A Contract Marriage With My Nemesis
My fiancé always told me he loved me. But not long after our engagement, I woke up suffocating in the dark.
He was pressing a pillow over my face, his eyes cold and dead, while my half-sister stood by watching with fake pity.
They had orchestrated everything just to steal my trust fund.
It all started with a massive hotel scandal. They had drugged me, thrown a cheap escort into my bed, and brought a mob of paparazzi to ruin my reputation.
When my fiancé broke through the crowd, playing the heartbroken victim, he knelt down with a massive diamond ring.
"I know things have been hard, but I love you. If you come home with me, I will forgive all of this."
In my past life, I cried tears of gratitude and let him slide that ring onto my finger.
That ring sealed my death warrant. I lost my company, my dignity, and eventually, my life.
Until my lungs burned and my heart stopped, I didn't understand.
How could the people I trusted most plot my murder so ruthlessly?
Why did they have to tear my entire life apart?
Opening my eyes again, I was back on the morning of the hotel scandal, exactly one year ago.
But the man lying bare-backed in my bed wasn't a random escort.
It was Johnathan Chase, my family's biggest corporate rival and the most ruthless predator on Wall Street.
Listening to the paparazzi pounding on the door, I smiled coldly.
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Chapter 4
Elena walked out of the elevator and straight into the hotel's underground parking garage. She pulled open the heavy door of a black Lincoln Navigator and climbed into the back seat.
She threw her head back against the cold leather headrest and let out a long, shaky breath. Her lungs finally felt like they were pulling in real oxygen.
Thea, her PR assistant, was sitting in the passenger seat. She immediately twisted around and handed Elena a paper cup of hot black coffee.
"Elena, Twitter is exploding," Thea said, her voice tight with panic. She tapped her tablet screen frantically. "The hashtag about the broken engagement is trending number one globally."
Elena took the cup. The heat burned her palms, but it grounded her. She took a sip of the bitter liquid.
"Draft a statement right now," Elena ordered, her voice completely devoid of emotion. "State that the engagement is terminated. Make sure you heavily imply that Darron's severe financial irregularities are the core reason for the split."
Thea's eyes went wide. She was shocked by how ruthlessly her boss was moving, but her fingers instantly flew across the tablet keyboard, typing out the draft.
Meanwhile, back in the penthouse suite, Johnathan stood by the floor-to-ceiling window. He watched the hotel security physically drag the last of the paparazzi out into the hallway.
He pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed his executive assistant, Cameron, on a heavily encrypted line.
"Send the photo to the Wall Street Journal," Johnathan ordered, his voice flat and businesslike. "The specific one we discussed."
There was a brief pause on the other end of the line. "Sir," Cameron hesitated. "Are you sure? That photo clearly implicates you in the scandal as well."
Johnathan let out a low, dark chuckle. "Do it. The only way to see what cards she's really holding is to flip the table."
Ten minutes later, inside the moving Lincoln, Thea sucked in a sharp, horrified breath.
Her hands shook as she shoved the tablet over the center console, pushing it into Elena's line of sight. "Look at this. Breaking news."
Elena stared at the screen.
The headline was massive. But it was the high-definition photo beneath it that made Elena's stomach drop.
It was a picture of her and Johnathan. Johnathan's large hand was resting firmly on the bare skin of her lower back, right where her dress was torn. The angle of the shot was incredibly intimate, completely cutting out the crowd of reporters and focusing only on the heat between the two of them.
Elena's eyes narrowed. She recognized the exact angle. It was taken from the back of the room, right before she turned around to face the cameras.
Only one person had the power and the foresight to arrange a hidden camera at that exact, impossible angle inside his own private suite. Johnathan. He had orchestrated the shot through a concealed lens embedded in the room's smart-mirror and leaked it.
The comments section under the article was a war zone. The public narrative had instantly flipped. People were calling her a hypocrite, accusing her of using Darron's finances as a smokescreen to hide her own affair with a billionaire rival.
The stock ticker widget on the corner of the screen flashed red. Conway Media's stock was taking a massive nosedive in pre-market trading.
Elena gripped the coffee cup so hard the cardboard buckled. Her knuckles turned stark white.
"That opportunistic bastard," she hissed through her teeth, her blood boiling.
