Unwanted Wife, Unstoppable Heiress

Tonight was supposed to be the night I became the happiest woman in D.C., celebrating my engagement at the legendary Bolton Manor gala. I wore emerald silk and a diamond that cost more than most mansions, convinced that Hank Bolton was my soulmate and the key to my family's future. But behind the heavy oak doors of the guest wing, the dream died. I found my fiancé tangled with another woman, laughing about how I was nothing more than a "clueless cash cow" whose inheritance would fund his run for the Senate. In my first life, I reacted with tears and screams, which only allowed his family to paint me as an unstable lunatic. They stripped me of my dignity, bankrupted the Adams estate, and watched coldly as my brother, Lucas, died in a ditch trying to save me. I ended up gasping for air in a burning building, realizing too late that my perfect engagement was actually my execution. I died in the soot and the shadows, feeling the searing heat of a betrayal that burned worse than the fire. I lost everything because I was too blind to see the monsters hiding behind expensive smiles. But then, I suddenly gasped for air and realized the smoke was gone. I was standing in front of a vanity, the calendar mocking me: October 14th. The night of the gala. I had been given a second chance, and this time, I wasn't going to be the victim. I recorded the betrayal on my phone and walked into the library with a heart made of ice. I didn't just blow up the engagement; I demanded a new groom—Hank’s "invalid" older brother, Dereck, a man the world had written off as a dying recluse. "I'll take him," I told the stunned family. I wanted a husband who couldn't cheat, a puppet who would leave me a wealthy widow within a year. I thought I was choosing a safe, broken man to shield me from my enemies. I didn't know that under his blanket, Dereck was hiding a holster, or that the "dying" man was actually a predator who had been waiting for someone exactly like me to walk into his trap.

The drill's whine was the only thing in my world, vibrating through my skull and drowning out my own screams. I was strapped to a cold metal table, paralyzed by wolfsbane, while surgeons bored into my hip bone to siphon my essence. "Just a little more," the surgeon muttered. "Isabella needs the boost for the wedding photos." They weren't saving my sister's life. They were harvesting my marrow just to make her skin glow for a picture. I looked at the observation window, begging with my eyes. Dante, the Alpha I had dragged from the jaws of death, stood there. He wasn't looking at me. He was holding Isabella's hand. He didn't know I was the one who healed him. He believed her lies. "Take it all if you have to," Dante's voice drifted through our fading mate bond. "Don't let her fade." The drill punched through. My heart stuttered and stopped. I died on that table, a hollowed-out husk used to feed my sister's vanity. "Seraphina! Are you deaf?" A sharp voice snapped me back into existence. I gasped, clutching my hip. No blood. No drill. No pain. I looked at the calendar on my father's desk. I was alive. And I had exactly one year before the surgery that killed me. I looked at my trembling hands and felt the ancient anger of my White Wolf stirring. I wasn't going to be the sacrifice this time. I was going to be the arsonist.

I spent three years as the perfect, silent wife to billionaire Ezequiel Sanford, enduring a marriage colder than the marble floors of our Manhattan mansion. The day I finally saw two pink lines on a pregnancy test was the same day my world burned down. I found Ezequiel at the hospital, but he wasn't there for me. He was cradling his ex-girlfriend, Alexa, with a gentleness he had never shown me, while my own father was being rushed into the ICU after a suicide attempt triggered by our family's bankruptcy. Instead of comfort, Ezequiel handed me divorce papers. He had checked a box that read "No Issue of Marriage," effectively erasing any claim I had to his legacy. He blackmailed me, promising to save my father’s company only if I signed away every cent of alimony and walked away with nothing. When Alexa called him claiming an emergency, Ezequiel shoved me aside so violently I hit the sharp corner of his glass desk. As I collapsed to the floor, clutching my abdomen in sudden, searing pain, he didn't even look back. "Stop acting," he sneered, his voice dripping with disgust. "It’s pathetic. I will never love you, Claudia, no matter how many times you fall down." He walked out to be with her, leaving me bleeding on his office carpet with the secret he had spent years trying to avoid. He thought I was a gold-digger faking a crisis, never realizing I was actually carrying the Sanford heir he claimed didn't exist. Now, I’m hiding in a private clinic while my husband’s security team scours the city for me. My childhood friend just handed me a one-way ticket to Paris and a chance to restart the medical career I sacrificed for a lie. The money just hit my father's account. I’m signing the papers and disappearing. By the time Ezequiel realizes what he’s lost, I’ll be a world away, and he’ll never even know my child’s name.

For three years, I documented my husband Ashton's neglect in a secret ledger I called "The Song of a Hundred Reasons." Each forgotten anniversary and dismissive glance was a point deducted from a hundred. When the points hit zero, I would walk away. The final reason came not as a quiet slight, but as a deafening crash. When a massive chandelier fell towards us in a restaurant, Ashton didn't hesitate. He shoved his "best friend" Bailey to safety, shielding her with his body while I was left to be crushed. I woke up in the hospital with broken ribs and a severe concussion. He never visited. Instead, he spent a fortune on a private med-jet to fly Bailey to a luxury retreat for her "panic attack." Her well-being was paramount; mine was an afterthought. That was the final reason. I signed the divorce papers from my hospital bed and never looked back. Two years later, holding a Grammy for my hit album "Song of a Hundred Reasons," he showed up, begging for a second chance.

For eight months, my Alpha husband Derek smiled as he rubbed my swollen belly, discussing nursery names. I thought he was excited. Then I found the hidden medical file: Vasectomy. One year ago. Irreversible. He believed my pregnancy was a betrayal. But instead of confronting me, he planned a public execution of my dignity. At the pack gala, he and his mistress drugged me with Wolfsbane. Paralyzed and helpless, I was forced to listen as they took bets from the crowd on who the "real" father was. When the pain started and I felt the life slipping from my womb, I screamed for him through our Mind-Link. "Let the bastard die," he replied coldly, severing the bond. I miscarried on the ballroom floor while they laughed. They thought I was broken. They were wrong. I sent him a box containing the remains, accompanied by a forged DNA test proving the child was his. I watched from the shadows as his sanity shattered under the weight of "killing his own heir." Now, he sits in a maximum-security asylum, howling in grief for a son that never truly belonged to him. I sip my champagne in First Class, leaving the wreckage behind. The sterilization had worked perfectly. The baby wasn't his. But as long as he suffers, the truth doesn't matter.

I watched the man I was contractually bound to marry dive into the freezing water. But he wasn't swimming toward me. Only seconds prior, his mistress had shoved me into the ornamental pool. I struggled to surface, my heavy silk dress dragging me down like a lead weight. Jax, the ruthless Underboss of Chicago, swam right past me. He reached for the woman who had pushed me, scooping her up as she faked a leg cramp. He carried her out, stepping over my hand as I clawed at the slippery edge. Every Capo and soldier in the underworld watched the heir choose a jersey chaser over his fiancée. "You are making a scene, Eliana," Jax said, his voice devoid of emotion. "Go home." He didn't offer a hand. He ordered me away like a disobedient dog. Later that night, when I tried to return his ring, his mistress laughed and shoved me down a flight of stairs. I lay at the bottom, broken and bleeding. Jax didn't check if I was alive. He comforted her instead. To him, I was just furniture. A guarantee. He thought he had broken me. He thought I had nowhere to go because our families were allied. He was wrong. I left the five-carat diamond on the table. I left my car keys on the dashboard at O'Hare Airport. I didn't just run away. I boarded a one-way flight to New York to join his mortal enemy, the Tran Syndicate. Jax Little thought he owned the board. He didn't realize the Queen had just defected.