A Second Chance With Mr. Blackwood
In the roaring flames of the abandoned warehouse, my skin blistered and peeled.
Through the crackling fire, my sister Elara's malicious voice echoed. She told me my husband, Damien, was dead, and it was all my fault.
For years, I had treated Damien like a monster. I fought him, threw tantrums, and desperately tried to escape our marriage, all because I blindly followed Elara's advice.
"Remember, the harder you fight, the more disgusted he'll get."
She texted me things like that, telling me to smash vases over his head and run away, claiming she was protecting me.
In reality, she was poisoning my mind, stealing my valedictorian spot at university, and plotting to crawl into my billionaire husband's bed.
My foolish rebellion cost me everything, ultimately leading to Damien's tragic death and my own fiery end.
As the massive explosion tore my consciousness to shreds, I finally understood who truly loved me and who the real monster was.
I died suffocating on my own agonizing regret, wishing I could tear Elara apart.
Then, a rush of freezing air punched into my lungs.
I opened my eyes to the crisp scent of cedar and mint. I was back seven years ago, on the very night our marriage was supposed to go to hell.
This time, looking at Damien's flawless, unscarred face, I didn't push him away.
I wrapped my arms around his neck and made a silent vow: I would make every single person who ever hurt him bleed.
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Chapter 1
The heat blistered her skin.
Giovanna felt the skin on her arms peeling back, the raw flesh exposed to the roaring flames of the abandoned warehouse. Thick, black smoke coated her throat. She couldn't breathe. Her lungs screamed, burning from the inside out.
"He's dead, Gio." Elara's voice echoed through the crackling fire, dripping with pure malice. "Damien died because of you."
A massive explosion shattered the air. Giovanna's heart seized. A violent spasm ripped through her chest, tearing her consciousness to shreds.
Then, a rush of freezing air punched into her lungs.
Giovanna's eyes snapped open. She gasped, her chest heaving as she coughed violently. She thrashed her arms out, fighting off the invisible flames, but her hands didn't hit burning wood.
Her fingers tangled in cold, smooth silk.
The suffocating stench of smoke was gone. Instead, the crisp, clean scent of cedar and sharp mint filled her nose. It was a scent permanently etched into her brain. Damien's scent.
Her vision blurred, then slowly focused. Above her wasn't a collapsing, charred ceiling, but a massive, multi-million-dollar crystal chandelier.
A tall, broad shadow eclipsed the moonlight spilling through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
Damien Blackwood stood beside the bed. He looked down at her. His dark eyes were a storm of sick obsession and tightly leashed fury. His jaw was locked so tight the muscle ticked under his skin.
"How long are you going to fake passing out to avoid our wedding night?" His voice was a harsh, gravelly rasp. It held no warmth, only ice.
Giovanna's pupils dilated. The sound of his voice-alive, deep, vibrating in the quiet room-hit her like a physical blow. Tears instantly flooded her eyes, spilling hot and fast down her cheeks.
She ignored the venom in his words. Her eyes locked onto his face. It was flawless. Young. Handsome. There were no burn scars. No blood.
She whipped her head to the side. The vintage digital clock on the nightstand glowed with the date.
Seven years ago.
The night he had forced the consummation of their marriage. The night before everything went to hell.
Damien saw her tears. His chest stopped moving. A flash of raw, unfiltered pain cracked through his cold facade, quickly swallowed by a surge of dark violence. He thought she was crying out of pure disgust for him.
He let out a low, bitter laugh. He took a half-step back, his body turning toward the door. He was going to walk away. Just like he did in her past life.
Panic seized Giovanna's throat. Her heart hammered against her ribs. She threw the silk blanket off and swung her bare feet onto the cold floor.
She tried to stand, but the sheer, overwhelming shock of rebirth and seeing him alive finally crashed down upon her. A violent wave of dizziness washed over her brain, and her legs gave out. She pitched forward, falling straight toward the hardwood floor.
Damien's instincts overrode his anger. He moved faster than thought. His large hands shot out, catching her upper arms in a vice grip before her knees could hit the ground.
Giovanna didn't try to stand up. She used his momentum, throwing her arms around his neck and burying her face into his broad, solid chest.
Damien froze. Every single muscle in his body turned to stone. His hands hovered in the empty air behind her back, terrified to touch her.