"Do we issue a denial? Say it's photoshopped?" Thea asked, her voice trembling.
Elena closed her eyes and took a deep breath, forcing the red haze of anger to clear. She shook her head.
"No. If he leaked this, he has the raw files to prove it's real. Denying it will only make us look worse."
She leaned forward. "Tell the driver to turn around. Get me to headquarters. Now."
She turned her head to look out the tinted window. The Manhattan skyline blurred past them. Her eyes were as hard and cold as the glass.
She knew this war wasn't just about destroying Darron and Haylee anymore. Johnathan had just forced himself onto the chessboard, and he was playing for blood.
The heavy SUV swerved sharply, the tires squealing against the pavement as it pulled into the VIP underground entrance of the Conway Media headquarters.
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7.4
Four years ago, to protect the man I loved from losing his billionaire empire, I drugged his drink, told him I only used him for his money, and vanished.
Now, at a high-society gala, Callum Wyatt is back. He isn't just a CEO anymore; he's a ruthless predator, and the second his eyes lock onto me, I know I am his prey.
When my wealthy half-sister publicly humiliated me, calling me the cheap bastard child of a homewrecker, Callum stepped out of the shadows. He nearly snapped her wrist in half and declared to New York's elite that anyone who touched me would be dismantled.
In the back of his Maybach, he pinned my arms above my head, his eyes burning with psychotic obsession.
"If you run again, Aubrey, I will burn your entire world to the ground just to keep you."
My heart bled. I had spent four grueling years tearing myself apart to keep him out of my messy, blood-soaked revenge against the family that watched my mother die.
But his terrifying protection only made my biological father's family target me harder, using their massive capital to buy out my movie set and crush my acting career.
They thought I would cower.
But as I walked onto the soundstage, facing the heiress trying to steal my role, I took off my sunglasses. I wasn't running anymore; it was time to make them pay.
9.7
I was an intern nurse working exhausting shifts, yet my mother constantly forced me into blind dates with wealthy, arrogant men to secure our family's social standing.
During a terrifying hospital lockdown, an assassin disguised as a doctor held a scalpel to my throat. I was almost killed, but a high-ranking military colonel threw his own body down a flight of concrete stairs to shield me.
I survived with cuts and bruises, but when I went home, my mother didn't care about my near-death experience. She was only furious that I had rushed out on my blind date with Preston, a rich financial analyst.
She forced me to meet him to apologize. When Preston grabbed my arm, bruised me, and mocked my attack as a pathetic lie, my mother still took his side.
"Men get angry," she told me coldly. "It's your job not to provoke them. You will beg for his forgiveness, or you are no longer welcome in this house."
I had narrowly escaped an assassin, yet my own family was willing to feed me to a monster just for a fat paycheck and neighborhood gossip.
My heart went completely dead.
So, when the intimidating Colonel appeared, offering me maximum military protection through a sudden marriage, I didn't hesitate.
I walked back into my parents' house and calmly slapped a crisp marriage certificate onto the coffee table.
"I won't be apologizing to Preston. I got married today."
7.3
Clara came home from a fourteen-hour board meeting to the sound of a piercing scream in the playroom.
When she rushed in, she found her husband, Chadwick, kneeling on the floor in a panic.
But he wasn't looking at their five-year-old son, Leo, who had a massive bleeding welt on his forehead.
Instead, Chadwick was trembling as he held the nanny's daughter, Autumn, who barely had a microscopic scratch.
"She needs ice. And antibacterial ointment," Chadwick snapped, carrying the nanny's daughter away and leaving his bleeding son behind.
From that moment, the nightmare only escalated.
Chadwick ordered Clara to cook a three-hour meal for the nanny's kid, threw away Leo's favorite toys because Autumn sneezed, and even secretly took the nanny and her daughter on Leo's promised Disney trip.
The final humiliation came at the Met Gala.
Right before their sponsor speech, Chadwick received a frantic call from the nanny claiming Autumn was having a panic attack.
He abandoned Clara in front of hundreds of flashing cameras, sprinting out of the ballroom.
Clara stood completely alone, the humiliation eating through her veins like acid.
She couldn't understand how a father could call the nanny's kid his "little princess" while watching his own son cry.
