From Jilted Wife To The Tycoon's Queen
The harsh glare of the spotlight hit Harper's custom wedding dress as she smiled at her groom.
But a single phone call from his mistress, Lila, made Chase violently shove his way down the aisle and sprint out of the hotel.
He left Harper to face the flashing cameras and the mockery of hundreds of guests.
Her mother-in-law dragged her into a hallway and slapped her hard across the face.
"You cannot even keep your own man in the room. You are making a mockery of this family."
When Harper rushed to the hospital, Chase blamed her for Lila's theatrical, fake miscarriage.
He threatened to pull every cent of capital from Harper's investment firm if she dared to walk away.
The Young family then used the media to frame Harper, turning her into a public pariah who viciously "killed" an unborn child.
Mobbed by ruthless paparazzi, Harper was pushed into the freezing rain, her knees bleeding on the concrete.
She couldn't accept that her entire life and career were being destroyed by a mistress's pathetic lie.
When Chase later tried to buy her silence with a pink diamond—the exact same one he had just gifted Lila—her remaining love turned to absolute ice.
But fate intervened when she was rescued from the mob by Antoni Donovan, the most ruthless billionaire on Wall Street and her biggest corporate rival.
Discovering that Antoni was actually her best friend's older brother, a dangerous smile spread across Harper's face.
She picked up his gold-lettered business card.
She was done being the victim; she was going to use the wolf of Wall Street to crush her ex-husband.
Chapters
Share
Chapter 5
Harper pressed her hands flat against the freezing concrete steps. She tried to push herself up. The torn skin on her knees burned like fire. She sucked in a sharp breath.
She crawled forward and started picking up the scattered pages of her proposal. The sharp edge of a paper sliced across her index finger. A drop of blood fell onto the white sheet.
Her phone vibrated violently inside her bag. The ringtone sounded unnaturally loud.
She leaned against a metal streetlight pole and answered it. Chloe's voice came through the speaker, thick with tears. "Boss, you need to look at Twitter right now."
Harper opened the app. A high-definition video of Chase filled the screen.
Chase stood in front of a microphone. He looked deeply sad. He told the reporters that Harper's aggressive behavior had caused Lila to lose the baby.
Blood rushed to Harper's head. The pressure behind her eyes was blinding. The Young family was using her as a human shield to protect their stock prices.
A white van slammed on its brakes right in front of her. The side door slid open with a loud crash. Six paparazzi jumped out, holding massive cameras.
The flashbulbs exploded in Harper's face like machine-gun fire. The reporters shoved their microphones inches from her mouth.
"Ms. Ryan, how does it feel to kill your husband's baby?" a man screamed at her.
Harper stepped backward. The reporters pushed forward. Her back slammed hard against the brick wall of the building. She had nowhere to go.
Thunder cracked loudly above them. The sky opened up. Freezing, heavy rain poured down, soaking everyone in seconds.
A reporter shoved his camera forward. The heavy plastic lens smashed directly into the bruise on Harper's forehead. The skin split open. Warm blood mixed with the cold rain and ran down into her eye.
She held her bag up to shield her face. She tried to push through the wall of bodies. A large hand grabbed the collar of her suit jacket and yanked her backward.
Harper's wet shoes slipped on the pavement. She lost her balance and fell toward the dirty, flooded street. Panic closed her throat.
She did not hit the ground. A strong hand, wrapped in expensive leather, clamped around her upper arm like a vice.
Harper gasped and looked up. A massive black umbrella blocked the rain and the flashes.
Two huge bodyguards with blank faces shoved the paparazzi backward, physically tearing a path through the crowd.
The black Maybach was parked silently at the curb. The rear door was wide open, looking like a dark cave.
The bodyguard holding Harper did not speak. He pulled her forward and shoved her roughly into the back seat of the car.
The heavy door slammed shut. The noise of the rain, the screaming reporters, and the flashes instantly vanished.
Harper fell against the soft leather seat. The air inside the car smelled faintly of cedarwood and expensive cologne.
