Escaping My Vicious Billionaire Husband
Colette stepped out of the federal prison, finally breathing the air of freedom after two agonizing years.
But instead of a bus home, a black armored SUV blocked her path. Ferris Vance's men kidnapped her right at the gates. He forced her to sign a marriage certificate, threatening to completely destroy her father's legacy if she refused.
The nightmare had only just begun. She soon learned her father had been driven to suicide anyway. Dragged into the Vance estate, Colette was beaten bloody by the family of Ellie, the girl she supposedly wronged. Ferris paraded her in a pure white gown for the cameras, playing the fiercely devoted husband. But the second the lenses turned away, he forced her into a coarse maid's uniform, making her scrub the freezing marble floors on her hands and knees.
"Your life isn't even worth the dirt on my shoes."
Ferris whispered those words as he threw his muddy boots at her bruised face. She was nothing but a piece of bleeding bait, a prop meant to lure his missing lover out of hiding. She was tortured and humiliated for a crime she had absolutely nothing to do with. The sheer injustice of paying the price for another woman's disappearance tore her soul apart.
When he cornered her in the bathroom, the last thread of Colette's sanity snapped. She hurled a bucket of filthy water right into his face, broke out of his grip, and threw herself out a window into a freezing storm. This time, she chose to escape, even if it meant death.
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Chapter 5
The sound of the shower was still running in the bathroom when the bedroom door swung open.
Alistair Pemberton stood in the doorway. His face was pinched with disdain. Two maids with hard expressions flanked him.
"The master will not have you sullying his linens," Alistair announced, his voice devoid of any warmth. "He ordered your relocation to the basement. He expects the stylists to fix whatever damage the night air might do."
One of the maids marched over to the sofa. She grabbed Colette's arm and yanked her upward.
Colette groaned as her bruised back protested, but she didn't fight back. She had no energy left.
The other maid pulled a black plastic trash bag from her apron. She swept Colette's lone sneaker and her cheap jacket off the floor, tossing them into the bag like garbage.
They pushed Colette out of the master suite. They didn't take the grand staircase. Instead, they shoved her down a narrow, steep set of wooden stairs meant for the servants.
The further down they went, the colder the air became. The smell of mildew and damp earth filled her lungs. The overhead lights flickered, casting long, eerie shadows on the concrete walls.
They reached the end of the hall. A maid shoved open a chipped wooden door and pushed Colette inside.
The heavy door slammed shut. The deadbolt clicked loudly into place.
"Keep quiet," Alistair's voice came through the wood. "Do not test the master's temper."
Colette stood in the center of the tiny room. A single yellow bulb hung from a wire on the ceiling. There was a narrow cot with a thin mattress against the wall.
The room was suffocating. It smelled faintly of damp mildew and old dust, and the freezing cold radiating from the concrete floor seeped through her thin sneaker and numbed her bare toes, sending a familiar, terrifying chill up her spine. She felt as though she had merely been transferred from one concrete cage to another, more exquisite prison.
Her legs gave out. She collapsed onto the edge of the cot. The wooden slats shrieked in protest.
The silence of the night pressed in on her. Suddenly, the image of her father's warm smile flashed behind her eyes. Then, the horrific thought of his body falling from the top of the Wheeler building ripped through her mind.
She clamped both hands over her mouth to muffle the agonizing sob that tore out of her throat.
Tears poured down her face, soaking into the rough, musty fabric of the mattress.
The basement was freezing. The damp cold seeped through her thin clothes, sinking straight into her bones. She pulled her knees to her chest, shivering violently in the dark.
Outside, the wind howled off the Long Island Sound, rattling the tiny, dirt-caked window near the ceiling.
She didn't sleep. She couldn't. She stared at a water stain on the concrete ceiling until her eyes burned.
Hours later, a sliver of pale gray light crept through the dirty glass. Morning.
Colette's eyes were swollen to the size of golf balls. Her skin was the color of ash.
The deadbolt snapped open. The sudden flood of bright hallway light made her flinch.
Three maids stormed into the room. They grabbed her by the arms and hauled her to her feet, dragging her out of the basement and up to the second floor.
They pushed her into a massive, brightly lit dressing room.
Julian, a top-tier celebrity makeup artist, and Roxanne, an elite stylist, were waiting with their assistants.
Julian grabbed Colette's chin, turning her face left and right. He clicked his tongue in disgust. "Look at this disaster. She looks like a corpse."
Roxanne carefully unzipped a garment bag, revealing a breathtaking, pure white haute couture gown.
They forced Colette into a chair in front of a massive Hollywood mirror.
