After My Husband Wished He Met Her First
I stumbled upon a video from a street interview blogger. "What advice would you give to your past self from five years ago?"
In the video, Corbin Murray was holding his young girlfriend close. His voice was calm and affectionate. "I wish the Corbin Murray from five years ago could have met Arianna Anderson sooner."
The young woman in his arms blushed, covering her mouth as she echoed him. "I feel the same way."
The viewers were delighted, showering them with blessings. No one knew that five years ago was the day Corbin and I got married. Even he had forgotten. Until a week later. The blogger released another street interview video. In the footage, I looked straight into the camera and said seriously, "Zainab West, don't marry Corbin Murray.
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Chapter 8
As I stepped out of Corbin Murray's office building, I heard Arianna Anderson call my name.
"Zainab."
She quickly closed the distance between us, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear with a graceful motion.
"Thank you for stepping aside and letting us be together, for giving Corbin up," she said.
Her smile was bright and triumphant, as if she were a victor showcasing her prize.
"You're welcome," I replied with a faint smile, wishing she wouldn't end up in my shoes someday.
A little piece of wisdom from someone who’d been there before.
Arianna's smile wavered for a moment but then returned to its radiant form.
"How could I end up like you? You've already seen how Corbin feels about me, haven't you?" she asserted confidently.
She was referencing something from the past.
Back then, Corbin had brought Arianna to one of his friends’ parties. During the gathering, one of Corbin’s friends inadvertently mentioned my history with Corbin.
He blurted out, "Once Corbin came back late from a business trip, and Zainab was waiting for him outside, asleep on a garden bench, when a homeless guy bothered her."
Arianna, nestled in Corbin’s arms at the time, frowned in distaste and uttered, “Isn't that just pathetic?”
I couldn't tell if she was referring to my sleeping in the garden or the incident with the homeless man.
Regardless, the room erupted in mocking laughter.
That night, I was standing right outside the door.
I had intended to catch them in the act.
Unexpectedly, those words struck me like a cold blast, leaving me feeling both icy and fiercely burning, torn apart by my emotions.
But what truly stunned me was Corbin’s reaction.
He sat on the couch, holding Arianna, and amidst the careless jokes and laughter, he remained silent, his expression nonchalant.
As if they were mocking a stranger.
And not someone he had once cared for and protected.
And during the final game of the evening, Corbin happily took a drink from Arianna’s lips.
At her playful urging, he repeated the words, "Zainab, dirty."
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9.8
At six months pregnant, Thomas Montgomery had his friends over for some gaming. I prepared a meal and served it to them, only for Blaire Clark to burst into tears, accusing me of trying to upset her. All because I had mistakenly added some parsley she despised to the dish. Thomas and his friends demanded I apologize. "She's just sensitive; try to accommodate her," Thomas said coldly. I refused, and he pushed me down to my knees in front of Blaire. "Apologize to her, you're out of line!"
Humiliated, I quietly scheduled the soonest possible appointment for an abortion that day. But when I truly decided to leave, Thomas went into a rage. I leaned against the cold wall as I made my way out of the hospital. The sky had turned dark, and snow was falling heavily.
8.3
My cousin Hailey paid a dock worker to assault me just to ruin my engagement.
To survive the military-grade aphrodisiac she poisoned me with, I stumbled into a walk-in freezer and threw myself onto the only source of cold I could find-a man paralyzed by unnatural hypothermia.
It was a desperate, primal exchange of my heat for his ice just to keep my heart from stopping.
But when Hailey threw open the heavy iron door, leading my fiancé and the entire Bolton family to witness my "shame," her triumphant grin instantly vanished.
She hadn't caught me with a low-life thug.
She had caught me straddling Demetrius Maddox, the ruthless Iron King of Chicago.
The air in the room dropped to absolute zero. My grandmother screamed in horror, and my father turned the color of ash.
Hailey, blinded by jealousy, tried to double down. She pointed a manicured finger at the deadliest man in the city and called him a "nameless muscle" I picked up to defile the family name.
She didn't realize she had just signed her own death warrant.
I didn't cower. I realized this was the only chance to survive the family that wanted me dead.
I walked up to the Devil himself, my body still humming with the poison, and looked him in the eye.
"Kill me, and the cold inside you wins," I whispered, knowing he was dying from the inverse of my own poison. "I am the only doctor who knows how to cure you."
Demetrius tightened his hand around my throat, his dark eyes assessing my worth.
"Prove it," he growled.
I turned back to my trembling cousin and signaled the enforcer to hand me the whip.
