PIECES OF MY PAST
/1/124235/coverbig.jpg?v=f3ebc666ede0f2ce73fe362a2a25fc71)
While My Husband Cheated, I Married His Powerful Brother
To help her husband build his business empire, Veyra worked two jobs, skipped meals, and sacrificed everything she had. When her mother desperately needed life-saving treatment, she couldn't even scrape together the money. Then, on a New Year's Eve flight, fate seated her beside her husband's mistress. That's when she discovered the cruel truth. Her husband had secretly amassed millions long ago. The wedding ring that belonged to Veyra now glittered on another woman's finger. The $500,000 that could have saved her mother's life had been spent instead on luxury gifts and pocket money for his lover. She lost her baby. She lost her mother. And finally, she lost every illusion about the man she'd loved for years. After leaving the airport, Veyra walked into a bar, kissed the most dangerous-looking stranger she could find, and spent one reckless night in his arms. By sunrise, she disappeared without leaving so much as her name. She thought it was nothing more than a farewell to her broken past. She was wrong. The stranger was Dorian-the most powerful, mysterious billionaire in the business world. Meanwhile, her cheating husband finally realized what he had thrown away. He begged on his knees, signed a postnuptial agreement worth billions, and swore he would give up everything if she would come back. But just as Veyra began plotting to reclaim everything that had been stolen from her, a mysterious car accident brought Dorian back into her life. Only then did she learn the truth. He wasn't a stranger at all. He was her ex-husband's older stepbrother. Now two powerful men are fighting for the same woman-one consumed by regret, the other determined to make her his. Sorry, cheating ex... I choose your brother.
Chapter 1 First Class Betrayal
Caspian had been working overtime through the entire New Year holiday. Veyra Solenne decided she would surprise him. She'd fly out, knock on his hotel door, watch his tired face crack into a smile.
Only business class seats were left. Although she felt bad about the ticket price, she thought it was worth it.
She sat there for a full minute, unable to figure out how to lower the tray table.
The woman beside her - polished, bored, gorgeous in the particular way that costs money - let out a short laugh.
"Never flown business before?"
Veyra managed an awkward smile. "Sorry. You must run a company or something. You've got that air about you."
"Me? No." The woman waved a manicured hand. "But my benefactor does. If I'm not in business class, he sends a private jet."
"A benefactor," Veyra said. "Those must be hard to come by."
"Not really." The woman's mouth curved. "I'm his subordinate. I keep making expensive mistakes at work. He scolds me until I cry, and then-" she smiled, letting the sentence finish itself.
A small chill moved down Veyra's spine, though she couldn't have said why. "Funny," she said slowly. "My husband has a colleague like that too. Always making mistakes."
"You're married?" The woman's eyes swept over her, cataloguing. "His wife's about your age, actually."
She examined her nails.
"He says he got tired of her ages ago. Says touching her feels stale. Less interesting than watching me flip my hair."
Veyra's stomach turned, quietly, the way it does before you know why.
"I told him I wanted to see him over the holiday," the woman went on, pleased with herself. "So he told his wife he had to work."
That was when Veyra saw it. The ring on the woman's finger. A diamond, cut exactly like the wedding band she had lost two years ago.
She went still.
Caspian is an ordinary employee, she thought. So, calm down. Similar rings don't mean anything.
Her eyes fixed on the ring.
"That's a wedding band," Veyra said, her voice coming out strange to her own ears. "Did you marry him?"
"This?" The woman - Xiomara, she introduced herself, admiring the stone as it caught the cabin light - "I made him take it from his wife."
The air went out of Veyra's lungs.
"I wasn't trying to make trouble for her, honestly," Xiomara said. "But on my birthday she had a miscarriage and dragged him to the hospital. I spent it alone."
Veyra's hand drifted, without her permission, to her stomach.
The memory came back whole and freezing: black ice on the walk home from the market, a fall she hadn't seen coming, three months along, and then nothing but blood on frozen concrete. Caspian at her bedside for three days straight, not sleeping. Waking to find her ring gone along with the child.
It's okay, he'd said, voice breaking. We'll have another baby. I'll make you a new ring.
Don't, she'd told him. They're doing layoffs. Save the money. When you make it, get me one then.
She had believed, at the time, that this was a small and noble sacrifice. She had not known she was negotiating away her own ring to a woman she hadn't met yet.
"So he gave you his wife's ring," Veyra said carefully.
"He didn't want to, at first. Said he'd buy me something better." Xiomara tilted her hand, watching the light slide across the diamond. "But that old thing acts so superior just for being his wife. If I don't put her in her place, she'll think she owns the world."
"When a woman lets herself get that pathetic," Xiomara added, almost kindly, "there's really no saving her."
Veyra's fingers found the hem of her sleeve and held on. "If he spends this much on you, he must be paying her a fortune to keep quiet."
Xiomara laughed, bright and careless, and leaned in close enough that her perfume became a wall.
"Here's the funny part," she whispered. "That pathetic woman doesn't even know he runs a company."