She gasped for air, her chest heaving. She turned her head. Antoni Donovan sat next to her. His legs were crossed. He held a crystal glass of whiskey in one hand.
Antoni did not look at her. He lifted his chin and spoke to the driver. "Drive."
The Maybach pulled smoothly away from the curb. The absolute silence and safety of the car caused the tight string holding Harper's sanity together to snap.
The exhaustion, the severe stomach pain, and the high fever from the freezing rain hit her all at once. Her vision blurred into gray static.
She opened her mouth to say thank you. Her throat was so swollen only a broken rasp came out. Her body went completely limp, and she fell sideways.
Antoni slammed his glass down. He reached out with both arms and caught her burning body before she hit the floor.
Right before Harper lost consciousness, she felt a cool, dry hand press gently against her bleeding forehead. The touch was shockingly tender.
Antoni looked down at the woman passed out in his arms. He brushed the wet hair from her bleeding forehead with a shockingly gentle touch. For a moment, the icy control in his expression cracked, replaced by a raw, possessive darkness before he masked it again.
You may also like
9.7
Clarissa rushed into a crowded nightclub for one simple reason: to save her wildly drunk best friend.
But her ruthless billionaire husband, Giovanny, was watching from the VIP room. After effortlessly ruining a man just for grabbing her wrist, Giovanny punished Clarissa for breaching their public image contract with an impossible curfew.
When she inevitably arrived back at his penthouse late, he didn't just yell. He forced her to her knees by his bathtub to wash his back, making her watch an explicit, humiliating video as punishment.
A sudden family medical emergency dragged them to his parents' estate. Still in her soaked, transparent dress and his misbuttoned shirt, Giovanny's mother caught them. She joyfully assumed they had been passionately intimate.
Instead of clearing her name, Giovanny pulled Clarissa close and lied to his mother's face.
"We are working very hard on the family's future, Mother."
He locked her in the guest suite, tossed a sheer silk nightgown on the bed, and literally shattered the tablet holding their "no-contact" prenuptial agreement. He then slapped a file against the window—he had secretly bought all her father's toxic debt.
Clarissa was terrified. They were supposed to be business allies bound by a strict contract. Why was he suddenly acting like a predator determined to own her body and soul?
"Give me an heir, or your father goes to federal prison," he whispered.
Stripped of all choices, Clarissa picked up the white silk. She would surrender tonight to save her family, but as his shadow swallowed her, she made a silent vow to survive this monster, and one day, tear his empire to the ground.
8.5
Alexandrea woke up with a splitting headache in a strange hotel bed, terrified to find a brutally handsome, half-naked stranger beside her.
Before she could even scream, the door burst open. Her adoptive mother, Ivette, stormed in with a swarm of reporters and flashing cameras.
"How could you disgrace our family name like this?"
Ivette sobbed, putting on a theatrical performance of a heartbroken mother. It was a setup to completely ruin Alexandrea's reputation in front of New York's elite.
For ten years, Alexandrea had lived in a house of horrors. Her back and arms were covered in silvery scars and puckered cigarette burns left by Ivette's vicious abuse.
Yet to the public, Ivette had carefully crafted Alexandrea's image as a wild, ungrateful, and manipulative liar.
Trapped under the duvet, Alexandrea was drowning in shame, her voice lost in the storm of accusations.
She didn't understand why her adoptive family hated her so much, treating her worse than a stray dog while using her brother's future to keep her chained.
But what she understood even less was the stranger beside her.
Instead of panicking, the man slowly sat up, his presence alone silencing the frantic room. He was Ace Griffith, the billionaire heir who owned half of Manhattan.
He wrapped his suit jacket around her trembling shoulders, looked Ivette dead in the eye, and dropped a bomb.
"I will be marrying her."
Then, he carried Alexandrea away from her ten-year prison, ordering his men to dig up the Terry family's darkest secrets and her true identity.
8.9
Five years ago, Arabella Sterling vanished without a trace, disgraced, heartbroken, and branded her billionaire benefactor's dirty secret.
What the world never knew was that she'd also been his wife.
Or that the man she loved-and the son she gave everything for-chose another woman over her.