7.3
I signed my own divorce papers thinking they were an investment in our future.
Craig handed me the stack of documents with a smile, telling me it was to secure assets for our unborn children. I trusted him more than gravity, so I didn't read the fine print.
Hours later, at his promotion party, I watched him announce his engagement to Chanel, the company heiress.
I rushed to check the folder I had signed. It wasn't a trust fund. It was a complete dissolution of our marriage.
I received no alimony. He kept the house and the stocks. And the box for "no child visitation" was already checked.
The cruelest twist came the next morning. I stared at a pregnancy test with two pink lines.
I was pregnant with the child of a man who had just tricked me into a divorce and called me "dead weight" in a text to his mistress.
When I tried to disappear and rebuild my life, Craig didn't let me go. His ego couldn't handle my silence.
He kidnapped me, locking me in a warehouse to "fix" our marriage, delusional enough to believe we could be a happy family after he caused me to lose the baby.
I thought I would die in that cold, dark room.
Then, a truck rammed through the wall, engulfed in flames.
Felix, the quiet assistant I had barely noticed for five years, walked through the fire to get me.
As he carried me out of the burning wreckage, leaving Craig behind, I realized he wasn't just an employee.
He had been waiting to save me all along.
8.3
For three years, I hid my identity as a billionaire heiress to build a life with the man I loved. I gave up everything to support Ben's career, believing we were creating a future together from the ground up.
The day before our engagement, I overheard him with his boss, Haylie. He called me a "stepping stone," a poor, simple girl he was using to climb the corporate ladder and get closer to her.
He laughed about our "humble" life and mocked the silver ring on my finger, calling it a necessary prop. He was sleeping with her, taking credit for the multi-million dollar deal I secretly engineered, and saw my love as a naive distraction.
The man I sacrificed my entire world for saw me as less than nothing. My love didn't just die; it turned into ice-cold rage.
So I walked out of his life and straight into the arms of my family's biggest rival.
He offered me a deal I couldn't refuse.
"Marry me," Jaxson Banks said with a smirk. "And together, we'll burn their world to the ground."
9.0
The day my guardian, Dante Moretti, announced his engagement was the day I started planning my death. Not a literal one, but the death of the girl who had orbited his world for ten years.
He was the Don of the Moretti family, the man I'd secretly loved since I was a child. But with his new fiancée, Sofia, on his arm, he began to erase me. He even forgot my severe allergy, gifting me a watch that would blister my skin.
He had ripped apart the diary where I confessed my love for him.
"I am your guardian," he'd spat. "Do not ever cross that line again."
Yet one night, drunk and stumbling, he crashed his mouth onto mine, his hands roaming my body as he pushed me against the wall.
He groaned, but the name that escaped his lips wasn't mine.
"Sofia..."
When I screamed my own name—Elara—he shoved me away in horror. He wasn't horrified by his betrayal, but by the fact that he'd kissed the wrong woman.
That was the final straw. I took the acceptance letter to a university in Toronto that I had kept hidden like a prayer. I called my estranged father and booked a one-way ticket. This time, I would burn my old life to the ground and leave nothing but ashes behind.
8.1
I was sealing our wedding invitations with crimson wax when I heard my fiancé through the slightly ajar study door.
Ethan wasn't reciting the poetry he’d written for me over the last seven years. He was outlining the logistics of his betrayal.
"If I fake amnesia after the 'accident' tonight, I can delay the wedding without the family stopping the merger," Ethan laughed, ice clinking in his glass.
"And Ava? The Canary?" his friend asked.
"Ava is property. You maintain property; you don't have fun with it. While she plays nurse, I get a medical exemption to sleep with Chloe."
My world shattered. I fled into the rainy night, blinded by tears, until headlights turned my world upside down.
I woke up in the wreckage, my arm shattered, tasting blood. Ethan arrived moments later.
But he didn't run to me.
He stepped right over my bleeding body to comfort Chloe, who had a minor scratch on her forehead.
"I've got you, baby," he cooed to his mistress, looking at me with nothing but cold annoyance. "Don't worry about her. She's tough."
He left me in the street.
By the next morning, the narrative was set: The tragic Don had lost his memory of his fiancée, but miraculously remembered his 'true love,' Chloe. He evicted me from our penthouse while I was still in surgery.
He thought he had won. He thought the Canary would just die in the cold.
He forgot one thing. I knew where he hid the bodies—literally.
I walked into his staged public proposal, slammed my ring on the table, and left a note under it.
*I remember everything. And so do you.*
Then I boarded a plane with his secret incriminating journal in my bag. The empire was about to burn.