The Woman Who Loved a Heart

For six months, I drained my very soul to heal Alpha Coleton's paralyzed spine. I gave so much energy that I lost the ability to shift into my wolf form. I thought when he finally stood up, he would announce to the pack that I was his Fated Mate. Instead, he looked right through me. "You have served the pack well as a servant," he said coldly. Then he welcomed back Charly, the woman who had abandoned him the moment he was injured. To protect Charly from a harmless spider, he shoved me into a purification pool laced with liquid silver. It burned my skin like acid, leaving scars that refused to fade. When Charly faked a cough during lunch, he accused me of poisoning her with Wolfsbane. He didn't check the food. He simply grabbed my jaw and forced boiling hot soup down my throat while I gagged and begged for mercy. "If you hurt her again, I'll make you a slave," he threatened, his eyes full of disgust. I finally understood. My sacrifice meant nothing to him. He would kill me to please a liar. So, I sent a single text: "I accept your rejection, Alpha Coleton." Then I disappeared. Three years later, I returned. Not as a weak, broken healer, but as a legendary White Wolf, with the most powerful Alpha Prime in Europe holding my hand. Coleton fell to his knees in the middle of the airport, tears streaming down his face as he begged for the bond to return. I looked down at him with glowing golden eyes. "You broke me so I could rebuild myself," I said softly. "And I built a world where you don't exist."

I was the architect of my husband's legitimate empire, the queen to his throne as the Don of a powerful crime family. Our home was our sanctuary, our bed the one sacred place he always returned to. But in the middle of the night, I woke to a woman's moan coming from a guest room that was supposed to be empty. The space beside me was cold; my husband, Brendan, was gone. The woman's voice belonged to Kiya, my protégée—a girl I’d mentored like a sister. Through the door, I heard him call me "a piece of furniture that sleeps soundly." I heard him tell her she possessed something I didn't. Then, a video confirmed the ultimate betrayal: a four-year affair, a pregnancy, and his casual dismissal of me as a business arrangement. He called me a title, but he called another woman's child his heir. He had broken the one rule that held our world together, turning my life's work into ash. He thought I was just a fixture in his grand design, a brilliant mind he could control and discard. He was wrong. There was only one way to escape this agony. I would have every memory of him surgically cut from my mind, erase him from my soul like a cancer, and disappear so completely that not even a ghost of me remained.

I had loved Kade Cordova for ten years, but our marriage was a transaction he despised. He hated me, flaunting his affair with his lover, Kendall, for the world to see. Then, Kendall framed me for corporate espionage. Blinded by hatred, Kade didn't even question it. He had me thrown into a pre-trial detention center. In the cold visitation room, he gave the guards a simple, chilling order. "Teach her a lesson." They ripped my clothes open and violated me as he watched, his eyes filled with disgust. But that wasn't enough. Kendall faked a miscarriage and blamed me. Enraged, Kade forced himself on me, vowing to use my body as a vessel to replace the child I had "murdered." The final blow came when Kendall went to my ailing mother and cruelly detailed every humiliation, causing a heart attack that killed her. I had lost everything. My love, my dignity, and now my mother. All because of lies I couldn't disprove and a man who refused to see the truth. Standing on a bridge with nothing left to live for, I let go. But I didn't die. I woke up with no memory, saved by a kind stranger. For five years, I lived a new, happy life. Until the day the man who destroyed me found me again.

The doctor's words didn't just break my heart; they erased my future. I could never have children. The cause? A fall my husband, Gregory, caused when he shoved me against our marble coffee table. I had confronted him about stealing my game for his new star protégé. While I was reeling from the loss, he was on the cover of a tech magazine, beaming, with his arm wrapped around her. They were celebrating the massive success of my game. When I went home, I found her there, wearing my silk robe, directing movers to pack up my life. Gregory didn't even deny the affair. He simply stepped in front of her, shielding her from my rage. He wasn't content with just that. He issued a press release calling me an unstable plagiarist, destroying my career to ensure I couldn't leave. His mother delivered the final, crushing blow. She told me my marriage was a transaction-my parents had traded their life's work, a revolutionary patent, just so I could marry him. I was bound by their sacrifice. He had taken everything-my work, my body, my family's legacy. He thought he had me caged, a broken trophy to display. He was wrong. That night, I doused our home in gasoline and walked away as the flames consumed my old life. Calista Gardner died in that fire. And I was finally free.

