Too Late, Billionaire: Watch Me Leave

As I lay on the floor of our manor, bleeding out from a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, I used my last ounce of strength to call my husband, Cole. I begged him for help, my vision blurring. But the only thing I heard was the clinking of champagne glasses and his mistress's giggle in the background. "Stop the drama, June," Cole snapped, his voice cold. "We're about to go on stage. Don't call again." He hung up, leaving me to die alone on the Persian rug while he accepted an award with another woman on his arm. I woke up in the hospital days later. My baby was gone. They had removed my fallopian tube. Cole finally arrived, smelling of expensive scotch and his mistress's perfume. He didn't hug me. He didn't cry. Instead, he leaned over my hospital bed, pressing his knee into the mattress until my fresh stitches tore open and bled. "You embarrassed me by calling an ambulance," he hissed. "My mistress, Alycia, says you're faking it. Clean yourself up." He left me bleeding again to go announce a $10 million donation to Alycia's "groundbreaking" medical research. I stared at the TV screen, numb. The research Alycia was taking credit for? It was mine. I wrote that patent years ago under a pseudonym. They thought I was just a poor, orphan housewife who needed Cole's money to survive. They had no idea I was actually a billionaire scientist hiding my identity. I pulled the IV needle out of my arm. A drop of blood fell onto the divorce papers I had been hiding. I didn't wipe it off. I signed my name right over it. Then I walked into the bank, reactivated my dormant account with $128 million, and bought the penthouse directly overlooking Cole's house. The mourning widow is dead. The avenger is born.

Bridget caught her fiancé tangled in the sheets with another woman. She left the engagement ring behind and, in a moment of reckless defiance, had a one-night stand with Damond Oneill, the most terrifying billionaire on Wall Street. But her nightmare was far from over. Her biological father threatened to destroy her mother's company if she didn't crawl back to her cheating ex to secure a business merger. Worse, she found her mother coughing up bright red blood, secretly hiding a fatal illness. Desperate to save her family, Bridget attended a high-society gala, only for her ex and her legitimate half-sister to slip a powerful drug into her champagne. Trapped on a locked balcony, her body burning and paralyzed, she watched her ex approach to assault and film her. "Let's see how arrogant you are when the drugs kick in." She didn't understand why her own blood treated her like disposable trash. Why was she always the pawn while her mother suffered in secret? The absolute despair almost broke her. Just as he grabbed her dress, a deafening explosion shattered the glass door. Damond stepped through the ruin, brutally crippled her ex, and claimed her as his own. But when Damond's team traced her mother's secret medical funds to a highly classified Swiss clinic, Bridget realized the real war had just begun.

I was the perfect wife to my producer husband, Braden, enduring his coldness and affairs for one reason: his promise to release my late father's priceless songbook. Then, at a crowded industry party, I watched him kiss his starlet mistress, Destany, for all to see. The humiliation made me collapse, and I woke up in a hospital bed to a shocking truth: I was pregnant. Braden used our unborn child as a leash, playing the role of a devoted husband while secretly continuing his affair. His mistress grew bolder, breaking into our home after taunting me with photos of her and Braden in Tokyo. "That baby is just another obstacle," she whispered, her eyes filled with hate as she lunged at me. In the struggle, she shoved me down our grand staircase. The fall was a blur of sickening thuds and a sharp, searing pain. I lost my child. The one thing that had tied me to him was gone, stolen by his cruelty and her jealousy. The years of his lies and my silent suffering crystallized into a single, cold purpose. When Braden knelt by my hospital bed, sobbing and begging for forgiveness, I felt nothing. I simply picked up the phone and called my lawyer. "I want a divorce," I said, my voice like ice. "And I'm taking back everything."

I was tossed into a dark alley like rotting garbage, bleeding and grieving the child I had just lost. When I was finally brought back to my fiancé Angelo's penthouse, instead of comfort, I was met with absolute disgust. His family declared me "unclean" after the kidnapping. Angelo coldly announced he was burying the scandal by marrying my sweet, innocent cousin, Carissa. When we were alone, Carissa stood over my bed, her voice dripping with venomous delight. "My father arranged the kidnapping. And now, Angelo and I can finally be together." Before I could react, she forced a silver letter opener into my hand, deliberately stabbed her own shoulder, and let out a bloodcurdling scream. Angelo stormed in, struck me across the face, and gathered a sobbing Carissa into his arms, looking at me with absolute revulsion. The family matriarch appeared at the door, her cold eyes sweeping over the scene before she gave a chilling order to the maids. "Clean this up." They pinned me down and brutally drove the blade directly into my chest. I choked on my own blood, staring at the man who had promised me the world as he turned his back, calling my murder a "mercy." As my heart beat its final agonizing rhythm, I made a silent vow to the shadows that if there was a next life, I would have my vendetta. When I opened my eyes again, there was no blood, only the soft silk of my nightgown. I had returned to the day before my eighteenth birthday. This time, I wouldn't play the desperate victim. I was going to ally with the Devil of Chicago and burn them all to the ground.

I secured the lifeline investment for my fiancé's company and went to his office to surprise him. Instead, I caught Preston sleeping with his top actress—the woman he publicly claimed as his stepsister. Through the cracked door, I heard him call me his "scarred, ugly bitch shield" to hide their sickening affair. I didn't cry. I hacked the live broadcast of the Star Awards and played their sex tape to two thousand people. But that night, drunk and reeling from the agonizing nerve pain in my facial scar, I stumbled into the wrong hotel penthouse. I was pinned down by a drugged billionaire, Josephus Hodges. The next morning, he left me a million-dollar check and a Plan B pill. When he later tracked me down to offer a cold, calculated fake marriage just to absorb Preston's ruined empire, I threw the contract at his chest and told him to go to hell. But when I got home and looked in the mirror, the chronic, burning torture in my scar was completely gone. His touch during that terrifying night had somehow cured the agony that had ruined my life. I had just declared war on the only man on earth who could heal me. Just then, my ruined ex-fiancé called, begging me to save him with a PR press conference. "I'll do it, but I control the venue." I booked it at Josephus's heavily guarded hotel. I was going to slaughter my ex on live television, and force the apex predator to look at me again.

To marry the man I loved, I held a shard of glass to my wrist and threatened my guardian, Alois Wyatt. "If you don't let me marry Erick, I will die right here." The second he reluctantly agreed, the horrifying truth of my past life slammed into me. Erick, the man I’d fought to marry, had never loved me. He’d locked me in a European asylum for three years, tortured me, and left me to die in a fiery car crash. I dropped the glass and threw myself into Alois’s arms, sobbing that it was all a joke. I begged him to take me home, swearing I'd rather die than marry Erick. But my sudden change was met with cold suspicion. To him and his friends, I was a snake playing a new, pathetic game, trying to steal his corporate secrets for my pathetic lover. The most painful part was that they were right. In my past life, I had betrayed Alois, destroyed his reputation, and left him to die a broken man, all for a monster who saw me as nothing more than a tool. But now, opening my eyes again on the very night my nightmare began, I have a second chance. This time, I will cling to the only man who ever truly protected me, and I will make Erick pay for everything he did to us.