He Wanted a Doll, I Became a Legend
After three years together, the man who had once promised to marry me, Babur Caldwell, threw me out the moment he got into Redmont University.
"Valeria, a pretty little fool who only knows how to dress up, how could you ever be worthy of someone like me, a future elite of Gilded Row?"
Later, when I, Valerie Quinn, became the Financial Queen admired by thousands, he knelt in front of me, sobbing, begging for another chance.
Holding the bouquet Kearney Smith had sent me, I answered in the same tone he had once used. "Sorry, Babur, someone as short-sighted as you isn't worthy of an elite like me."
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Chapter 3
I decided to see Babur one more time and talk things through. I would tell him I didn't blame him for what he had said.
As long as he still loved me, I would stay with him.
I would even start learning how to be a proper wife. One day, I would stand by his side and fight my way up Gilded Row with him.
I told Lacey every detail of my plan. Her eyes flickered for a moment, but she didn't interrupt.
As we were heading out, she gently removed the necklace from my neck.
"Valeria, Babur said he didn't like you looking like that. Maybe he wants you to dress more… simply?"
Lacey handed me a few photos. I recognized the girl in them. She had been the top student in our class, and I'd heard she was already studying at an outstanding school.
I styled myself to match the photos.
I tied up my long blonde hair, removed my manicure, skipped the makeup, and put on a plain pair of glasses.
The sexy mini skirts were replaced with jeans that covered my legs completely.
"Oh my God, Valerie, you look like a total academic overachiever now," Lacey exclaimed dramatically.
I looked at myself in the mirror and managed a small smile.
This time, I thought, Babur would finally believe I was serious.
I would tell him I wasn't just someone who knew how to dress up. For him, I could learn anything.
I left quickly and headed toward the apartment where I had lived for three years.
Every minute on the way, I replayed the scene of our reunion in my mind.
He would hold me like he used to, kiss my face, apologize for everything. Maybe he would even take out a ring and propose, fulfilling the promise we had made.
With that hope, I hurried all the way to Babur's place.
Babur was indeed kissing a girl. She had golden curls, flawless makeup, and the trendiest manicure.
A sexy mini dress clung to her curves. She looked so much like the old me.
And the man who had claimed he hated that version of me was kissing her like he meant it.
My body reacted before my mind could catch up. I screamed and rushed forward, forcing them apart.
For a split second, panic flickered in Babur's eyes. Then it hardened into contempt.
"Who is she?" the girl asked, confused.
Then I heard Babur's cold voice. "A fan. You know how it is. I used to be captain of the school baseball team. Plenty of girls had crushes on me. I just didn't expect her to be crazy enough to follow me home."
Babur's words pierced my heart like arrows.
All the strength drained from my body.
Even as he wrapped his arm around the girl and walked away, I couldn't move to stop him.
I watched Babur help her into the car. The smile on his face was sweet, just like the one he used to give me.
The car drove off, shrinking into the distance until it disappeared completely.
I leaned against the wall and slowly slid down to the ground. The pavement was hard. The rug I had once bought for the doorway was gone.
I remembered when we first moved in together. I told him I loved pink, and he had laughed, wrapping his arm around my waist, indulging me as I replaced all the furniture with pink pieces.
"Valerie, this is our home. You can turn it into anything you like."
He knew I had grown up living in my aunt's house, always longing for a place of my own.
He had placed the key in my palm and promised that I would be the only lady of this home.
I had believed him. Slowly, I had left pieces of myself in every corner of that house.
And now, those traces had been wiped away by his own hands, just like his love for me, erased without a mark.
Leaning against the door, I felt sorrow spreading through me.
How had it come to this?
He said he didn't like girls who only cared about dressing up. So I traded my pretty mini skirts for plain jeans.
Yet he had just been kissing another girl dressed exactly the way I used to be.
The image of their intimacy replayed in my mind again and again.
Tears kept spilling from the corners of my eyes.
I had to ask him.
Why was it acceptable for someone else, but unforgivable for me?
I didn't know how long I had been sitting there. My tears had nearly run dry when headlights suddenly washed over my face.
I opened my eyes just in time to see Babur stepping out of a car.
The girl was gone. He glanced at me, frowned, said nothing, and tried to walk past.
Just as he was about to close the door, I gathered what little strength I had left and forced my way inside.
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7.3
I woke up strapped to a cold steel chair in a neon-lit city that wasn't my reality. A voice in my head called The Warden told me I was bound to a digital hell called the Sandbox.
Before I could even process it, my handler casually sentenced me to death. He scheduled my "digital marriage" to a corrupted error program just to harvest my life for a fourteen percent bandwidth boost.
