I Ended Our Baby, Ended Him

My heart hammered. My Moleskine, my "Strike List," lay open on Ethan’s desk. Every betrayal, every point deducted from our marriage. One hundred points, and I’d be free. He’d already reached ninety-five. Then came the fire, raging through his ex, Olivia's, restaurant. Ethan, my husband, became a frantic hero for her, oblivious to my presence, my pain. I was just background noise in his obsession. But the true horror emerged months later. Pregnant and hemorrhaging in the ER, fighting for my life, I needed an O-negative blood transfusion. The doctor’s voice was grim: "Your husband has reserved our entire O-negative supply for a Ms. Olivia Vance—for her minor cosmetic procedure." Over speakerphone, I heard Ethan's cold, impatient reply: "Olivia’s needs are paramount. That blood is for her. My wife will have to wait." Our baby, our future, became collateral damage for his obsession. He chose her appearance over our child's life. How could the man who swore to cherish me, who claimed to fulfill my dying father’s wish, be capable of such monstrous indifference? Was I really just a convenient placeholder, waiting for his 'true love' to become available? The pain was a hollow echo now, not sharp, but vast and empty. The score was final. One hundred points. My hand, trembling but resolute, reached for the divorce papers. I packed my life into boxes, leaving behind a marriage that was never really mine, and booked a one-way flight to Austin. This was not the end; it was the ferocious, unyielding beginning of my own story.

Isabel returned to her penthouse after a grueling seventeen-hour flight, only to be greeted by the cloying scent of another woman's perfume. Her husband of three years, Darius, sat waiting with divorce papers. He wanted to marry his mistress, Dove, and offered Isabel a measly one million dollars, treating her like a greedy charity case from the Rust Belt who should just take the payout and vanish. But Isabel didn't want his pity. She demanded the four percent equity stake in his family's company that she rightfully owned—a stake worth 1.5 billion dollars. When she revealed this, the wealthy family turned vicious. They refused to acknowledge that she had secretly saved their empire from bankruptcy years ago. Instead, Darius and Dove orchestrated a brutal public execution. They ambushed her at a top law firm, spreading malicious lies that her investment money was stolen from a Ponzi scheme. They even hired a fake victim to scream at her in the lobby, successfully terrifying Isabel's lawyer into dropping her case on the spot. She had quietly rescued their entire legacy, yet they were willing to frame her as a criminal and destroy her life just to keep her rightful billions. As Darius and his mistress gloated over her absolute ruin, the most ruthless and feared lawyer in New York suddenly stepped in front of Isabel, his voice cutting through the dead silence. "Your case, I'll take it."

I gave up everything to be the perfect fiancée to Jemal and the grateful sister to Claire. But as I lay dying on a cold warehouse floor, I watched them passionately kiss over my bleeding body. "Damn it, look at my suit. This was custom," Jemal complained, flicking my blood from his cuff. "Oh, don't be such a baby. She was always so gullible," Claire laughed, mocking my dying gasps. They admitted every promise and sisterly defense was a lie to steal my inheritance and save his bankrupt company. As my soul detached, the warehouse doors burst open. It was Braxton Shields, the ruthless Wall Street titan whose arranged engagement I had broken off years ago. The famously cold billionaire fell to his knees in my blood, his stoic mask shattering into raw agony. He gently cleaned my face, pulled out a hidden photo of me, and kissed my cold forehead. "I'm sorry, Alex. I was too late. I should have never let you go." Without hesitation, he drank a vial of poison and slumped dead beside me. The shock of his ultimate devotion and my own foolish blindness tore my soul apart. Why did I choose my murderers over the man who loved me enough to die for me? Opening my eyes again, I was back in my eighteen-year-old body. It was the exact day I was welcomed back into the toxic Vargas family from foster care. This time, they would all pay.

When the back-alley doctor told me the cancer in my stomach had spread and I had maybe weeks left, my hand faltered. The ceramic figurine—a gift from a lover five years gone—slipped and shattered against the floorboards. Inside the broken clay was a stiff white card, stained at the corner with dried blood. A marker. One absolute favor from Silas Falcone, the most ruthless Don in New York's underworld. Five years ago, his mother threatened my sister's life to force me out. On that same day, I learned my body was already dying. To protect his succession, I staged a brutal betrayal—breaking his heart so he'd let me go, so he'd survive. Now, with weeks left to live, I redeemed the marker just to see him one last time. But when Silas arrived, his eyes held nothing but lethal ice. He coldly announced his arranged marriage to a rival family's daughter. His mother showed up and struck me across the face, calling me a worthless liability. I bit my tongue and hid my dying body's failure, ready to take the secret to my grave. Until Silas kicked down my door and found my medical file. The ruthless Boss who terrified the entire underworld dropped to his knees on my floor, his hands trembling. He renounced his Falcone inheritance, pulled me into his arms, and looked at his mother with murder in his eyes. "I will burn the Famiglia to the ground for her." ---

I sold myself to a paralyzed billionaire to pay for my mother's life support. But my step-sister staged a photo of me with another man, making my new husband think I was a cheating gold-digger. In a jealous rage, Curtis locked me in a dark panic room. While trapped, my step-mother sent a picture of her hand on my mom's ventilator plug, forcing me to sneak out to a black-market clinic. There, they forcibly drained 800cc of my blood to sell. Half-dead and in severe shock, I dragged myself back home, only for Curtis to confront me with another staged photo of my ex grabbing me outside the clinic. Believing I had snuck out to see a lover, he ordered his guards to throw my blood-drained body into the freezing wine cellar. "Please, don't put me down there! I'll die!" I begged and clung to his wheelchair, but he just kicked my hand away in absolute disgust. In the pitch-black, 55-degree room, my organs slowly shut down. I didn't understand why I had to endure this hell, or why he was so blinded by his own fragile ego that he never even noticed how chalk-white my face was. Hours later, his precious sister needed an emergency transfusion, and they dragged my icy body out to drain me again. But when the doctor rolled up my sleeve and exposed the horrific, bruised puncture wound, Curtis finally realized the truth. As he stared at my arm in absolute, paralyzed terror, the EKG machine attached to my chest flatlined.

At my rehearsal dinner, my fiancé Coleman abandoned me to rush to the hospital. His "savior" and first love, Elia, had been in a minor car accident. When I followed him there, I saw him holding her hands with an agonizing tenderness he had never shown me in our three years together. Through the gap in the blinds, Elia locked eyes with me and gave a deliberate smirk. When I tried to leave, I was assaulted by his family's security guards and thrown into a freezing police precinct. Coleman refused to bail me out, claiming he couldn't leave Elia's side. Instead, his ruthless billionaire uncle, Axel Arnold, dragged me out, only for me to be drugged by his associate and wake up in Axel's bed with a ruined dress and bruised skin. Before I could even process the shame, Coleman publicly announced the postponement of our wedding, turning me into the city's ultimate laughingstock. For years, I had endured the biting cold of an Aspen avalanche to save his life, only for Elia to steal the credit and my fiancé. They thought I was just a grateful, adopted orphan they could bleed dry to secure the Cooper family's wealth. But I was done being their punching bag. I marched straight to his penthouse, threw the three-carat diamond ring right at his chest, and left the city. Six months later, his mother called, threatening to bankrupt my family if I didn't return to their estate by dinner. I gripped my phone, a cold fire igniting in my eyes. "Book us the next red-eye flight to New York." This time, I was going back to burn their world to the ground.