We Burnt His Empire Down Together

I stood outside my husband's study, the perfect mafia wife, only to hear him mocking me as an "ice sculpture" while he entertained his mistress, Aria. But the betrayal went deeper than infidelity. A week later, my saddle snapped mid-jump, leaving me with a shattered leg. Lying in the hospital bed, I overheard the conversation that killed the last of my love. My husband, Alessandro, knew Aria had sabotaged my gear. He knew she could have killed me. Yet, he told his men to let it go. He called my near-death experience a "lesson" because I had bruised his mistress's ego. He humiliated me publicly, freezing my accounts to buy family heirlooms for her. He stood by while she threatened to leak our private tapes to the press. He destroyed my dignity to play the hero for a woman he thought was a helpless orphan. He had no idea she was a fraud. He didn't know I had installed micro-cameras throughout the estate while he was busy pampering her. He didn't know I had hours of footage showing his "innocent" Aria sleeping with his guards, his rivals, and even his staff, laughing about how easy he was to manipulate. At the annual charity gala, in front of the entire crime family, Alessandro demanded I apologize to her. I didn't beg. I didn't cry. I simply connected my drive to the main projector and pressed play.

After my boyfriend of four years publicly humiliated me at a charity gala, calling me a "charity case," I drowned my sorrows at a dive bar and had a one-night stand with a stranger. I woke up the next morning in a luxury hotel suite to find out the stranger was Christian Porter, the most ruthless billionaire on Wall Street. Worse, paparazzi had photographed us leaving the bar. He coldly informed me that the photos would create a scandal that could tank his company's upcoming IPO, costing him hundreds of millions. As if my world wasn't collapsing fast enough, I got a call that my younger brother had been arrested for assaulting my ex in my defense. Christian didn't want my apology; he wanted a solution. He slammed a prenuptial agreement on the table in front of me. He gave me an ultimatum: sign a two-year marriage contract to turn the scandal into a corporate fairy tale, or he would ruin me. Trapped, I agreed. But when my furious brother confronted him at the police station, Christian looked him dead in the eye and said something that left me breathless. "I didn't marry her to solve a problem," he said, his voice echoing in the small room. "I married her because I've been in love with her for ten years."

I stood in the center of the rose garden, convinced the Underboss of the East Coast was finally going to defy his father and put a ring on my finger. Instead, Desmond walked toward me holding another woman's hand. "Dallas," he said, his voice devoid of emotion. "This is Chelsea. My fiancée." He told me it was just business, a merger to secure shipping routes. He expected me to stay in the shadows as his mistress, his "pet canary." When I refused to be his dirty little secret, his family sold me like cattle to Kennedy Simmons, the crippled Don of the West Coast, just to get rid of me. But the ultimate betrayal happened the night before I left. On the family yacht, Chelsea pushed me overboard. I screamed for help in the freezing dark water. I watched Desmond dive in. I reached out for him, but he swam right past me. He chose to save his wealthy fiancée, the "asset," and left me to drown. In that moment, the girl who loved him died. I realized his brother Antone, who I thought was my friend, was just a stalker using me to get close to Chelsea. I was nothing but collateral damage to the people I had worshipped. I didn't die that night. I boarded the plane to Seattle with a frozen heart. They thought they were selling me to a monster. They didn't realize they were handing me a King. The next time the Morgans saw me, I wasn't their victim. I was the woman coming to burn their empire to the ground.

My fiancé, Jadon, proposed on the Fourth of July. It was the perfect moment I had dreamed of since we were kids. That night, he called me on FaceTime. But the man on the screen wasn't him. It was a version of him from five years in the future, his face hollow with regret. He laid out a horrifying timeline of betrayal. He was sleeping with my best friend and business partner, Kimberly. She would use his venture capital to steal my architectural firm. She would sabotage my father' s life-saving kidney transplant, leaving him to die. And she would maliciously cause a future pregnancy to end in tragedy, murdering our unborn child. My entire world-my love, my friendship, my future-was a lie. The two people I trusted most were plotting my complete ruin. This broken man from the future, desperate to atone, gave me a roadmap to escape. So I drove my car off a cliff and faked my own death, determined to rewrite the story they had written for me.

The man I gave up a twenty-billion-dollar inheritance for asked me to go to prison for his mistress. In the same breath, he told me to kill our unborn child. While his mother's actions caused me to miscarry our son in a derelict warehouse, he was on television announcing his engagement and *her* pregnancy. The betrayal wasn't just private; it was a public execution. So I picked up my phone and made a call I hadn't made in five years, to the one man he never knew existed. "Father," I choked out, "I need you."

Alaya woke up in the sterile hospital room to a devastating reality: her six-month-old baby was gone, lost in a horrific car crash. But as the memories crashed into her, she realized she had been reborn. She was back three years before her ultimate death, back to the moment she remembered lying bleeding on the asphalt while her husband, Hardy, shielded his mistress from the freezing rain. When Hardy finally showed up at the ward, he coldly dismissed the crash as a mere accident and immediately left to comfort his young lover. To make matters worse, Alaya secretly checked her medical files and found a terrifying detail: someone had intentionally slipped beta-blockers into her system, a lethal drug for her transplanted heart. And Hardy didn't care about her dead baby or her irreversible infertility. He only coldly confirmed with the doctor that her heart was still viable. A horrifying suspicion made Alaya's blood run cold. Why was her husband so obsessed with protecting her transplanted heart while treating her like garbage? And why was his perfectly healthy mistress secretly racking up massive bills at an advanced cardiac hospital? Realizing she was nothing but a vessel in a twisted, deadly game, Alaya didn't shed another tear. She packed her belongings, left her flawless diamond wedding ring on the cold marble table, and vanished from their penthouse. When Hardy finally tracked her down, she threw a thick stack of documents onto the table. "Sign the divorce papers," she said, her eyes completely dead.