---
"Why keep it from her?" Veyra asked. Something in her was still hoping - stupidly, stubbornly - that there was an explanation that didn't end where she thought it did.
"Because what's the point?" Xiomara turned her nails toward the window light. "She already spent her best years slaving beside him while he built everything. If you were a man and you finally made it, would you keep spending on a wife who's already worn out? Money doesn't buy back anyone's youth."
Veyra caught her own reflection in the cabin glass - hollow-cheeked, shadowed under the eyes, ten years of scraping by written into her skin. She used to look better than this. She used to look like Xiomara.
"You know, sis, you've still got some looks left," Xiomara said, studying her with the clinical warmth of someone appraising livestock. "A little cosmetic work wouldn't hurt. Your husband hasn't been that interested lately, has he?"
Veyra said nothing.
"My benefactor gives me half a million a month just for living expenses," Xiomara added, unprompted, unbothered. "Procedures are separate."
"How long," Veyra made herself ask, "has this been going on?"
"Since June twelfth, last year." Xiomara checked her nails again, already bored of the question.
Veyra's grip on her own sleeve went white-knuckled.
June twelfth. The day her mother had needed five hundred thousand dollars for surgery she never got. Caspian had begged everyone he knew and come back with three hundred fifty thousand - everything I have, he'd told her, weeping, and she had believed him, had scraped together eighty thousand more herself and still watched her mother die eighty thousand short of enough.
I'm sorry, he'd said into her hair. I'm worthless. I couldn't even save your mother.
She had wiped his tears instead of her own. You gave everything you had. That's enough. Just wait a little longer, she'd told him, and he'd gripped her hand like a man drowning and sworn they wouldn't suffer forever.
He'd had the other hundred and fifty thousand the whole time.
"Funny thing," Xiomara said, watching her now with real interest. "That woman's mother needed exactly five hundred thousand that same month."
Veyra looked at her and said nothing at all.
Xiomara winked. "He was going to pay it. Originally."
"You took it," Veyra said. "For an allowance."
"Please, he's got plenty more where that came from. I just told him - once her mother's dead, that woman has no family left. Nowhere to go. If he ever gets caught keeping me, she won't dare make a scene." Xiomara smiled, cat-content. "I wanted a Chanel piece that month. Five hundred thousand, as it happens."
"Aren't you afraid she'll find out?"
"I'm smarter than that." Xiomara stretched, satisfied. "It was my idea - tell his wife he'd scraped together everything, let her think he gave his all. She'd be too grateful, too guilty over the shortfall, to ever look for someone else in the picture."
Then, almost as an afterthought, she added the last piece.
"The annoying part is, the only reason he finally agreed to do it was so that if I ever got found out, his precious wife wouldn't leave him." She snorted. "Tch. Some women have all the luck."
The slap landed before Veyra had decided to throw it.
"What is wrong with you?" Xiomara shrieked, hand flying to her cheek.
/0/19271/coverbig.jpg?v=5d0ec7a2ee50f9cb09cba22ae151b2ce)
The Glimpse of My Past
"Could you ever forgive that someone who ruined your past?" Diane is trapped in the past she can't even remember. How can she live her life again once she figures out what really happened?
/0/76607/coverbig.jpg?v=2caa83597f3bd8e42d489ade9f8467c9)
The pieces of our love
Five years ago, Amelia Chase chose ambition over love, leaving behind her small town-and Noah Bennett, the only man who ever truly knew her heart. But dreams come at a cost. Alone and pregnant, Amelia built a life for her son, hiding the truth from the man she once loved. Now, a chance encounter s
/0/25443/coverbig.jpg?v=1a06c2d6d47c7e87dce0bd0a90fe30a7)
The story of my life. My Past.
A revelation to a secret hidden for the past seventeen years marked the beginning of a bigger predicament in my life. The beginning of knowing what it was like when life was dealing with me that I felt only I could understand better. Not to combine the financial instability in the house. My life var
/0/24075/coverbig.jpg?v=43385078d6883f55c262cdc8ad17445e)
Visions Of The Past
When Anabelle turned eighteen, she started having dreams, they haunted her every night. Plagued by recurring dreams about the forest with the strange vampire, then the dreams turned to her seeing this poor girl being tormented by her people, and eventually set ablaze, murdered for defending the vamp
/0/98621/coverbig.jpg?v=8a79ef698b66d4c9fa5a38c843c398c4)
Ashes of the Past
Twelve years ago, her life was ruined. Erynna Monte's, a beautiful and free spirited twelve years old girl, watched as her sister-her only family was killed, and she could only hide and watch in pain. From that day, the love, and warmth Erynna portrayed turned into hate. Along with the death of her
/0/78296/coverbig.jpg?v=56653d7bbb56262ecf414ec22bff1e9c)
He's My Past, My Passion
"I'm sorry Venice, let's divorce." His eyes were sincerely apologetic. "I want to be with the woman I've always loved." The fact that his tone was pleading for understanding hurt me all the more but I refused to shed a tear. "You'll regret this, Dylan Davis Creighton." And twenty three year old Veni
/1/110576/coverbig.jpg?v=c0ca38d7a8fccaf30aa5d80859fba20b)
ECHOES OF PAST
Ten years of love. Ten years of loyalty. He repaid her with a knife to the heart. When Aria wakes up ten years in the past, lying next to the same man who will one day destroy her, she realizes she has been given a second chance. But this time, she can hear every thought inside his head. Every lie.
