The Woman He Thought He Broke

My husband and son were pathologically obsessed with me, constantly testing my love by showering attention on another woman, Kassandra. My jealousy and misery were their proof of my devotion. Then came the car accident. My hand, the one that wrote award-winning film scores, was severely crushed. But Jacob and Anton chose to prioritize Kassandra' s minor head injury, leaving my career in ruins. They watched me, waiting for tears, anger, jealousy. They got nothing. I was a statue, my face a placid mask. My silence unsettled them. They continued their cruel game, celebrating Kassandra' s birthday lavishly, while I sat in a secluded corner, watching them. Jacob even ripped my deceased mother' s gold locket from my neck to give to Kassandra, who then deliberately crushed it under her heel. This wasn't love. It was a cage. My pain was their sport, my sacrifice their trophy. Lying on the cold hospital bed, waiting, I felt the love I had nurtured for years die. It withered and turned to ash, leaving behind something hard and cold. I was done. I would not fix them. I would escape. I would destroy them.

My twin sister Haleigh returned with a fake diagnosis of Stage 4 Pancreatic Cancer and a "dying wish" to marry my fiancé, Jameson Blair. Without a second thought, Jameson, the most feared Underboss in New York, took the three-carat diamond meant for me and slid it onto her finger. I became the spare. The obstacle standing in the way of a tragedy's happy ending. When Haleigh planted a brown recluse spider in my room, I was the one bitten and poisoned. Yet, my brothers kicked me while I was delirious with fever, accusing me of trying to terrorize their "dying" angel. On her birthday yacht party, a grill tipped over during a storm. My synthetic dress caught fire instantly. As flames seared the skin off my legs, I screamed for help. But Jameson and my brothers formed a human shield around Haleigh, frantically checking her hand for a single speck of ash while I burned alive just ten feet away. The final straw came at the cliffs. Haleigh staged a suicide attempt to frame me for bullying her. To teach me a lesson, Jameson bound my wrists and hung me over the edge of the abyss on a rope, leaving me dangling helplessly over the churning ocean. They thought they were punishing a monster. They didn't know I had a jagged rock in my hand. As they drove away to comfort the liar, I didn't wait for them to come back. I sawed through the rope myself and let the ocean take me. Three years later, after discovering Haleigh never had cancer, my brothers and Jameson found me alive in Florence. They knelt on the cobblestones, weeping, begging for a second chance. I looked at the men who had watched me burn. "You aren't sorry you hurt me," I said, turning to walk away with another man. "You're just sorry you bet on the wrong sister."

My father died because a drunk socialite, Kenya Cline, blocked the ambulance carrying him to the hospital. She laughed while filming the chaos for her followers. When I tried to bring her to justice, my husband, Cornell, drugged me and deleted the video evidence from my phone. Just because Kenya Cline is the daughter of his primary investor. He let her move into our house, where she mocked my father's death. He held me down while she poured scalding coffee on my neck. "An eye for an eye," he said calmly. At Kenya's birthday party, they framed me for stealing a necklace and forced me to walk across burning coals to prove my innocence. The final straw came when Cornell had my father's body thrown into the ocean, just to protect the killer, Kenya Cline. He thought he had broken me. But my father, a cautious lawyer, had left me two gifts: an ironclad post-nuptial agreement that entitled me to half of Cornell's billion-dollar empire, and a secret, encrypted copy of the video he thought he'd erased. He had no idea he hadn't just destroyed his wife; he had created his executioner.

Tonight was my engagement party, the beginning of the perfect life my fiancé, Mark, had promised me. The ballroom glittered, filled with white roses and the smiling faces of our friends and family. But just before my grand entrance, I overheard him talking to his sister, Isabella. "She's so ridiculously naive," he laughed. "Swallowed every lie. This sham of an engagement secured it all. Her family's company is ours now." I threw the door open, only to find them locked in a passionate, desperate kiss. He just smirked at me, his eyes cold. "The act is over," he said. "Did you really think I could ever love someone as pathetic as you?" When I ran to my father for help, he called me hysterical and sided with Mark, the man who had just destroyed my life. A text message confirmed the nightmare: Mark had frozen all my accounts. He'd taken everything. My only hope was a desperate one: Julian Thorne. A ruthless corporate predator and Mark's biggest rival. I went to him to beg for help. He looked at me with cold, calculating eyes and revealed a shocking secret. My family's company had already belonged to him for weeks. Then he made his offer. He would give me my revenge. In return, I had to sign a marriage contract and become his wife.

For five years, I was the steady paycheck that funded my boyfriend Mark's musical dreams. I paid the rent, I believed in his genius, and I thought our future was finally about to begin. He begged me for one last ride for him and his wealthy patron, Daniel. That favor ended in the screech of tires and the shattering of glass. I came to in a haze of pain, my right arm shattered and my career as an architect over. But Mark ignored my injuries, screaming at the paramedics to save his patron's precious hands. Then, at the hospital, Daniel's terrifyingly powerful brother, Julian, loomed over my gurney and promised me I would pay for what I'd done. While I was lying in a hospital bed, Mark changed the locks on the apartment I paid for and gave a false statement to Julian's lawyers, ensuring I would be blamed for everything. Broke, homeless, and facing prison, I was summoned to Julian Thorne's office. He didn't offer mercy. He offered a contract. He slid a document across his desk and gave me a choice: ruin and prison, or marriage and revenge. "You will marry me for one year," he said, his voice like ice. "In return, I will not only drop the lawsuit, but I will personally ensure the man who betrayed you is utterly destroyed."

My best friend, Emily, and I married into the powerful Thorne family on the same day. We thought we had it all, living a dream life as two of the luckiest women in the world. That illusion shattered on a Tuesday afternoon when Emily burst into my sunroom, her face pale, shoving her phone at me. The screen showed paparazzi photos of her husband, Liam, with another woman – his "childhood sweetheart," Olivia Hayes. Before I could process Emily's fury, my own tablet lit up. A press release from my husband Ethan' s company announced Olivia as the new face of his lifestyle brand, complete with a smiling photo of her next to him. Not only was Olivia the source of my best friend's pain, but my own husband, who had been distant and forgotten our anniversary, had made her our company's public face without a word to me. All my grievances, the neglect, the loneliness-they all flooded back. He didn't even think to mention it, treating me like just another asset to manage, not a wife to love. A cold resolve settled over me. Emily, still raging about her post-divorce plans, saw the press release on my tablet. A dangerous smile spread across her face. "Well," she said, "Looks like we' re both in the market for an upgrade." "Okay," I declared, a hysterical laugh bubbling up. "I' m in. We' re getting divorced. And I' ll find male models who are better than Ethan." Our laughter, wild and unhinged, was cut short by a low, cold voice from the doorway: "Better than me?" My husband, Ethan, stood there. He must have heard everything.