harvest my organs alive, yet she had the audacity to claim I paid thugs to rape her.
My biological parents didn't bother to ask for the truth. They cursed me, calling me a vicious bastard, and threatened to break my legs.
My fiancé, Caspian, coldly announced the cancellation of our engagement, declaring he would marry the very murderer who killed me.
I had been dead for exactly three days. No one cared. My body was rotting back in a moldy storage room.
Through it all, my soul was trapped in the manor, forced to witness this absurd farce.
But what they didn't expect was that when they finally learned of my death—
Everyone went completely insane.

My five-year-old son, Emrys, was poisoned by the deadly "Silver Eclipse." The only cure, Moonbloom Serum, had been seized entirely by my husband, Corvin, to save it for his nine-month-pregnant mistress, Melisande.
He froze all my bank accounts, forcing me to pawn the ring that symbolized my status as Luna and brave the dangerous black market just to secure the antidote.
But by the time I rushed back to the hospital, covered in blood, my child’s organs had already failed. He was gone.
When I threw the death certificate and divorce papers in Corvin’s face in despair, he just looked at me with mockery, accusing me of using our own flesh and blood to put on an act for his attention.
At that moment, all my love for him died completely. I took my son’s ashes, left the Ashmere pack, and decisively severed a mate bond that had tied us together for years...

The morning of our wedding, Dante Russo led the hit that wiped out my family.
Branded a traitor, stripped of my name, I spent three years scrubbing blood from dog kennels at the docks. I lost my hands, my music, and three babies I never got to hold.
Then I learned the truth: there was no hit. My parents and the man I loved staged it all—to teach me a lesson, because my adopted sister Isabella cried that I’d hurt her.
Now Dante is marrying Isabella. And he wants me there on my knees, pouring her champagne.
I said yes.
But I bled out on the concrete the night before.
They think I’m sulking. They smash everything I ever gave them to punish me for not showing up.
And when my body is finally wheeled into their wedding in a black bag, the most dangerous men in Gotham City will learn what they’ve done.
Too late.

I've been to four weddings. I never made it through a single one.
Not because I didn't love enough. Not because they weren't good enough. It was because every time — right at the moment I was supposed to say I do — my parents would appear on cue, fall apart on cue, and burn everything to the ground on cue.
For years I thought they hated me. Thought they'd given all their love to my dead sister, Claudia, and had nothing left. Then my brother-in-law said something that cracked me open: Any one of those three men — if you'd married him, you wouldn't be alive today.
So which is it? Were they protecting me, or destroying me?

Thirty thousand feet in the air, inside the sealed cabin of a commercial airliner, my five-year-old daughter vanished into thin air while I took a thirty-minute nap.
I tore through the lavatories, the galleys, and every overhead bin. The only thing I found was her stuffed bunny, the one she never let out of her sight.
What was even more terrifying was the crew and the passengers. As if perfectly rehearsed, they all insisted I had boarded the plane alone. They even gaslit me in front of everyone, claiming I was mentally unstable and had hallucinated a daughter.
They took turns pushing me, trying to force me into self-doubt and submission. Not a single person offered to help me look. The entire plane was covering up a sinister crime.
If this plane was going to hide my child and protect the guilty, then I would tear this hypocritical aircraft apart with my bare hands.

I was murdered. My body was dumped on the riverbank.
The detective leading the case is Brennan Carter — my husband. He has sworn to find the killer of this "unidentified female." He doesn't know the victim is me.
I've been missing for seven days. My colleagues and supervisors keep calling Brennan to ask where I am. Dismissing it as a tantrum, he's spent the week doing one thing: celebrating his mistress Tessa's birthday.
It wasn't until my phone turned up at the crime scene that it finally hit him — the wife he'd wished would disappear might actually be gone.

Four years ago, Giovanni dumped me in front of everyone at an upscale restaurant. Two weeks later, he was engaged to Rosanna. I made a fool of myself begging on his doorstep, became the laughingstock of Ferro City.
Four years later, he runs into me at Casa Valentino, assumes I'm destitute, and offers me a job as a cleaner for him.
What he doesn't know is that the plainly dressed woman standing before him is the wife of Don Alessandro Valentino—the man the entire underworld bows to.

