Awakened For Sin
Rebirth with a Twist.
Fawn Jones doesn't get a chance to resolve the issues with her marriage. No, she gets murdered in her own bathtub. Drowned by the husband she hated after he had moved his mistress into their bed, Fawn's last lucid thought is a promise before death. "I will not stay weak. I will make you pay. If not in this life, then the next." Then she wakes up. Different room. Different body. Different life. Cassandra Huntington – rich, infamous, beautiful in a way Fawn never had been. Cassie had been in a coma for six months after a car crash. Her billionaire husband, Blake, had just signed the paperwork to turn off her life support when she suddenly started breathing on her own. Now everyone thinks Fawn is Cassandra. The media calls it a miracle. Blake calls it complicated. The woman wearing his wife's face is softer, sharper, funnier... and so tempting he hates himself for wanting her. Fawn calls it an opportunity for revenge. Her killers are still out there. Her old body is in the ground under a lie. And the only weapons she has now are Cassandra's money, Cassandra's reputation... and Cassandra's husband. So, she plays the role. Learns to walk in six-inch heels. Smiles for the cameras. Seduces a man who once couldn't stand his wife and now can't seem to stay away from her. While she quietly buys into the company that ruined her old life. While she gets close enough to the man who killed her to watch him crack. They drowned the wrong woman. Now she's awake. And she's not done.
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Chapter 3
Fawn’s POV
Air ripped into my lungs like I’d swallowed knives.
I jerked upright, hands flying to my chest, half-expecting water to gush out of my mouth as I gulped in air. For one panicked, blinding second, I was back in the bath, drowning. No, not drowning… being murdered as I fought to stay alive. But I hadn’t fought them off; they had been stronger. I could still smell lavender oil for a second before it was gone. Like a snap.
Now everything smelled like bleach and plastic and something harsh that stung my nose. I wiggled my nose to stop myself from sneezing as I focused my eyes, or tried to.
The light above me was too bright. Everything around me was white, sterile, and clean. Not my bathroom. Not home. Not even anywhere I recognized. There was a plastic rail at my side. A beeping that was fast and frantic. It was damn annoying.
I became aware my throat hurt, and I needed a drink of water, and I was dizzy.
“Easy—easy!” Someone’s hand hovered near my shoulder, not quite touching.
I blinked, vision clearing.
A man stood at the foot of the bed. I had been looking in his direction.
He didn’t fit… Not Richard.
No. This man was taller, broader, in a shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a loosened tie. His jaw was sharp and dark with stubble, his mouth a hard line, his eyes a steel gray that made my stomach twist because I knew that face. Which didn’t make sense. I blinked once.
Blake Huntington.
My husband’s rival. The man Richard ranted about after too many whiskeys. The “arrogant prick,” the “smug bastard,” the name he spit whenever a deal didn’t go his way. Or when Mr. Huntington had won a project he wanted. Both Richard and Blake had businesses in construction, and they often placed bids for the same jobs.
So why the hell was he in my hospital room?
Then it hit me, I was alive. They hadn’t killed me after all. I must have passed out, and they thought I was dead. It didn’t explain the out-of-body experience. But how had I gotten here? Had they called the police to say I had drowned, but instead of the police finding me dead, I had been very much alive?
The room wobbled a little, then snapped into focus in jerks. Blake wasn’t the only one in the room with me. Two men in white coats… I would take a guess they were doctors; both stared at me like I’d just crawled out of my own grave. Maybe I had, after Richard and Gemma tried to kill me. Also, a nurse stood pressed against the wall, one hand over her mouth, eyes huge. I almost felt the urge to check myself and make sure I still had a head, but my eyes were working, so my head had to be on my shoulders, right?
The older doctor recovered first. “Cassandra,” he said slowly, like he was testing it. “Can you hear me?”
Cassandra? My ears were working, but that wasn’t my name.
I frowned. The effort made my head throb. “That’s… not my name,” I tried to say, but the words barely made it past my dry lips. Had they mixed up my files with another patient’s? Well, that was embarrassing. For them, not me. “I’m… That is… I’m…”
My voice wasn’t right; it stopped me from going on because I was so shocked by the sound. It was deeper, huskier, like I’d smoked a pack a day for ten years, and there was this weird… accent? No, not an accent. Just not mine. The voice was a New Yorker’s voice, but it was sexy, and my voice wasn’t sexy. Was it a side effect from the almost drowning. Well, I hoped it stayed.
Blake Huntington took a step closer to the bed; those grey eyes locked on me as if he could somehow pin me in place with his stare alone.
“Cassie?” he said, and his voice was rough. “You… you weren’t supposed to—”
Die? I thought, and a hysterical little laugh bubbled up that I swallowed down. Too soon for that joke yet, I was guessing.
“I… I don’t…” My throat still felt like sandpaper. Not surprising when I had swallowed a bath full of water. “Water.”
