Rejected By My Fated Alpha, Claimed By His Rival

The same hour I got my pregnancy results, someone sent me photos of my fiancé kissing his first love on the Spanish Steps. I gave him three chances anyway. At the airport, I asked him to go public. He said there was no need. At dinner, I asked him to marry me at City Hall the next morning. He said I was acting out. Then I told him I was carrying his baby. Lucian Rhodes, the richest man in New York, the man who had proposed to me on one knee a month earlier, looked at me like a stranger. "I had a vasectomy two years ago. Watching you pretend to love me is disgusting." He slammed the door. The candles went out. I sat on the marble floor in the dark and bled. A week later I came back. Red lips, a resignation letter, a miscarriage report, and two cases of cash. My half of everything he had ever spent on me. "Three years, split fifty-fifty." On my arm was my new husband. On my way out, I told Lucian the only true thing I had ever said to him. "I never faked loving you. You called that disgusting. That's the one thing I won't forgive." Then I boarded my family's private jet. An hour later, he learned who I really was: the runaway daughter of a European banking dynasty, promised from birth to a crown prince. He learned his vasectomy had failed. He was on the airstair of his own jet, about to chase me across the Atlantic, when the news broke. My plane had gone down at sea. No survivors. The world lit candles for me. He coughed up blood on the tarmac. And on a private island in the Caribbean, with his baby growing inside me, I turned off the news and finished my mango.

I stood in the biting November wind for twenty minutes just to deliver a coat to my fiancé, Ethan. But when I entered the private club suite, I found a wealthy socialite sitting in his lap. He hadn't forgotten his coat. She had used his phone to summon me, just to mock my plain clothes and make me the punchline of their cruel joke. Ethan didn't defend me. Instead, he publicly denied our engagement in front of the city's elite, threw some cash on the table, and told me to get out. When I fled home and begged my father to call off the wedding, he furiously refused. "It is your duty to this family!" He roared the words, reminding me that this marriage was my lifelong penance for the car accident that killed Ethan's mother years ago. My stepmother just watched, fully aware that my father was using my trauma to secure his business deals with the Sterlings. I was suffocating under the crushing weight of a sin I didn't commit. Why did my entire existence have to be a transaction? Why was I forced to endure endless humiliation for a tragedy that wasn't even my fault? I had spent years being their obedient, silent victim, letting them drain the life out of me. But the next morning, when Julian Carlisle—the city's most notorious and untouchable billionaire who had unexpectedly defended me at the club—walked into my bakery, everything shifted. I looked right into his dark, intimidating eyes and smiled. This time, I was going to use the devil himself to break my cage.

For eight years, I was the secret mate of Xavier, the most powerful Alpha of the Blood Moon Pack. Because of my low-ranking Omega blood, he refused to mark me or make me his Luna. One freezing winter night, my disabled father traveled miles to bring me rare herbs. But Xavier forced him to stand in the biting wind for eight hours. The reason? He claimed my father's sour scent would disturb his Beta secretary, Sylvia. When I demanded an explanation, Xavier just swirled his whiskey and threw a limitless credit card at my father's face. He shielded Sylvia behind his broad shoulders, roaring that my family's filthy stench was polluting his pristine territory. He thought I was just throwing a childish tantrum to get his attention. He completely forgot that when I miscarried our unborn pup in a pool of blood, he was out attending a dinner party with that very same Beta. For eight years, I endured his volatile temper, waiting in a cold bed while he paraded his secretary around the city. I looked at the man I had loved with all my soul, and felt nothing but cold ash. Why should I remain his invisible, disposable shadow while my own flesh and blood was treated like a stray dog? That night, I packed my bags, took my father, and left his estate forever. As my dormant White Wolf bloodline finally awakened, I picked up my phone and pressed send. "I, Serena, reject you, Xavier, as my mate."

I thought my cold marriage to billionaire Ernst Winters was finally thawing after a night of unexpected intimacy. But the next morning, he threw a check in my face, accusing me of drugging his water just to get pregnant. Desperate to prove my innocence, I confronted my adoptive mother, who had been in our room that night. Instead of defending me, she fell to her knees in front of Ernst, crying fake tears. "She did this once before, you know, just to get you to marry her. We can't let Haley stand in the way of your happiness with Keely any longer." Ernst looked at me like I was a monster. I was chased out into the rain, hit by his car, and left to rot in a hospital bed while they threw a lavish welcome party for my cousin Keely's return. Stripped of my marriage and family, I tried to start over by applying to a prestigious design firm. But the interviewer publicly humiliated me, throwing my portfolio on the floor and calling me a cheap plagiarist. When I looked up the genius new designer I supposedly copied, my blood ran cold. It was Keely. She hadn't just orchestrated the end of my marriage; she had stolen my graduation portfolio and claimed my entire life's work as her own. The grief vanished, replaced by a cold, hard fury. My original, hand-drawn sketches were still locked in a storage box in my adoptive mother's attic. It was time to go back and burn their perfect little world to the ground.

For three years, Coralie was Alec Montgomery's flawless executive assistant and his secret contract wife. But everything shattered when his untouchable first love, Dianna, returned to the US. Dianna intentionally poured scalding coffee on her own hand and framed Coralie. In response, Alec's mother slapped Coralie across the face and had her locked in a freezing, dusty room to reflect on her "vicious behavior." When Alec finally found Coralie battered and bleeding, he was incredibly gentle. But the very second Dianna called crying about a fake break-in, he dropped Coralie's wounded hands and rushed out into the night. The ultimate reality check came days later at a construction site. A massive section of steel scaffolding suddenly snapped and collapsed right above them. In that split second between life and death, Alec lunged forward and tackled Dianna to the ground, shielding her completely with his own body. Coralie was left behind. A heavy steel rod violently crushed her shoulder, blinding her left eye with her own warm blood. Waking up in the ER with severe head trauma, Coralie looked through the cracked hospital door. "Are you hurt? Are you okay?" Alec asked frantically, comforting a sobbing Dianna who only had a tiny scrape. He never even checked if Coralie was alive. Three years of enduring his coldness and his family's abuse meant absolutely nothing compared to his first love's fake tears. Her heart didn't ache anymore; it was just completely hollow. She calmly picked up her phone and texted her lawyer to push the divorce proceedings forward. The marriage was over, and she was leaving for good.

To keep her art scholarship, Vesper had to complete a life-size woodcarving for her final project. But her randomly assigned model was Slade Forrester, the arrogant basketball captain who had shattered her grandfather's priceless antique carving tools freshman year without a single apology. When Vesper blackmailed him with a ten-thousand-dollar property damage claim to force him into the studio, Slade mercilessly turned the tables. "I'll be your model, but you're going to do something for me in return." He demanded she carve a custom piece to help him woo a girl who hated his guts, and forced Vesper to act as his personal spy. The target turned out to be Vesper's own roommate. To make matters worse, Slade caught onto Vesper's terrifyingly deep, secret crush on his polite roommate, Julian. He ruthlessly weaponized her anxiety, mocking her stuttering panic and trapping her in a twisted mutual-blackmail deal that left her completely suffocated. Exhausted, humiliated, and desperate to escape this nightmare, Vesper logged onto the university portal at 2 AM to register for a quiet online elective where she wouldn't have to see anyone. But the system lagged, locking her out of every normal class and leaving only one open seat in a brutal varsity physical conditioning course. With her required credits and scholarship on the line, she had absolutely no choice but to hit register. Then the syllabus loaded on her screen. The Teaching Assistant for the class was Slade Forrester.