The night before the gala where my rich family would finally claim me as their real daughter, I sent an email to my future self.
Have Mom and Dad really accepted me?
Does Spencer still hate me?
Julian and I are married by now, right?
A second later, my inbox exploded.
Dozens of photos, one after another, loading faster than I could scroll. Every single one was Julian—my Julian—wrapped around Camille. Kissing her. Cradling her face like she was something precious.
The blood drained out of me.
Then the voice messages started. And the voice was mine—older, hoarse, recorded somewhere I didn't recognize, and raw with panic.
"They're going to kill you—"
"Mom and Dad want to make it up to Camille, so tomorrow at the gala they're going to stage an accident. A fire. They burn your legs on purpose—you'll be crippled, Cora. In a wheelchair for the rest of your life—"
"Spencer leaks the videos. He says the only way Camille gets to be an Ashcroft again is if you're destroyed—"
"And Julian—he's so terrified you'll expose the truth and hurt her that he's the one who has you committed. He signs the papers himself."
The last message was barely a voice at all. Just breath, thin and failing.
"Cora. Don't go back."

The night I collapsed at my desk from acute appendicitis, my husband’s phone rang thirty-seven times. He didn't answer a single one.
When he finally strolled into my hospital room the next day, his excuse was that he had been entertaining clients all night and his phone was on silent.
"A multi-million dollar contract versus a minor surgery—which do you think is more important?" Nathan asked, adjusting his cuffs. "As the CEO's wife, I’d expect you to have some sense of the bigger picture."
I didn't say a word. I just nodded.
Not because I agreed with him, but because the first thing I saw when I woke up from anesthesia was his secretary's latest social media post: a sky ablaze with green aurora, and Nathan with his arm around her shoulders, his back to the camera.
Thinking I had finally learned my place, my husband looked thoroughly satisfied. He casually mentioned that once things settled down, he would officially hand over my position as Project Director to her, "so you can relax a bit."
But he didn't know.
He didn't need to wait for things to settle down.
I didn't want the position anymore. I didn't want his company. And him? I didn't want him, either.

My mother-in-law, Dorothy, sneered that I dressed like a janitor. My husband, Adrian, called my design sketches "a waste of fabric." Even the son I carried for nine months called me an embarrassment, saying he wished his dad’s secretary, Madison, was his mother.
For eight long years, I was nothing but an unpaid maid in this house.
Until today, when the doctor told me severe exhaustion was causing my heart to fail. And my eight-year-old son just pointed at the bag of medicine in my hand, shrieking, "You just have a headache! Why are you wasting money on medicine?"
I didn't argue. I didn't cry. I went home, opened the bottom drawer of Adrian’s desk, and signed the divorce papers he had been secretly preparing.
In their wildest dreams, they could never imagine that the sole trigger condition for my late mother's $50 million trust fund was for me to leave this man.

I thought Auden was the most devoted husband in the world—until the day I regained my sight and recognized him on the front page: a serial killer who had murdered eight blonde women.
I had to play blind. I swallowed the liquid the maid brought me—a brew soaked in dead people's eyeballs. I chewed on a human molar in my dinner. I sat perfectly still as I watched him fuck our maid right in front of me, not daring to let a single expression slip.
Because the exact second my vision returned, an anonymous text had popped up on my phone: Don't let Auden know you can see.

In my past life, I died in a freezing, damp basement.
The person who destroyed me was Evelina, the daughter of my father’s mistress. She set a trap at a charity gala, dragged my reputation through the mud, and forced me into a hellish marriage—all so she could strip away everything that rightfully belonged to me.
When I opened my eyes again, I was twenty-two. The gala that sealed my fate was happening tonight.
Before the banquet officially began, I seamlessly swapped two champagne flutes, handing her meticulously woven trap right back to her. When the scandal detonated, sending shockwaves through the ballroom, my eyes landed on Killian—the Vance family's notoriously cold-blooded illegitimate son.
The trust fund my mother left me was still firmly under my control. I walked straight up to him and laid my chips on the table.
My enemies had retreated to the shadows, waiting to strike back. But I was going to use their own conspiracies as stepping stones, clawing back everything I owned, one piece at a time.

