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 9
Giovanna and Fiona slipped out of the library and speed-walked across the campus. They reached the back entrance of the Centennial Auditorium just as the five-minute warning bell rang.
Inside the massive hall, thousands of freshmen and faculty members were taking their seats. The low hum of chatter filled the air.
Giovanna pushed open the heavy metal door to the backstage holding area.
The lighting was dim, smelling of hairspray and nervous sweat. In the center of the room, standing in front of a full-length mirror, was Elara.
Elara wore an obscenely expensive, custom white Chanel dress. Two makeup artists were frantically powdering her nose. She even had a small, ridiculous diamond tiara pinned into her hair.
Skylar stood next to her, holding a bottle of water and gushing about how perfect Elara looked.
Elara caught Giovanna's reflection in the mirror. Her perfectly painted lips twisted into a vicious sneer.
She turned around, placing a hand over her chest in mock surprise. "Gio? What are you doing back here? This area is for VIPs only."
Skylar snorted loudly. "She probably came to beg you to mention her in your speech. You know, to fix her trash reputation."
Giovanna didn't get angry. She leaned her shoulder against the doorframe, crossing her arms over her chest. She looked at Elara with the bored, detached expression of someone watching a bug crawl across the floor.
"I just came to watch the peacock strut before all its feathers get plucked," Giovanna drawled, her voice lazy and dripping with sarcasm.
Elara's smile stiffened. A vein throbbed in her forehead. "Jealousy is an ugly color on you, Gio. In five minutes, the whole school will know who the real pride of the Vang family is."
Before Giovanna could reply, the heavy curtains parted. Dean Cromwell, a balding man in a tight suit, sprinted into the backstage area. He was sweating profusely, clutching a freshly printed clipboard to his chest.
He didn't even glance at Elara in her million-dollar dress. His panicked eyes scanned the room.
"Fiona Daly!" Dean Cromwell shouted, his voice cracking. "Where is Fiona Daly?!"
Elara froze. Her brow furrowed in confusion. She stepped directly into the Dean's path, blocking him. "Dean Cromwell, you must be mistaken. I'm Elara Vang. I'm up next."
The Dean shoved his glasses up his nose. He looked down at the physical piece of paper clipped to his board. He scowled in annoyance.
"Miss Vang, the master system clearly lists Fiona Daly as the valedictory speaker. Now please step aside, the Chancellor is already at the podium!"
The words hit Elara like a physical blow to the stomach. All the blood rushed out of her face.
"No!" Elara shrieked, her voice pitching into a hysterical octave. "That's impossible! My father paid-I mean, my father arranged everything!"
The makeup artists and stagehands nearby stopped what they were doing. They stared at Elara, their eyes wide with shock and disgust at the accidental confession.
Elara slapped both hands over her mouth, realizing what she had just screamed. But the damage was done. The bribery was out in the open.
Giovanna nudged Fiona's shoulder. "Go. Take your stage."
Fiona swallowed her fear. She squared her shoulders and marched up to the Dean. "I'm Fiona Daly."
"Thank God," the Dean gasped, grabbing her arm and dragging her toward the stairs leading to the stage.
From the other side of the curtain, the Chancellor's booming voice echoed through the speakers. "Please welcome our freshman representative, entering with a near-perfect score... Fiona Daly!"
A deafening roar of applause shook the floorboards.
Elara stood paralyzed. She watched Fiona walk out into the blinding spotlight. Her hands shook so violently her diamond tiara rattled. Her fingernails dug into her palms until they bled.
She whipped her head around, fixing a look of pure, homicidal rage on Giovanna. "You did this! You hacked the system!"
Giovanna slowly pushed off the doorframe. She walked over to Elara, stopping inches from her face.
Giovanna leaned in, the cold, dead look returning to her eyes.
"This is just the appetizer, Elara," Giovanna whispered, her voice a deadly promise. "I am going to rip back everything you stole from me. Piece by piece."
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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.