My Bartender, The Billionaire

Kelsie's biggest regret in life was getting involved with Judge, the icy Captain. She pursued him for three years, married him for two, thinking she'd warmed a stone, only to be met with nothing. Her mother-in-law disliked her, her husband was indifferent, and a fragile "white moonlight" would occasionally try to get her attention. Until she witnessed Judge and Angelique meeting secretly at a hotel, her heart shattered, and then she discovered she was pregnant. Kelsie sneered, threw down the divorce papers, and decisively ran away, disappearing without a trace. When they met again, she was a successful single mother, surrounded by suitors. In the pouring rain, the once aloof man humbly stopped her car, pleading in a hoarse voice, "Kelsie, come home with me." The car window rolled down, and a little boy, nine-tenths like him, coldly warned in a cute but fierce tone, "Want to date my mommy? Ask me first!"

For two years, my husband Hunter flaunted his affair, using his mistress's fake pregnancy to torture me. I endured it all for our daughter, trapped in a gilded cage where he expected me to mistake his strangling for passion. Then his mistress whispered cruel lies to my six-year-old, telling her that her daddy would abandon her for the new baby. My daughter vanished. While I searched frantically, Hunter was unreachable, still with her. When he finally appeared, he shielded his mistress from my desperate rage, his wedding ring glinting as he pushed me away. With our daughter still missing, he pleaded with me. "Krystal, she's pregnant, don't hurt her!" The years of suppressed anger finally exploded. After our daughter was found safe, I looked him dead in the eye and told him the truth he'd been desperate to avoid. "I want a divorce, Hunter. I never loved you. I hate you."

The roar of the crowd was a physical force, pressing in on me from all sides, a wave of sound that vibrated up into my bones. I moved my mouth, swayed my body, mimicked the gestures – but it wasn' t my voice pouring from the speakers. It was Scarlett' s, a perfect, studio-polished product of technology and longing. My fiancé, the celebrated producer Liam Stone, had turned me into his ex-pop star. This wasn' t a dazzling comeback, though. Not for me. It was a lie on a colossal scale, a holographic projection of Scarlett overlaid on my body, my voice digitally reshaped into hers. For six months, he' d been systematically erasing me, Ava Green, the indie musician known for raw lyrics and a voice that sometimes broke with emotion. "Keep going," his voice crackled through my in-ear monitor, icy and sharp. "Don't break character. The modulation is perfect." My own pain and defiance surged, a desperate desire to reclaim my sound. When I pushed past the modulation, letting a raw note escape, the hologram flickered violently, and Scarlett' s synthesized voice cracked into static. The crowd gasped. Liam' s face twisted into a snarl. "What the hell do you think you're doing, Ava? Stick to the plan." His anger, cold and calculated, filled me with a sudden, overwhelming nausea – a feeling I' d been ignoring for weeks. The realization hit me with the force of a physical blow: I was pregnant. Trapped, silenced, and carrying the child of the man actively erasing my identity, I knew one thing: I would not be erased.

Three years. Three years of nights blurring into mornings, building a company from nothing with my wife, Chloe. Tomorrow, all that sacrifice would finally pay off with our IPO, making us billionaires and allowing us to finally reveal our secret marriage. But tonight, my world stopped. I found Chloe in my office, her personal assistant, Liam, his hands on her waist, his mouth on hers. Their whispered words, "So much better than my husband," poisoned the air. As she pushed him away, she defended me with a furious hiss, calling him a mere "toy" and me her "foundation." Yet, moments later, she pulled him back, her seductive smile returning. The betrayal was clear, but her fierce, confusing defense left me reeling, adrift between anger and a painful, desperate confusion. My hands shook as I stumbled back to my desk, the words "husband" and "foundation" twisting into a cruel, empty echo. How could she betray me so utterly, yet defend me with such ferocity? What was this hollow space inside my chest? There was only one way out. My thumb hovered over a number I hadn' t called in years. "Dr. Peterson," I whispered into the phone, "that mission in the Zercian conflict zone… is there still a spot?"

"Mommy." That single word, uttered by my five-year-old daughter, Lily, should have been a moment of pure joy. Instead, it detonated the fragile peace I' d clung to for five years, ever since Lily' s mother, Sophia, abandoned us to chase after her ex. Sophia froze, her plastered-on smile for her new boyfriend, Mark, faltering. I watched in horror as Mark, red-faced and enraged by Lily's innocent affection, lashed out, knocking over a glass and then contorting in feigned agony over a minor scrape on his knee. Sophia, utterly consumed by placating him, rushed to his side, showering him with a tenderness she had never once shown our child. Then, with chilling indifference, she turned to her security guards and commanded them to lock a sobbing, asthmatic Lily in an upstairs closet. Three days, she declared, Lily needed to "learn a lesson." My pleas about Lily' s severe asthma were met with her cynical scoff: "You always make things up to get attention." The metallic click of the lock echoed a horrifying finality. I banged on the door, screaming Lily' s name, but to no avail. The guards, under Sophia' s orders, ensured no one went near. Sometime after midnight, the crying stopped. I found my little girl crumpled on the floor, blue, lifeless, and not breathing. While I was attempting to revive our daughter in one hospital room, Sophia was miles away in a luxury car showroom, buying Mark two brand-new cars – a "compensation prize" for his scraped knee, celebrating their twisted reunion at Lily' s expense. How could a mother be so utterly devoid of humanity? How could the woman I once loved, the woman I foolishly hoped would one day return to us, betray our child so completely? I had to know. I had to understand what monstrous depths she was capable of, and how I could possibly escape her toxic grasp.

My entire life was a countdown to my sister Clara' s 30th birthday, the day I was to become a spiritual donor to save her from a wasting illness. I clung to Liam, the man I loved, as my only hope of escape, only to have that hope shatter when he coldly told me I had to go through with the ritual, dismissing my desperate plea that I was too weak. He forced Momma' s drugged tea on me, rendering me immobile, then dragged me to the prayer cabin where my parents awaited, my body offered up as Clara-who gave a triumphant smirk-stole my life force, leaving me for dead, unceremoniously dumped in a shallow ditch. How could the man I' d secretly saved ten years ago, giving him half my life in a forbidden ritual to heal him after his logging accident, betray me so completely, not even remembering my sacrifice while unknowingly feeding on my dwindling vitality? Yet, after Liam and Clara died in a mysterious crash and I was arrested for their murders, a blood-stained letter from Liam revealed the horrifying truth: he had finally remembered my sacrifice and the family's monstrous conspiracy, driving to atone by attempting a reverse ritual with Clara, freeing me to live the life he ultimately gave back to me.