For two hours, it was pure physical torture. Heavy concealer was spackled over her bruised cheek and dark circles. Hairpins scraped aggressively against her scalp as her hair was pulled into an intricate updo. Cold setting spray hit her face like ice water.
When they finally forced her into the gown, she stood in front of the full-length mirror.
The woman staring back at her was flawless. Radiant. Expensive. But her eyes were completely dead. She looked like a beautifully painted porcelain doll with no soul.
Roxanne clapped her hands together, a wide smile on her face.
"Perfect," she declared. "Now we just wait for Mr. Vance to inspect his bride."
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9.8
Ina Holman, heiress to a failing real estate empire, was forced to attend a high-stakes matchmaking meeting to secure a financial lifeline for her family.
But the drink she was handed was secretly spiked. Desperate to avoid a public scandal that would ruin her father, she fled into a VIP elevator, only to fall directly into the arms of Buren Warner—the most ruthless billionaire predator on Wall Street.
After a blurred, chaotic night, the nightmare truly began.
A fabricated scandal of her hotel rendezvous hit the front pages. Her father slapped her across the face, using the disgrace as an excuse to freeze her accounts and kick her out onto the streets, legally severing her from the family trust before declaring bankruptcy.
Even worse, her twin sister was killed in a sudden estate explosion.
And the final, crushing blow? Ina discovered that her ex-boyfriend, Faron, the man supposed to save her family, was secretly gay. He and her best friend had orchestrated the drugging to destroy Ina's reputation, allowing Faron to break their alliance and keep his inheritance without suspicion.
Stripped of her home, her family, and her dignity, Ina screamed in agony on the freezing streets.
Her own father had murdered her sister for a fifty-million-dollar insurance payout and sacrificed Ina to hide his assets. The people she trusted most had conspired to ruin her life just for their own selfish greed.
Driven into a corner with absolutely nothing left to lose, Ina stared at the cold, calculating billionaire who had tracked her down to an abandoned cliffside estate.
"Marry me, and I will give you the power to destroy them all."
To avenge her sister and crush the people who betrayed her, Ina signed her soul to the devil.
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.
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.
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.
8.4
Everly spent four years playing the perfect, accommodating wife to Carson Moss, swallowing every grievance just to secure medical treatments for their sick daughter.
But at a high-society banquet she exhausted herself organizing, Carson's pregnant mistress crashed the party.
The woman shoved an ultrasound of Carson's "real heir" directly into Everly's frail grandfather's face.
The shock triggered a massive heart attack.
Carson refused to use his private helicopter to save the dying old man, choosing to protect his mistress and his company's IPO instead. Her grandfather died on the hospital table.
Instead of remorse, her mother-in-law demanded Everly publicly cover up the murder.
"You will do exactly as I say, or I will freeze every single cent of the medical trust fund paying for your crippled daughter's treatments."
When a battered Everly returned to the estate, she discovered her three-year-old daughter covered in dark bruises and pinch marks. Her in-laws were deliberately torturing her disabled child.
Everly couldn't comprehend how a family could be so utterly heartless. Her only family was murdered, her child was abused, and her husband threw a five-million-dollar check at her face as hush money.
They thought she would just break and quietly disappear.
But when a terrifyingly powerful billionaire unexpectedly blocked Carson's security team from locking her up, Everly finally saw her window.
She grabbed her sleeping daughter and ran out into the freezing storm, making a blood-bound vow to make the entire Moss family bleed.
7.1
I was the top commander of a black-ops military program. After slaughtering my way through a hellish mission, I reached the extraction helicopter, trusting my second-in-command to watch my back.
But the moment our hands locked, he didn't pull me up. Instead, he plunged a syringe of lethal neurotoxin directly into my neck.
He aimed his gun at my chest, coldly stating that I was too dangerous to live. My lungs stopped, and I died in a pool of my own blood. But the endless blackness suddenly shattered. My consciousness violently forced its way into a new, broken shell. I woke up in a freezing alley, soaked in muddy rain.
This body belonged to seventeen-year-old Eliza Wyatt. A massive wave of foreign memories crashed into my brain. Her own younger sister had just stood at the top of the stairs with a mocking smile, watching street thugs beat Eliza to death.
"Take good care of the Wyatt family's eldest daughter. Tonight is the night she finally disappears."
The endless humiliation, the cold stares of her family, and the brutal betrayal by her own blood flashed before my eyes. Why was this fragile girl treated like garbage and pushed to her death by the very people who should have protected her?
I looked down at my pale, trembling hands. The top commander was dead, but in this bleeding shell, Eliza Wyatt was very much alive. I picked up a switchblade from the bloody puddle and stood up in the storm. It was time to hunt.