Flash Marriage To The Vengeful CEO

After my family went bankrupt, I entered the entertainment industry to support my sister's education. In order to make money, I endured the advances of older men and even drank until I had stomach bleeding. My usually calm sister criticized me for being too eager for success and not respecting myself, but she used my money to help others and gain a good reputation. In order to get her a famous teacher, I exposed the scandals of her competitors. She accused me of being ruthless and malicious, but she didn't refuse the opportunities I fought for her. Later, she became a famous painter while I suffered from the revenge of her competitors, ruined my reputation, and accumulated huge debts. I asked her to ask her wealthy boyfriend for help, but she said, "Sister, I told you before that we should be kind and not have malicious thoughts. Look, you are now facing retribution!" She refused to help me in order to make me realize my mistakes. I was forced to jump off a building. When I opened my eyes, I was back to the day I entered the entertainment industry.

The passenger window bloomed into a spiderweb of cracks, and one razor-sharp sliver drew a searing, hot line across Amelia Hayes’s cheek. "Help me," she choked into the phone, but her husband, Ethan Caldwell, snapped: "Amelia, for God's sake, I'm in a meeting." A percussive blow, then a wave of encroaching silence. She awoke not on the hard-packed asphalt beside her car, but in her opulent master bedroom, the calendar marking three months after her wedding. Three months into a marriage that had already begun its slow work of killing her. Ethan stood by the window, his voice softening, "Yes, Jessica, tonight sounds perfect." Jessica Thorne, his true love, the shadow over Amelia's first life. The customary ache that had long occupied the space beneath her ribs did not flare, but rather receded, leaving behind a preternatural stillness—a silence so profound she could count the heavy, deliberate beats of the pulse in her wrist. For seven miserable years, she had given Ethan a desperate, unyielding devotion. She had endured his glacial distance, his brazen affairs, his emotional abuse, all for a flicker of his attention. She had become a shell, a caricature, ridiculed by Ethan's circle and condescended to by his family. The profound injustice, the sheer blindness of his indifference, was a bitter pill. The familiar, constricting tightness that had long defined her chest had vanished. In its place was a peculiar and unnerving lightness, as if some vital, heavy organ had been neatly excised, leaving behind a cavity that no longer knew how to ache. She recalled the final indignity from that first life: a vulgar scene at a gala involving Eleanor’s ashes. Ethan’s palm had struck her shoulder with such force that she stumbled two full steps backward; before her skull met the unyielding wall, she registered the faint, sickening pop of a vertebra in her own neck, his accusations echoing: "You are a disgrace." He comforted Jessica while Amelia's head reeled from the impact. That was the final insult. There were no tears, nor any tremor of rage. Her fingertips, which had so often trembled, now rested upon her knees with the weight and stillness of poured lead. She delivered a small velvet box to his penthouse. Inside: the wedding ring and a divorce decree. "I require you," she stated, her voice a thing of newfound clarity, "to be removed from my life. Permanently." She was reborn to be free.

On the morning of my wedding, I found a voice memo my fiancé of seven years had saved from his 22-year-old intern. But I still walked down the aisle, secretly pregnant with our child. Then, as we stood at the altar, she faked a faint. Blake dropped my hand and ran to her, leaving me alone. He called my heartbreak a "tantrum" while making his special tea-the one I taught him-for her in our apartment. He was certain our baby was his safety net, a guarantee I' d never leave. "She's not going to do anything," he told his mother on the phone while I was at the clinic. "Just let her blow off some steam." He thought my pain was a game and our baby was a bargaining chip. He was wrong. He found me in the recovery room, striding in with a cocky smile and a bouquet of lilies. The smile died when he saw me, pale in the hospital bed, and the flowers slipped from his grasp as he finally understood what I had done.

My husband, Don Lorenzo Bianchi, the man who once took ninety-nine lashes for me, had just locked me in a guest room. I was four months pregnant with our child, the heir to his mafia empire. My crime was throwing a glass of wine on his mistress, a woman he had moved into our home. She cornered me in the garden, gloating that once the baby was born, he would give it to her to raise as her own. Later, she shoved me down the grand staircase, then threw herself down after me, screaming to my husband that I had tried to kill her. As I lay in a pool of my own blood, Lorenzo rushed past me, scooping her into his arms and carrying her away without a single backward glance. To force me to apologize, he had my parents brought to my hospital room and brutally whipped until they collapsed at his feet. He was no longer the man who had 999 crystals sewn into my wedding dress. He was a monster who believed every lie she told and punished me for her crimes. How could the man who swore to love me forever become this cruel stranger? But he didn't know the truth. Days before the fall, I had secretly terminated the pregnancy. I took the urn containing our child's ashes, filed for divorce, and disappeared from his world forever.

I reached for my fiancé's phone to silence an alarm and found a hidden folder named "The Protocol." Inside was a spreadsheet that systematically dismantled my entire existence. Task 399: Buy blue hydrangeas. Note: Her favorite. For Denzel. Task 400: Schedule anniversary dinner. Note: Make sure she feels special. For Denzel. In that heartbeat, I realized the man I had loved for three years hadn't looked at me once without seeing a chore list left by his dead brother. I wasn't Elfrieda Stewart, the woman Jaxon Tate loved. I was a legacy project. The truth turned lethal at our engagement gala. When a massive chandelier detached from the ceiling, Jaxon didn't lunge for me. He tackled his "ex" Janice—who I later discovered was his secret wife—to safety. He left me standing in the center of the target to be crushed by shattering glass. But the cruelty didn't end there. On a "reconciliation" yacht trip, Janice pushed me overboard. Jaxon looked at me struggling in the freezing black water, then threw the life preserver to her. He saved the shark and left me to drown. I lost everything in that water, including the unborn child I hadn't even told him about. He thought I was dead. He thought he was free to play house with Janice. But my brother pulled me from the darkness. And when I resurfaced in Norway, wearing the ring of a man far more dangerous than Jaxon could ever dream of being, Jaxon realized too late that he had destroyed the only thing that could have saved him.

He remembered my childhood pet' s name, our first meeting, and my obscure tea brand, but for five years, Braylon couldn't remember I was allergic to shrimp. It glistened in my pasta, a cruel reminder of how little of me registered in his mind, especially as he laughed with a familiar blonde across the room. My stomach churned, not from the allergy, but from a deeper sickness. That night, at a sprawling rooftop party, Braylon handed Dallas Huff, a young blonde, a delicate bracelet-a replica of her grandmother's, a story he'd told me a hundred times. "Dallas, this reminded me of you," he said, his voice soft, intimate. She beamed, leaning into him, her eyes sparkling, then flickered to me with a triumphant, venomous gleam. When Dallas purred about a gallery opening, Braylon chuckled, "Eliza will be coming with us. Our anniversary dinner is that night." He turned to me, a forced smile pleading for me to play along. But I was done. "It's over, Braylon," I whispered, "And my name is Eliza." He looked genuinely lost, unable to recall my actual name, while Dallas and his friends mocked his forgetfulness. His eyes, wide and confused, searched my face. "Eliza? What are you talking about? Your name is... it's always been..." He trailed off, genuinely lost. A bitter taste filled my mouth. He remembered every trivial detail of Dallas' s life, but my actual name? It was a blank. Later, he left me stranded on a dark, winding road after I refused to apologize to Dallas. My phone was dead, and I stumbled, breaking my ankle. As I lay there, alone and injured, I sobbed, "Why did I stay? Why did I waste five years on him?" Braylon, meanwhile, drove away, a gnawing unease simmering beneath his anger, only to return to a horrifying scene.