The nurse jolted into action, grabbing a cup, pouring some water into it, then fitting a straw and guiding it to my lips. I sucked greedily, the cool liquid tasting like heaven, not like the bathwater I had swallowed.
As she took it away too fast for my liking, my hands dropped to the sheet, to the hospital gown hanging off my shoulders. The fabric was thin and scratchy. I had hospital tape on the back of my hand where it looked like an IV would go. My fingers looked… different and, well… wrong.
The fingers were longer. The nails were neater, longer. I couldn’t keep my nails that long; they chipped and broke all the time. My wrists were different as well…slimmer.
Okay. Weird. I’d lost weight. Or maybe almost dying was a great detox plan.
Had I been in a coma? Was that why I had lost weight? How long had I been here for? I had so many questions.
My gaze darted past Blake, catching a glimpse of myself in the reflective surface of a dark TV screen on the wall.
And my brain just… stopped. Frozen as I stared.
The woman staring back at me was gorgeous in a way I had never been. Not cute. Not “you have a nice smile” pretty. No. This was the kind of gorgeous that made people stop mid-sentence. And what was that saying… stop traffic. Yes, the woman staring at me would definitely stop traffic.
Long black hair spilled over her shoulders in a glossy mass, almost blue in the fluorescent light. Her skin was pale, with high cheekbones and a full mouth that could’ve sold lipstick in a magazine ad. Her eyes—I couldn’t tell, because the TV screen didn’t show that sort of detail well enough.
I stared. She stared back. I blinked. So did she.
“Okay,” I thought, grasping for logic while my heart hammered against my ribs. “So either I’m dreaming, or I hit my head without knowing it, or I’m in some kind of post-drowning coma hell where I have to live as a supermodel.”
The monitor beside me beeped faster, betraying me. No, my eyes must be playing tricks on me. I would not panic… panicking had been in that bath. I had lived through that.
“This shouldn’t be happening; she was… was brain-dead,” the younger doctor whispered to the older one. “She… was unresponsive. She shouldn’t—”
That snapped me out of whatever shock my brain had gone into.
“I can hear you,” I croaked. I hate it when doctors talk over your head, don’t you?
All three of them… two doctors, one nurse flinched like I’d slapped them. Well, what did they expect? They had been rude.
Blake didn’t move. He just kept staring at me with an expression I couldn’t read. Shock, yes. But under that, something else. Wariness. Guilt. Like he’d been about to do something unforgivable, and I’d caught him right in the act. Why would he care? He hadn’t… hadn’t tried to kill me. That was something I did know.
My last clear memory before waking up in the hospital slammed into me.
My bath. The scent of my lavender oil. Gemma’s nails biting into my arms. Richard’s hands on my shoulders, pushing but not bruising. The water in my lungs. The burning pain in my chest as my lungs were starved of oxygen. How would they explain Gemma’s nail marks as an accident? Richard had been careful not to bruise my skin, but Gemma hadn’t. Now I was alive; there was no way I would let them get away with trying to kill me. I would not be silenced.
Then the promise I’d made as the darkness had taken over. The way my soul had peeled away from my body like smoke. But I was back and alive.
I would make them pay… but I would make it hurt and hit them where it hurt.
My stomach churned.
“I… almost drowned,” I whispered, more to myself than anyone. “He… my husband tried to kill me with his mistress. They tried to kill me.”
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8.9
My father was marrying a gold-digger, the mother of my cheating ex-boyfriend.
To end the charade, I crashed their luxury wedding with a ten-foot funeral wreath.
In front of hundreds of elites, my father slapped me across the face, calling me a vicious bitch while his new wife smiled in victory.
I triggered the estate's fire system to ruin them, but a terrifying stranger in the VIP section bypassed my military-grade hack in seconds.
He was Kavon Velasquez, a dangerous billionaire heir who had been missing for twelve years.
Instead of exposing me, he shielded me from my father's second blow.
When my pathetic ex tried to drag me away, I grabbed Kavon and kissed him to humiliate my ex.
I shoved a $500,000 check into Kavon's pocket as hush money and left.
I thought that was the end of it.
But why did this apex predator move into the penthouse right next to mine at 2 AM?
Why did he violently crush my ex's face the next morning just for grabbing my arm?
"She is my woman. If you ever come within ten feet of her again, I will bury you."
I didn't understand why a man with lethal skills was suddenly hunting me.
Then I found out he had just blackmailed my father with undeniable proof of corporate money laundering.
His demand wasn't money. It was me.
He ordered my father to announce our engagement by tomorrow sunset, and this dangerous game officially began.
9.6
Minutes before announcing her grand engagement, Darla caught her fiancé sleeping with her stepsister.
She publicly exposed them and canceled the wedding on the spot.
Furious, her adoptive mother demanded Darla marry a fifty-five-year-old predator to save their broken business deal.
"If you don't do exactly what I say, I'll let your father rot in prison for the rest of his life."
Desperate to escape her family's control, Darla grabbed a massive, intimidating hotel security guard she bumped into in the hallway.