Giovanna inhaled deeply, greedily sucking in the scent of him. He was warm. He was breathing. Her tears soaked right through the thin fabric of his custom-tailored dress shirt, burning against his skin.
Damien's brain short-circuited. His breathing turned shallow. The extreme paranoia that kept him alive screamed at him. This was a trick. She was faking it. She wanted him to drop his guard so she could run.
He grabbed her forearms, his grip bruising. He tried to peel her off his body, forcing her to look at him.
Giovanna refused to let go. She tightened her hold, rising onto her tiptoes, pressing her body flush against his.
"D," she whispered. Her voice was broken, thick with tears, but incredibly soft. "Don't push me away."
Damien's pupils blew wide. The nickname hit him like a bullet to the chest. She had never called him that. Never.
Giovanna tilted her head back. She closed her eyes, her eyelashes wet and trembling. She pressed her soft, parted lips directly against his hard, thin mouth.
The last thread of Damien's control snapped.
He didn't just accept the kiss; he devoured it. His large hands slammed into her back, crushing her against him. He took over, his mouth slanting over hers with a desperate, punishing heat.
As his tongue swept into her mouth, stealing her breath, Giovanna made a silent vow. She would make every single person who ever hurt him bleed.
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7.8
Helen was finally brought back to the luxurious Gallagher estate as their long-lost blood relative.
But her new family didn't welcome her; they looked at her with undisguised disgust.
The matriarch mocked her stench of poverty, while her step-sister Candice treated her like a feral animal. The patriarch, Fredy—who had built his empire by betraying Helen's mother—tried to break her spirit. He blackmailed Helen into attending a high-society gala by threatening to cut off her grandmother's medical funds.
At the gala, Candice squeezed into a diamond-encrusted gown, desperate to seduce the guest of honor, Damian Montgomery. Damian was the most powerful man in New York, and he was currently tearing the city apart looking for a mysterious woman named Jane.
Overhearing this, a sick, greedy smile spread across Candice's face. She planned to impersonate Jane to claim Damian's wealth and completely crush Helen under her heel.
"Hide in the corner tonight. Don't you dare try to speak to anyone important!"
They all thought Helen was just a helpless, uncultured country girl they could easily manipulate and step on to secure their stolen legacy.
What they didn't know was that Helen was the real Jane. She was the lethal shadow who had saved Damian in the woods, shattered his grip, and robbed his highly guarded vault just the night before.
Helen calmly adjusted her simple black dress and stepped into the ballroom, ready to tear their stolen world apart.
7.2
Blaire woke up in a Manhattan penthouse, her body covered in bruises and her innocence stolen.
Before she could process the terror, her adoptive sister Danita burst in, acting heartbroken and accusing Blaire of shamelessly seducing the powerful Kamryn Lane. Kamryn threw a one-million-dollar check at Blaire's bleeding face, calling her a calculating gold digger.
That night, Blaire overheard a conversation in the family study that shattered her entire reality.
"Once she gives birth to the Lane family's seed, we'll stage an accident, drain her blood, and transplant her healthy heart into your chest."
Her adoptive mother and Danita were celebrating the success of their trap. She wasn't an adopted daughter; she was a living organ bank and a disposable surrogate. Even her adoptive brother, Calhoun, knew everything, trapping her in the dark hallways with a sick, possessive obsession to ensure she never escaped.
The horrific truth suffocated her. The family that had taken her in had raised her like livestock for slaughter. How could they smile at her every day while planning to carve out her heart?
Terrified but burning with a desperate will to survive, Blaire swallowed a Plan B pill to ruin their surrogate plot and fled the estate. To get the money and power she needed to crush her adoptive family, she pulled out Kamryn Lane's business card. This time, she would make a deal with the devil.
8.1
Desperate for a way out of rejection and poverty, Pearl Augustine accepts a nanny job with an outrageous salary-working for billionaire Ace Warren. What she doesn't expect is his daughter.
Mia Warren is spoiled, sharp-tongued, and feared by everyone in the mansion. Behind her cruelty is a lonely child longing for a mother. As Pearl becomes the only one who can reach her, walls begin to fall-especially those around Ace, a grieving man hiding behind wealth and control.