/0/31442/coverbig.jpg?v=20260518233339)
Sins of the Past
Marie Mirey is a famous actress who one day meets a writer named Jonnathan. Between them, a passion and a desire awakens that is forbidden because eMarie has a boyfriend. Still, they can't help but attract each other. What Marie doesn't know is that Jonnathan has a dark past and that a mysterious p
/0/60223/coverbig.jpg?v=2e631a481b0a69d72ef24aa8b5615f5d)
Shadows of the past
Lovey Rylan, a good secret agent, finds her once thrilling career now a tiresome routine. But her world is turned upside down when a powerful enemy from her past resurfaces, threatening everything she holds dear. Forced to confront buried traumas and navigate a web of deceit, Lovey must rely on her
/0/1285/coverbig.jpg?v=20171122153116)
Reprinted Pieces
WHEN the wind is blowing and the sleet or rain is driving against the dark windows, I love to sit by the fire, thinking of what I have read in books of voyage and travel. Such books have had a strong fascination for my mind from my earliest childhood; and I wonder it should have come to pass that I
/0/72395/coverbig.jpg?v=021f4945bbcd7acaf981ca49c488d095)
Fools Rest In Pieces
Fools Rest in Pieces – A Tale of Murder, Betrayal, and Dark Transformation When dismembered body parts start appearing across Brooklyn in garbage bags, Detective Kenneth Wilson is thrust into a chilling investigation that leads him deep into the shadows of deception and brutality. The victim, Mary J
/0/84118/coverbig.jpg?v=55815989d38c2492d85a66d6af5de218)
The Ghost Of Her Past
The last thing I remembered was a crushing weight in my chest, and the impossibly cruel words about my son not being mine. Then, everything went black. I thought I was dead, a broken man on my own lawn, betrayed by the wife I' d mourned for a decade. But I opened my eyes to the scent of lilies an
/1/113138/coverbig.jpg?v=43af6d83502b3b2b0c9df844b6ef6891)
Whispers of a Hidden past
Molly May was disowned by her wealthy adoptive family at seventeen when she mysteriously became pregnant with triplets she couldn't explain. She spent five years raising Alex, Ben, and Claudia alone in a foreign country, working herself to exhaustion to keep them safe. When a job opportunity brings
/0/74194/coverbig.jpg?v=2ce0aeb1bde4b931e29bbcd1b8732f7a)
The remnants of the past
Synopsis: Blessed Luna Rising Nobody wants a rejected Omega like Lily. Once the weakest in her pack, she stopped believing in the mate bond long ago. Instead, she devoted herself to healing others as the pack's doctor, proving her worth through skill rather than destiny. But everything changes the
/0/66700/coverbig.jpg?v=2151d4c583a1ae969cb42fd65e31099a)
Echoes of a broken past
Anna Harriet, the only daughter of Shaun Bordman Harriet, had been struggling to fend for herself since the deaths of her father and grandmother. They had been her world, her foundation, and now, without them, she felt untethered. "I'm not doing that. Never," Anna said firmly, lying on her bed.
/0/71299/coverbig.jpg?v=f7760b193126c15b01909383c73fff86)
A ghost of the past
"The past never stays buried... especially when fate demands justice." Fifteen years ago, Isla's life was shattered. Victimized at a young age, she was left with only her sister, Eliana, and a child she never expected-Lucian. She vowed to build a life for her son, leaving the ghosts of her past beh
/0/80468/coverbig.jpg?v=8fa6c5dad074091aea986fc0f39200ad)
Billionaire In Broken Pieces
Please help me; you are the only one I trust. I need you...... to be my wife. His plea, accompanied by his sad expression, revealed how frustrated he was. Daisy Lorne, a 23-year-old had been Lucas childhood friend, but she came from a poor family and had always been considered "clumsy and short". De
/1/114008/coverbig.jpg?v=28cfe58d32727e5008c5935ec24f784f)
Bound To The Devil From My Past
To save my family's dying company, I was forced to marry a billionaire I hadn't seen in fourteen years. But right outside the City Clerk's office, he tossed our marriage certificate at me like a cheap receipt and shoved a four-year-old boy into my arms. "Your new life has begun. You're on babysitt
/0/14763/coverbig.jpg?v=d2bf3fde985126c32b2e31a391e35fd6)
Picturesque Sketches of London, Past and Present
Picturesque Sketches of London, Past and Present by Thomas Miller
/0/7198/coverbig.jpg?v=2b97b1a09e24880ccf026d34c06afb90)
Walter Harland / Or, Memories of the Past
Walter Harland / Or, Memories of the Past by Harriet S. Caswell