Why was he treating his own flesh and blood like garbage just to play savior to another woman's child?
Suddenly, the blinding camera flashes were blocked by a massive shadow.
Erasmo Chase, the heir to New York's largest financial dynasty, stepped out of the darkness and shielded her.
"A man like that is unworthy of your grief, Ms. Best," he whispered, pressing a silk handkerchief into her trembling hand.
Looking at the sharp profile of the powerful man beside her, Clara's shock hardened into a lethal, cold fury.
She was going to dump her family's shares, crash the board, and make Chadwick lose absolutely everything.
7.5
I was Nyx, a top-tier covert operative. But when I opened my eyes, I was trapped in the unfamiliar, overweight body of a bullied girl named Eliza.
Before I could even process the body swap, the bedroom door splintered open. I was in bed with Julian Malone, a wealthy military heir, both of us heavily drugged. Cameras flashed wildly. It was a vicious setup to ruin his career, and I was the bait.
To save his family's reputation, Julian was forced to marry me. But the moment the wedding was over, he abandoned me. His elite family treated me like a disease. His mother froze my only bank account, trying to starve me into submission.
I even intercepted a private conversation between his parents.
"Once she's in a private facility, she loses all legal standing. We can sign anything we want on her behalf."
They planned to lock me up in a mental asylum and erase my existence entirely to get rid of the "trailer park trash."
To them, I was just a weak, pathetic pawn they could crush without a second thought. They thought they had backed a helpless girl into a corner.
They had no idea they had just declared war on a lethal weapon.
I didn't cry or beg. Instead, I bypassed their state-of-the-art security, cracked their safe, and stole the financial secrets that could destroy their entire empire.
"I want five hundred thousand dollars, or these files go to the IRS."
This time, I was playing by my own rules.
8.4
Kenzie, the former leader of the Aegis Alliance, opened her eyes to find herself reincarnated as a freezing, abandoned infant in a wet cardboard box.
She was rescued from the rain by Devin Ayers, a ruthless billionaire, and rushed to a private hospital, but a deadly threat was already waiting for her.
The ER doctor, Desiree Dillon, approached her with a syringe. Through a sudden burst of telepathy, Kenzie read the doctor's dark thoughts. Desiree wasn't trying to cure her fever. She deliberately ignored the safe dosage, drawing a lethal amount of Diazepam to permanently silence the crying baby and disguise it as sudden infant death.
"This will make it all go away," Desiree smiled gently, the needle glinting as it moved inches from Kenzie's arm.
Trapped in a weak, paralyzed three-month-old body, Kenzie couldn't run, fight, or even speak. She could only watch the poison inch closer.
How could she survive death only to be assassinated in a hospital bed by a corrupt doctor? She used to command armies. The sheer injustice and terror of dying completely helpless in this tiny body ignited a blinding rage inside her.
Refusing to be a victim again, Kenzie pushed her newborn brain to its absolute limit and unleashed a desperate telepathic scream directly into the billionaire's mind.
"Poison! She's trying to kill me!"
Devin, who had been looking away, suddenly froze, his icy gray eyes locking onto the doctor's wrist.
8.1
On my wedding day, the wedding planner looked at me with pity in her eyes.
She told me the groom had called with a last-minute request. He wanted the name on the floral arch changed from "Elena" to "Sofia."
Five years of loyalty to Dante Romero, and I found out he was planning a "secret" ceremony with his mistress an hour before ours.
He claimed she was dying of cancer. He said it was her final wish to be a bride, and that as a good mafia wife, I should understand. He swore it was just charity.
But I had seen the texts where he called me "furniture."
I had watched him step over my body when I fell down the stairs at a club, just so he could leave with her.
And this morning, I watched Sofia walk into the hotel lobby wearing *my* custom French lace wedding dress, smirking as she clung to his arm.
Dante thinks I'm crying in the bridal suite.
He thinks I will sit in the front row of his "fake" wedding and wait for my turn like a dutiful puppet.
He is wrong.
I wiped my tears and picked up my phone. I didn't cancel the wedding date. I just changed the location to the ballroom next door.
And I changed the groom.
As Dante says his vows to his mistress, I am walking down the aisle to meet the only man the Romero family fears.
The Reaper.