Now, she's back as The Reformer, a world-renowned business strategist celebrated for resurrecting dying empires.
Her newest client? The Sterling Group.
Her ex-husband's empire.
Adrian Sterling has spent years trying to atone for the lies that destroyed them both.
But when Arabella walks into his boardroom, colder, sharper, untouchable...he realizes redemption may come at a cost he can't pay.
Because this time, she's not here to save him.
She's here to ruin him.
9.5
For nine years, I poured my soul into proving I was worthy of my wealthy boyfriend, Clayton Wright. I endured his endless, humiliating "tests," sacrificing everything for a place in his world.
But at our engagement party, the final test was revealed. He stood by as his ex-girlfriend, Anjelica, framed me for shattering a priceless family heirloom.
"You manipulative bitch!" he snarled, slapping me across the face. He then ordered his bodyguard to force me to my knees, grinding them into the sharp, broken fragments of the watch.
As I bled on the floor, he pulled out his phone and gave a single command: demolish my childhood home, the last piece I had of my deceased father.
He destroyed my past and my dignity, yet minutes later, my phone buzzed with a message from him.
"The engagement is just for show. I'll still marry you. You're my destiny."
That night, clutching the last of my father's life insurance, I booked a one-way ticket and vanished. He thought he had finally broken his little project, but he had just unleashed a woman with nothing left to lose.
7.7
I trusted the wrong people in my past life.
My supposed lover and my sweet sister conspired against me, locking me inside a burning warehouse to die.
But the man I had spent my life hating, my ruthless captor Damien Sterling, rushed straight into that inferno and burned alive just to try and save me.
In my past life, I was utterly blind. I believed Julian's forged documents and Scarlett's fake affection. I even tried to assassinate Damien with a silver dagger they provided, breaking the heart of the only man who truly loved me. I died choking on thick ash, realizing too late who the real monsters were.
Why was I so incredibly foolish? Why did I let their vicious manipulation turn me into a weapon against the one person who would sacrifice absolutely everything for me?
Opening my eyes again, the phantom smell of smoke vanished.
I was sitting in the bloody water of Damien's bathtub, right after my staged suicide attempt.
When my sister sneaked into my penthouse suite and handed me the dagger to kill him again, I didn't hesitate.
I grabbed her hand tightly and plunged the sharp blade directly into my own shoulder.
"Please don't kill me, Scarlett!"
This time, I will ruthlessly ruin them both, and I will never let Damien go.
7.8
Evelyn was already suffocating under her family's impending bankruptcy when she rear-ended a ten-million-dollar Rolls Royce in the freezing rain.
The tinted window rolled down, revealing the cold, predatory face of Julian Hawthorne—the man she had brutally abandoned three years ago.
Now a ruthless billionaire, he demanded a seven-figure repair check she couldn't afford, or she would have to pay with her body.
Desperate, she went to her wealthy fiancé, Preston, for the money, only to find him in a VIP club with another woman straddling his lap.
Instead of helping, Preston threw the repair bill on the floor and laughed with his rich friends.
"You want the money? Fine. Get on your knees, crawl over here, and kiss the tip of my shoe in front of everyone."
Evelyn trembled with pure humiliation.
Three years ago, she had sacrificed the only man she truly loved to save her family from ruin, only to end up engaged to this pathetic, cheating scum.
Just as her knees bent toward the carpet, the heavy velvet door was kicked completely off its hinges.
Julian walked in like the grim reaper, beat Preston half to death, and dragged Evelyn away.
He pinned her in his car, threatening to destroy everyone she cared about if she didn't return to him.
Evelyn was terrified and confused. Why was this powerful tyrant going to such extreme, violent lengths to trap a woman who had thrown him away?
The answer slipped out through an accidental phone call: the cold-blooded CEO had spent the previous night drunk, crying and screaming her name.
Realizing the monster caging her was actually just a desperate, heartbroken man, Evelyn wiped her tears and made a decision.
She was going to break her engagement, walk into his corporate fortress, and finally face the terrifying debt of their past.