What started as "just a job" quickly turns into something dangerous: attachment.
Sometimes, healing begins where you least expect it.
8.7
Emerson worked grueling twelve-hour shifts just to keep her five-year-old son, Leo, alive. Her only lifeline was her partner Alden, who was willing to give up his wealthy family to protect them.
But when Leo's bone marrow completely failed, the doctor delivered a death sentence. The only way to save him was a two-million-dollar treatment, or having another child with his biological father.
That father was Finnegan Mcconnell, the ruthless billionaire who had accused Emerson of faking her pregnancy and abandoned her five years ago.
Desperate for the medical fees, Emerson submitted her designs to Finnegan's company.
Instead of advancing the money, Finnegan tore her portfolio to shreds and trapped her as a prisoner in his estate.
To force her complete submission, he systematically destroyed her reality. He framed Alden with federal charges, leaving him facing twenty years in prison.
Alden's mother stormed into the pediatric ICU, violently strangling Emerson against the wall.
"Beg Finnegan to let my son go! You are a curse!"
Even Emerson's own adoptive mother showed up at the hospital, just to publicly mock her dying child.
Emerson was suffocating in despair. Finnegan already had a beautiful new wife and a five-year-old daughter—absolute proof he had been cheating while she was pregnant and alone.
He had his perfect family. Why did he have to hunt her down and sever every lifeline she had left, just to watch her drown?
With her son's heart monitor fading and Alden locked in a cell, her pride finally shattered.
Emerson walked into the top-floor executive office and dropped to her knees at the devil's feet, but the desperate mother looking up at him was preparing for a devastating revenge.
8.8
Clara supported her boyfriend Leo for four years, paying his rent and buying his headshots while working dead-end extra gigs.
On his twenty-sixth birthday, she caught him in their bed with Veronica, a wealthy producer's daughter who constantly stole Clara's roles.
Leo mocked Clara as a "pathetic, poor stepping stone" who was just there until he got his foot in the door.
Veronica threatened to ruin Clara's career forever.
Clara dumped him, packed her bags, and impulsively entered a contract marriage with a cold stranger she met at City Hall.
But her nightmare wasn't over.
When her mother suddenly needed a $200,000 emergency brain surgery, Clara was forced to take a demeaning extra gig to survive.
There, Veronica and her starlet friend cornered Clara.
They mocked her cheap clothes, ridiculed her new wedding ring as fake glass, and intentionally poured scalding coffee on her feet.
"Well, maid, you better clean that up."
Veronica laughed, forcing Clara to her knees to wipe up the burning liquid while snapping photos.
Clara swallowed her burning humiliation, secretly recording their abuse on her phone.
She endured the pain, desperate for the $300 day rate to save her mother's life, feeling entirely crushed by their overwhelming wealth and power.
What she didn't know was that outside the soundstage, her new contract husband—the man she thought was just a struggling, broke tech worker—was sitting in a sleek black Maybach.
He watched his wife kneeling on the floor, and his dark eyes filled with a lethal, terrifying rage.
9.7
Charity woke up in a hellish, acid-rain-soaked slum, trapped inside a bloated body covered in festering, toxic sores. She was the exiled Grand Princess of the Empire.
But the real nightmare wasn't her ruined body. It was the fact that the original owner had used her royal authority to force genetic marriage contracts onto four top-tier, powerful men.
Now, she was bound to them, and they absolutely loathed her.
Hjalmar, chained to a bed in her filthy room, smiled like a feral beast and promised to rip her head off the second his chains snapped.
Braden, a ruthless military officer, saved her from a mutated rat only to look at her with pure disgust.
"If you want to die, go die somewhere else. Don't dirty my patrol sector."
Even the locals mocked her fallen status, and a wealthy heiress publicly framed her for stealing a hundred-thousand-coin energy core just to see her rot in a dark cell.
She was universally despised, physically repulsive, and a lethal biological toxin gave her exactly 59 days left to live. How was she supposed to survive this absolute hell when her starting affection with her partners was at negative 100?
Then, a mechanical voice echoed in her skull, activating a survival system. To purge the poison, she had to harvest emotional energy by making these four men fall for her. Charity accepted the mandate, unlocked a top-tier culinary skill, and grabbed a rusted meat cleaver to start her counterattack.