She shoved all the cash in her purse at him—eight hundred dollars—and begged him to fake-marry her.
They signed the papers at City Hall that same day.
But the nightmare didn't end.
That evening, Darla received a cold phone call from the state penitentiary.
Her father had been found dead in his cell, and her company, owned by her ex-fiancé's family, fired her immediately.
They had taken everything from her, leaving her completely broken and sobbing on the floor of her tiny apartment.
She thought she had nothing left but a broke, fake husband to keep her company.
She had no idea that the "poor security guard" holding her in his arms was actually Anson Prince, a ruthless billionaire CEO.
And he was already making the calls to tear her abusers' empires to the ground.
8.9
At my million-dollar wedding to the Hoffman heir, the priest was interrupted by a ringing phone.
My groom, Elijah, didn't silence it. He answered it right at the altar, yanked his arm from my grasp, and walked out because his "true love" Jalyn needed him.
I was left standing alone in front of three hundred elite guests, blinded by mocking camera flashes. My own mother rolled her eyes in disgust, later threatening to freeze my trust fund and sell me to a notorious playboy to recoup her losses. Elijah even had the nerve to call me, demanding I take the blame for the canceled wedding to save his PR, while live news feeds showed him cradling a fragile Jalyn in the hospital.
I had spent two years bending over backward to be his perfect bride, only to be discarded like trash. What made it sicker was finding out that Jalyn's sudden "medical emergency" was actually a ruptured cyst caused by having vigorous sex with Elijah right before he walked down the aisle.
I refused to let them destroy me.
Kicking off my six-inch heels, I stepped down from the altar and walked straight to the back row where Cristian Lowe sat. He was the ruthless iceberg of Wall Street and Elijah's most terrifying rival.
I looked up at his sharp jawline and asked the craziest question of my life.
"Will you marry me?"
He stood up, his dark eyes locking onto mine.
"As you wish."
9.2
Lainey spent her last life destroying herself for Larry, only to become the woman he discarded most cruelly. He never loved her, never wanted her, and made no secret that his first love still owned his heart.
On their wedding day, he abandoned Lainey at the altar for that woman, then later used Lainey as nothing more than a stepping stone for his company's rise. In the end, he even had her kidney ripped from her.
Reborn at the very moment everything began, Lainey called off the wedding without hesitation. But after losing her, Larry begged desperately.
Lainey shot him a cold look, then turned and walked straight into the arms of a powerful, aloof man, who stared down at Larry with pure contempt. "She's my wife now."
7.5
I was tied to a concrete pillar in an abandoned warehouse, the heavy stench of gasoline suffocating me.
Ten steps away, a masked kidnapper slammed a loaded Glock onto a metal barrel and forced my husband, Alvie, to make a sick choice.
"The wife or the mistress. You only get to walk out of here with one."
Alvie didn't even blink.
He walked straight toward the dark corner where his mistress, Gail, was crying. He wrapped his arms tightly around her, shielding her, and guided her toward the exit.
He never looked back. He didn't cast a single glance over his shoulder. To him, I was already a corpse, just trash left on the pavement.
The kidnapper laughed and tossed a lighter onto the soaked concrete floor.
A wall of ghostly blue fire erupted instantly, swallowing me whole. The absolute agony of my skin blistering and melting shattered my sanity.
In my last moments, consumed by the inferno, I couldn't understand how the man I had loved and served so submissively could leave me to burn alive. My heartbreak quickly morphed into a hatred far deeper than the flames.
Then, I violently jerked awake.
I shot up from the bed, gasping for cold air, my hands frantically checking my perfectly smooth, unburned skin.
I looked at the desk clock. I had returned to exactly four years ago, the morning of the annual Gallagher family gathering.
The fragile, naive wife died in that warehouse. This time, I am going to destroy them both.
8.9
I was married to billionaire Alessandro Dorsey for four years. The only person in his cold, elite family who truly cared for me was his grandfather.
But when his grandfather suddenly passed away, my husband dragged me to the freshly dug grave and threw a newspaper in my face. The headline blamed me for his death.
Before I could process the grief, Alessandro forced me to my knees in front of dozens of flashing cameras.
"Admit your negligence, or you will never see the sun rise in this city again."
He threatened to destroy my own family if I didn't publicly apologize for a crime I didn't commit. Back at the estate, his mother falsely accused me of stealing a priceless family heirloom. I begged my husband to believe me, but he just looked at me with disgust, froze all my personal bank accounts, and handed me a divorce agreement. Sign it, forfeit everything, and erase my identity, or go to prison.
I was stripped of my dignity, my money, and the man I loved. I fled New York with nothing, only to discover I was pregnant with his triplets. For years, the injustice burned in my chest. How could the man who once meant safety throw me to the wolves without a second thought?
Five years later, I stepped back into the city with my three children. This time, I wasn't the broken woman he discarded, but a powerful gemologist ready to tear down his empire.