Planning His Wedding, Sleeping In His Bed

My husband was in the shower, the sound of water a familiar rhythm to our mornings. I was just placing a cup of coffee on his desk, a small ritual in our five years of what I thought was a perfect marriage. Then, an email notification flashed on his laptop: "You're invited to the Christening of Leo Thomas." Our last name. The sender: Hayden Cleveland, a social media influencer. An icy dread settled in. It was an invitation for his son, a son I didn't know existed. I went to the church, hidden in the shadows, and saw him holding a baby, a little boy with his dark hair and eyes. Hayden Cleveland, the mother, leaned on his shoulder, a picture of domestic bliss. They looked like a family. A perfect, happy family. My world crumbled. I remembered him refusing to have a baby with me, citing work pressure. All his business trips, the late nights-were they spent with them? The lie was so easy for him. How could I have been so blind? I called the Zurich Architectural Fellowship, a prestigious program I had deferred for him. "I' d like to accept the fellowship," I said, my voice eerily calm. "I can leave immediately."

I thought I had the perfect marriage with my billionaire husband, Hartwell, who treated me like a priceless artifact, even though he had a strange obsession with me wearing only cornflower blue. That was until an anonymous text called me a "pathetic substitute" for a dead woman, and I broke into his locked attic to uncover the terrifying truth. Under a dusty sheet, I found a life-sized portrait of a woman who looked exactly like me. Her name was Georgia Freeman, his dead lover, and my entire three-year marriage was a meticulously crafted lie. When I tried to rebel by wearing a different color, Hartwell violently tore the clothes off my body in disgust. Even worse, his entire elite family knew the secret all along, secretly mocking me as a clueless stand-in used to keep a ghost's memory alive. I was nothing but a prop to them, a hollow vessel chosen to replace a dead woman, and I couldn't understand why I had to sacrifice my identity for his twisted, obsessive grief. I shredded every blue silk gown he forced me to wear and threw his million-dollar sapphire down the trash chute. "I want a tubal ligation because I will never bear a substitute child." Watching all the color drain from his suddenly terrified face, I knew the game was over, and I was going to completely destroy his perfect illusion.

I woke up to find that I had lost five years of my memory. I was told that I had been married to Caspian, the ruthless Godfather of the New York Mafia, for five years. I had harbored a crush on him for a long time, so marrying him should have been good news. But the terrible truth was, he didn't seem to love me. After losing my five years of memory, he felt like nothing more than a stranger to me. "Break the blood oath, Caspian," I said. "We're getting a divorce." Yet later, he would pace outside my door late at night, refusing to leave: "Darling, just look at me one more time, please?"

On our tenth mating anniversary, I stood outside my Alpha husband's office with his favorite coffee, only to be hit by the cloying scent of rotting peaches—a female in heat. Through the mind-link, I heard him promise his mistress he'd deal with the "boring formalities" regarding me tonight. I walked in to find him plotting with his pregnant assistant, Jami. Instead of apologizing, Dustin sneered at me. "She gave me in three months what you couldn't give me in ten years. A strong lineage." He conveniently forgot that I was the one who built his empire, designed his impenetrable wards, and funded his lifestyle by selling my own family heirlooms. When I confronted him about the betrayal, he didn't just dismiss me; he shoved me. I crashed into a silver nightstand. For a normal wolf, silver is an irritant. For me, a descendant of the White Wolf bloodline, it is acid. As my flesh sizzled and blood poured down my face, blinding me, Dustin didn't even flinch. He stepped over my convulsing body—his wife of a decade—to ask his mistress if she was stressed. Lying on the floor, watching him comfort the woman wearing my mother's stolen ring, the bond finally died. He thought I was a broken, barren Luna who would accept his scraps just to keep her title. He was wrong. I didn't call the police. I called a specialist extraction team. "I am the architect of this pack's security and financial systems," I told the crew. "Decommission everything." I wasn't just leaving. I was taking my empire with me.

I lost my leg saving my husband, Kingsley. My ballet career was over, but my dying mother had secured a perfect heart transplant for my sister, Julia. We had hope. Then Kingsley gave her heart away. He and his mistress traded it for a business deal. Julia died. When I confronted him at the hospital, he shoved me against a wall. The fall didn't just shatter my world; it caused me to miscarry the baby I never knew I was carrying. In a single night, he took my sister and my child. As I lay bleeding on the floor, I looked at the man I once sacrificed everything for and made a promise. "You will regret this for the rest of your life." I divorced him and disappeared. A year and a half later, he found me, a broken man begging for forgiveness. I looked him in the eye and gave him my final answer. "There are no second chances for murder."

For three years, I was Dante Moretti's secret. I was the Underboss's property, the cure for a violent curse that plagued him. He promised that if he wasn't married by his twenty-fifth birthday, I would be his bride. But on the eve of that birthday, he ended our arrangement. He brought home another woman, Sienna, and introduced me as "the help." Sienna, with feigned innocence, knocked a precious memento from my hand, shattering it. When I confronted her, Dante slapped me twice in public, the humiliation searing my soul. Later, I discovered Sienna had framed me for kidnapping her, a lie Dante readily believed. To force a confession, he had my mother tied in a sack and thrown into the freezing lake to drown. He left her there to die. That was the moment the girl who loved him died, too. I saved my mother, and we fled the country, seeking refuge with my childhood friend, Julian. I thought I had escaped. But then Dante appeared in Australia, begging for forgiveness. I rejected him, choosing a future with Julian. I thought it was over. Until a car, driven by a vengeful Sienna, barreled towards us. The last thing I saw was Dante throwing himself in front of me, taking the full impact.