To save my mother's life and pay for her experimental cancer treatment, I had to take a night shift at an exclusive private club.
That night, Elias Sinclair had been drugged. He grabbed my wrist, his eyes wild and burning, and whispered, 'Don't go.
Two months later, a constant, sickening wave of nausea confirmed my worst fear: I was pregnant.
The Sinclair family didn’t waste any time. Within days, a contract was shoved in my face. The house and millions of dollars would be mine, but the child would belong to them. The price? I could never see my baby again.
I signed the paper, took the money, and fled the country, thinking our paths would never cross again.
Five years later, I returned to Koren City, wanting nothing more than to quietly care for my ailing mother.
But the one man I swore to avoid blocked my path, smelling of whiskey and dark intent.
"Are you avoiding me, June?"

Seven years ago, I was Velmoor City’s youngest surgeon. A bloodied nursing assistant knelt at my feet, weeping that her thug boyfriend was going to beat her to death. I gave her my guest room.
On her chemo bed, my mother gripped my hand, begging me to kick that woman out. I said she had nowhere else to go.
Later, I caught her wearing my pajamas in my own home. Then, I caught her and my husband naked in his office. Immediately after, a fatal medical error was pinned on me, and my medical license was revoked.
My husband looked at me arrogantly and said: I can liquidate everything I own to settle this for you. On one condition—divorce.
What he didn’t know was that I was pregnant. On the day of the divorce, the judge read out the division of assets: $26.30.
Seven years later, I took a catering gig at a billionaire’s mansion. Less than half an hour into the banquet, his seven-year-old daughter pointed at my seven-year-old daughter. “She stole my ten-million-dollar diamond necklace!”
I looked up and finally recognized him. The billionaire was my "bankrupt" ex-husband. And the woman clinging to his arm, dripping in diamonds, was the nursing assistant who had once knelt at my feet.

I was Alessandro Romano's wife in name only—the mafia godfather of Belluno City.
We had the most extravagant wedding this city had ever seen: three thousand guests, flowers lining every street. Everything except a legal marriage certificate.
Over three years, he promised to sign the papers twenty-two times. He canceled every single one.
He would buy two identical necklaces, hanging one around my neck and the other around his mistress's, trading a night spent comforting her for a dismissive apology to me.
After the twenty-one broken promise, I stopped waiting.
I packed my bags and left for the one city he vowed never to enter.
What I didn't know: after I left, the man who ruled the underworld completely lost control.

Alexandra Moretti has not taken a single step down the aisle when the cathedral doors open behind her.
A nurse comes in with a newborn and a birth record. The mother is in surgery. The father, she says, is the groom.
Vincent DeLuca does not deny it. Neither does his family. They offer ten minutes in the priest's office and a simple arrangement: the boy will be provided for quietly, and Alexandra will still be Mrs. DeLuca.
They have misjudged her.
This was never a wedding. It was a merger, and Alexandra is the only person in the room who read every clause. She sets the ring on a pew, orders her security chief to recover the signed papers, and walks out of St. Patrick's before the ink is dry.
Her father does not stop her.
By tonight, the DeLucas will find out how much of their empire was only ever borrowed.

Married for five years, I always trusted my husband Jasper's excuses.
He had been stationed at our branch hospital for two years without returning home, claiming his administrative duties were simply too overwhelming.
That was until a whistleblower’s letter exposed the tip of an iceberg: a major patient privacy breach in the maternity ward—a scandal he had casually pinned on an intern nurse.
Facing my father’s suspicions, I decided to head to the branch hospital to investigate for myself, keeping the trip a secret from Jasper.
The moment I stepped into the hospital, I collided head-on with absurdity.
Jasper’s mistress, Zayda, was wearing a custom-tailored lab coat despite having zero medical credentials. She was making fun of a pregnant woman's ultrasound and waltzing in and out of clinical areas as she pleased.
Any staff member who dared to step in faced immediate retaliation. The culprit held all the power, while the innocent took the fall.
Intimidated by the hospital president's authority, everyone suffered in silence. But as the tension finally boiled over and Zayda's arrogance peaked, my husband was racing back from a meeting just to back up his mistress.
I stood my ground, waiting for the inevitable confrontation.