The last thing I remembered was the cold, seeping into my bones on the operating table, as doctors frantically tried to stop the hemorrhaging. Then, the words that shattered my world: "The baby… the baby can' t be saved." My baby, gone. And in a flash, I remembered my husband Liam' s venomous sneer just hours before, "If it' s some other man' s bastard, I' ll kill it myself." The pain of his words, worse than labor, twisted my love for my adoptive brother into pure hatred. I believed he had killed our child. Consumed by rage, I seized a scalpel and plunged it into his chest, gasping, "If my child dies, you' re dying with him." His eyes widened in despair, not anger, as consciousness faded. His frantic shouts echoed, "Save her! Get the best doctors… And find her the best lawyer… Don' t let her find out about her father. Let her hate me forever." Tears fell onto my cheek, hot and foreign. My father? What did he have to do with this? Then, darkness. "Do you, Ava Miller, take this man, Liam Hayes, to be your lawfully wedded husband?" My eyes snapped open. The blinding white of the operating room was gone. I was at the altar, clutching white roses, in a heavy wedding dress. Liam stood before me, young and handsome, looking exactly as he had ten years ago. Our wedding day. The day my nightmare began. I was back. He leaned in, his voice a low, impatient hiss, "Ava, what are you doing? Say 'I do.' Don' t make a scene." The same cold tone, the same barely-veiled annoyance. Nothing had changed. I saw Sarah Johnson in the second row, feigning heartbreak, her hand resting protectively over her stomach. Liam' s innocent victim. Then it all crashed down. Liam' s final words, his protection, Sarah' s true manipulation, my father' s death-it was all a misunderstanding, a mountain of lies. I had died because of it once. I wouldn't walk back into that cage. "No. I don' t."

The final memory of my past life was a cold, digital execution. I watched David Chen, my ex-fiancé, on a hundred-foot screen at his company' s IPO launch, alive and destroying me. "Sarah Miller hacked my systems," he' d declared, pulling his new girlfriend, Emily, close. "She tried to con my grieving family and ruin Emily' s reputation." The fallout was immediate: blacklisted, our family' s digital forensics firm raided, our life' s work wiped clean. He' d sneered, "If you can' t bring back my reputation, you' ll pay." I paid. We all did. Until now. The insistent ding-dong of my doorbell cut through the silence, bringing me back to October 12th. It was the day after David Chen was reported dead, the day his parents had come seeking my help. Last time, I' d opened that door, taken their money, accepted their false promises, and poured my soul into his shattered laptop, only for him to rise from the grave to crucify me. But this time, I knew where that path led. I pressed my face against the cool wood, my voice steady. "Go away." Mrs. Chen's muffled plea followed: "Sarah, please! It's about David. We need your help." I' d lied: "No one can truly recover data from a physically destroyed device." The silence on the other side thickened with their disbelief, just before the lock on my door clicked. He was here. Already. The door swung open, revealing David Chen, perfectly alive, his charismatic smile a cruel slash. "See, Mom, Dad? I told you she was hiding something," he said, his eyes locking onto mine, a chilling, possessive fire in them. "She knew I wasn't dead." Emily slipped in behind him, a picture of deceptive innocence. He picked up my brother' s locket, a symbol of my family, and with a flick of his wrist, tossed it out the window. "You're a monster," I whispered. "No," he said, "I'm a survivor. You've had your little rebirth, your second chance. Fine. Let's see what you do with it." He knew. He was acknowledging it, and my blood ran cold. He thought he had won, confining me to this digital graveyard. But he was wrong. He hadn't just confined me. He had given me a target.