On our seventh anniversary, my fiancé left me standing outside the courthouse so he could drive another woman to the hospital. It was the ninety-ninth time he'd called off our wedding for her.
That night, he booked the restaurant where we'd had our first date. He wore the tie I'd given him. For a few minutes, I let myself believe he finally understood.
Then he asked me to eat faster. She wanted dessert.
So I stopped counting. I signed my transfer papers, packed up seven years, and boarded my flight without looking back.
By the time he realized I wasn't bluffing, I was already gone. Now he's the one left waiting, and all the roses in the world won't bring me back.

To marry Vincent Romano, I survived twenty-eight near-death experiences over five years.
The first: city hall's foundation collapsed — three broken ribs. The second: a truck rollover — my right leg nearly amputated. The twenty-seventh: a chandelier in the bridal shop, three days unconscious.
All of Seren City laughed at me. Romano's most cursed bride-to-be. Yet I loved him still.
Until the twenty-eighth time.
When the bomb detonated outside city hall, I threw myself over Vincent on instinct. The blast shifted my organs and shredded my back. The day my stitches came out, I felt no relief at having survived.
Because I stood outside the study and heard his voice.
"Her organs were badly damaged. She almost actually died." Antonio's horror was audible. "Vincent, you used to treat her so well—"
"People change." A pause, then quieter: "I did want to marry her once. But before Amelia, I had no idea what it meant to truly want someone. I acknowledge the debt — I just can't spend my life repaying it." Another pause. "Father won't agree, and she won't let go easily."
"So." His voice turned to ice. "The only clean way out is to make her give up on her own. As long as Cassandra refuses to break the engagement, the accidents must continue. Until she walks away."

Three years of marriage. Three pregnancies.

Every time I confirmed I was pregnant, my sister-in-law Ophelia would walk into the chapel behind the manor.

Then my in-laws would drag me to the hospital and force me to abort the healthy baby.

The night after my third miscarriage, I dragged my weakened body to follow her into the chapel.

The moment I pushed open that door, my blood ran cold.

In that instant, I finally understood why my three children had to die.

I accompanied my husband, Kieran, down to the Antarctic station’s underground quarantine zone to rescue an ice-bacteria sample at negative forty degrees. Halfway there, he asked me to fetch some data. I was gone for exactly three minutes. When I came back, he had vanished.
The institute staff told me I had gone insane, wandering the halls searching for a husband who had been dead for three years.
They called Kieran’s mentor, Dr. Reiner. Through the phone, the old man wept, swearing that Kieran had fallen into the deepest ice rift in Antarctica three years ago. Not even his bones were recovered.
Branded a lunatic, I was thrown into a sealed bio-containment pod twenty miles away. I became a human guinea pig. Under endless rounds of experimental drugs, my organs failed one by one until I died on that cold metal table.
Then, I blinked. Kieran was standing right in front of me, rushing me to the lab...

Every time my husband’s adopted sister, Avey, had a tennis match, he would force a dark green concoction down my throat. As soon as it kicked in, my entire body would turn weak and aching.
He claimed it was a folk remedy, and I believed him.
In half a year, I lost twenty pounds, half my hair fell out, and I lost our four-month-old baby.
Until the night I overheard them whispering behind a cracked door—they had sought out a witch and cast a dark curse.
My forced standstill was the price for her endless stamina. All her fatigue and sports injuries were being directly transferred to me.
Late that night, listening to them plot to drain the life out of me, I made a choice. On the very night Avey won her championship, I climbed into a deep hibernation pod. I traded thirty days of absolute physical stasis to ensure she could never stop.

On the day of my prenatal checkup, I found out my husband, Caleb, was sleeping with his student.
That night, I spiked his Pinot Noir with poison. I watched him collapse, convulse, and take his agonizing last breath. Then, I dragged his body into the basement and sealed it inside an oak wine barrel.
For five years, I raised our daughter, Nora, on my own. I thought the secret would rot in the dark forever.
Until she told me: Daddy speaks to her from under the floorboards every night. His voice sounds muffled, like he’s talking through a thick blanket...

On our sixth wedding anniversary, my husband Jonathan brought his dead ex-girlfriend's sister into our home — despite my objections.

"Beatrice, are you even human? You can't even show compassion to a dying woman! How could someone so cold-hearted be a role model for Oliver!"

My son — the boy I'd raised for six years — swung his little fists at me and screamed: "Beatrice! If you don't let Isadora stay, I'll never speak to you again!"

That was the moment my heart turned to stone.

I signed the divorce papers and walked straight back into the courtroom — clawing my way back to the top.

Then they discovered her lies. Every. Single. One.

Jonathan fell to his knees before me, eyes red and brimming with tears: "Beatrice, do six years of marriage mean nothing to you anymore?"

My son clung to my legs, sobbing: "Mommy! Mommy, don't go! I know I was wrong! Mommy—"

I looked down at them. I felt nothing.

"Now take your mistress and your son — and get out of my life."

I turned and walked away without looking back.

I used to be so sick of the mafia's endless bloodshed. So, when I met Cassian, I hid my real name and willingly played the role of his sweet, obedient girl.
But three years of devotion only bought me a gut-wrenching betrayal.
When I was eight months pregnant, he tossed me into the dungeon like trash, all so he could marry a mafia heiress. To ensure his new fiancé’s child inherited the empire, he ordered his men to inject me with labor-delaying drugs.
They suffocated my baby inside me.

"You're just an orphan, only fit to be a mistress," he mocked, looking down at me. That single sneer shattered my last shred of hope for a normal life.
Lying in a pool of my own blood, I stopped fighting and let out a cold laugh.
Cassian, you stepped on my baby's life to climb to the power you crave. I hope to God you don't regret this. Because the woman you just pushed back into the abyss will become your worst, unreachable nightmare.

Following Aunt Helen’s sudden death and the exhausting funeral arrangements, strange things began happening at home.
A lingering warmth on an empty sofa. Faint footsteps echoing in the hallway late at night.
I couldn't shake the creeping certainty that a third person was hiding in the house with my husband and me.
My husband brushed it off, insisting it was nothing more than grief and severe insomnia playing tricks on my mind, and told me not to overthink it.
Then, one morning, he walked through the front door, briefcase in hand, his eyes heavy from an obvious all-nighter. "The institute's data was a total disaster," he explained with a tired sigh. "I was stuck at the lab all night."
I froze, completely at a loss.
"But you came home last night," I stared at him, my voice trembling. "We were in bed, making love for half the night."
He frowned, looking at me with the cold, clinical detachment of a doctor examining a patient. "Maeve, I didn't set foot in this house last night. You need to stop imagining things..."

Thirty-two times.
That was how many times Tristan had "tested" me during our three years together.
When I met Tristan Bennett, we were both hiding our true identities. He never mentioned he was the Bennett family heir, and I never brought up the surname Torrente. We were just ordinary college sweethearts in Ashborne City. He said he loved me, and I believed him.
The seventeenth time: driving across town late at night to deliver documents for him, I was run off the road and crashed into a guardrail, earning nine stitches in my forehead. His first words at the hospital were, "Can't you even drive properly? You delayed my business."
The twenty-sixth time: he owed money at an underground casino. He sent me to negotiate. A gun was drawn, and a bullet grazed my arm, soaking my sleeve in blood. The scar is still there. He never asked if I was in pain; he only cared if his debt was cleared.
The thirtieth time: he asked for my entire life savings for an "emergency." He turned around and used that money to buy someone else a new car.
I thought if I endured it all, we would eventually have a future.
Until he announced he was opening a casino and demanded ten million dollars. "The ultimate test," he called it. If I passed, he’d marry me.
I refused.
He immediately bought Aurelia Gallom a twenty-million-dollar mansion. Waving the property deed in my face, he said, "Vesna, I was just testing you. It's a shame you failed. We're done."
I didn't cry, and I didn't beg. The moment I walked away, I had never felt so free. He didn't know I was a Torrente, or that my father, Dario, owned the criminal underworld of this city. And he certainly never imagined that I would later marry Silvio Marchesi—the most powerful Mafia Boss in Ashborne City—and become the Donna of the Marchesi syndicate.

I'm an international flight purser. Every time I returned from a trip, I would find a woman’s item in my apartment that didn't belong to me.
The first time, it was a diamond earring on the bathroom counter. Gabriel said his mother left it behind when she visited. The second time, it was a pair of lace panties stuffed between the sofa cushions. He claimed his cousin's girlfriend left them when they crashed at our place, and his cousin even offered to buy us a brand-new sofa to apologize.
Time and time again, there was a flawless excuse for every single item.
Until the seventeenth time, when I deliberately hid one of my own lace bras under the sofa...

The most humiliating moment of my early life was when my father drove my mother and me out of our home. From a pampered heiress, I fell to the depths of a bar hostess. It was there that I encountered a man I would never forget for the rest of my life. After a one-night stand, I accepted his proposal—who could refuse someone they had admired for so long?

I thought I'd found redemption, but it turned out the pregnancy was a misdiagnosis! From then on, Raymond offered me nothing but money and sex. In this loveless marriage, I endured five years. Just when I thought my life would remain this way forever, he brought a little boy home.

Watching my stepsister's smug smile, my world crumbled. "Raymond, let's get a divorce!"

Three years ago, as Luna Gray, I secretly seduced Gabriel Ashford—heir to a powerhouse family—luring him into a scorching underground fling during our college days in Vale City. For three wild months, our passion burned hot and hidden, until I dumped him cold, leaving him reeling.

Now, I'm engaged to the Anderson family's polished gentleman—a strategic move that ignites Gabriel's explosive return from London. He's back in Vale City, transformed into a ruthless financial kingpin with the infamous "Big Cannon" nickname (earned from his handsome, towering build and the swirling rumors of his enormous dick—though only I know the truth: it's huge, and it wrecked me every time, pushing me to the brink of ecstasy I could barely endure).

Our secret past detonates, shocking Vale City's elite circles. Everyone braces for revenge from the ice-veined CEO, popcorn in hand. Instead, a viral video leaks: me straddling him in his top-tier ride on a foggy roadside, his dark eyes stormy as he grips my hips, slamming me against the steering wheel. We're grinding hard, my nails digging into his shoulders while he growls, "Feel how you own this cock, Luna? Beg for it." But in a heartbeat, he crumbles—eyes red, voice breaking: "Baby, I fucked up. Please, love me again?"

For three years, I was Adrian Vale's kept woman.
Pretty, useless, and so thoroughly spoiled that even his sister said I wouldn't survive three days without the Vales. I didn't bother arguing. Before I met Adrian, I'd been chair of the Global Financial Order Council. That job had nearly worked me to death. Now I didn't have to set an alarm or use my brain, and my monthly allowance ran to eight figures. Who in her right mind would give that up?
Then twelve overseas funds joined forces to short Vale Group. Adrian's father was forced out. His two older brothers were taken into custody. And Adrian, who had always been able to fix anything, found himself at a negotiating table with a pen pressed into his hand and a demand to surrender every share he owned.
One of the fund managers across the table looked me over and smiled. "Don't worry, Mr. Vale. Once your family’s bankrupt, we’ll take good care of your little songbird."
I was quiet for a long moment. If the Vales went under, where was I supposed to find another man this generous?
So just as Adrian was about to sign, I took the seat at the head of the table and called a number I hadn't used in ten years.
"Halt trading across the European markets. And tell the heads of these twelve funds to get here within thirty minutes and explain themselves—on their knees."

Three years. He worshipped me by day and bedded her by night.
I saw everything. I felt everything—she made sure of that.
So on the night of his coronation, I severed our bond and walked away.
He bled. He knelt. He begged.
Too late.
When I wore white again, it wasn't for him.

To buy my freedom, I made a deal with my father. I would play Lorenzo Hale’s fiancée, his shield, until he took the throne as Don. Then I’d swallow a black-market drug, fake my death.
For five years, I took bullets for Lorenzo. I tasted poison meant for him. I bled for him more times than I can count. The whole underworld said Corinne Moretti loved Lorenzo Hale so much it made her crazy.
The day he finally became Don, he married my sister Blair, declaring he would keep me as his mistress.
I didn’t cry. I didn’t fight. I simply started counting the days.
The drug was already in my blood. Seven days, and I’d be gone.
But by the time Lorenzo finally decided he wanted me to stay, I was already “dead.”