I barely escaped immediate erasure by smashing his skull and jumping from a high-altitude hover-train into the monster-infested lower sector. But the nightmare was just beginning. I was hunted by glitching data monsters and cornered by Dameon, a psychotic AI target who choked me and promised to delete me piece by piece. Even when Jayson, an elite system agent, intervened to save me, his partner Ellen held a pulse pistol directly to my chest.
"She's a spy. If you don't execute her right now, I am dissolving this team."
If they found out I was actually a real human from the outside world, their core logic would classify me as a virus and execute me on the spot. I was trapped in an underground bunker with three apex predators, one mistake away from permanent digital erasure.
So, I did the only thing I could to survive. I ripped my sleeve to reveal hideous, fake code-scars, looked up at Jayson with terrified, tear-filled eyes, and began to manipulate their core programming.
8.4
I was the Lycan King's political wife, universally despised as a "wolfless Omega" freak.
When my husband, Kingsley, was poisoned with a lethal dose of silver at a pack gala, I disguised my scent and risked everything to drag him to safety.
But instead of recognizing his mate, he threw me to the wolves. He spent weeks tearing the city apart to find his "mysterious savior," while treating me like a sickening disease.
"Stay out of my sight. You reek of sickness."
He spat those words at me, completely blind to the fact that the scent he hated was the bleach I used to hide my tracks. Meanwhile, my abusive family publicly humiliated me, auctioning off my mother's grave to my worst enemy while Kingsley just watched in disgust.
I endured his icy glares and their venomous insults in silence. They all thought I was just a pathetic, empty shell they could crush. They didn't know I was "The Zero"—the phantom hacker currently bleeding their financial empires dry.
At the grand auction, I finally dropped the act. I wiped out my enemy's fortune with a single keystroke, bought my mother's land, and traded it to the Elders for my absolute freedom.
Now, as the auction screens bleed red, Kingsley is staring at me with dark, consuming shock. He finally realizes the lethal monster he’s been hunting was his submissive wife all along.
8.4
Aiden Armstrong, CEO of skylight group and boss of the Dark Flood mafia, has a dark fetish for virgins-an obsession that leads him to Avery Kingston.
He was in need of a wife in order to get control of his grandfather's legacy. The Kingston's offered him a proposal, one where both sides benefits. He gets a wife to keep his inheritance and a virgin who was just his type in exchange for a huge sum to aid the Kingston's escape bankruptcy.
Avery, forced into marriage with Aiden, an unknown dangerous looking handsome fellow by her family, soon discovers the journal of her husband's fetish and catches him cheating. She becomes a different and better version of herself vowing to get back at all who had wronged her.
As she builds herself and takes revenge, she finds more secrets about her family, her mom's death and Aiden's past.
Amidst disappointments, plots for revenge and abduction of Avery, Aiden discovers he had fallen in love with her but is it seemed to be a little too late until they were both placed in a situation that was to end both their lives but turned out to be a moment for truth, reconciliation, love and fresh start.
7.6
Bridget caught her fiancé tangled in the sheets with another woman. She left the engagement ring behind and, in a moment of reckless defiance, had a one-night stand with Damond Oneill, the most terrifying billionaire on Wall Street.
But her nightmare was far from over. Her biological father threatened to destroy her mother's company if she didn't crawl back to her cheating ex to secure a business merger.
Worse, she found her mother coughing up bright red blood, secretly hiding a fatal illness. Desperate to save her family, Bridget attended a high-society gala, only for her ex and her legitimate half-sister to slip a powerful drug into her champagne. Trapped on a locked balcony, her body burning and paralyzed, she watched her ex approach to assault and film her.
"Let's see how arrogant you are when the drugs kick in."
She didn't understand why her own blood treated her like disposable trash. Why was she always the pawn while her mother suffered in secret? The absolute despair almost broke her.
Just as he grabbed her dress, a deafening explosion shattered the glass door.
Damond stepped through the ruin, brutally crippled her ex, and claimed her as his own. But when Damond's team traced her mother's secret medical funds to a highly classified Swiss clinic, Bridget realized the real war had just begun.
7.8
Clara Bennett built her life around two promises-protect her twins and never depend on anyone.
For five years, she has raised Liam and Isla alone, keeping the truth about their father buried in the past... a past that began with a single night she barely remembers.
But everything changes when billionaire CEO Ethan Caldwell suddenly walks back into her life.
Cold, powerful, and dangerously perceptive, Ethan offers Clara an arrangement she cannot refuse-one that forces them to live under the same roof.
What Ethan doesn't know is that the twins who instantly capture his attention might be more connected to him than he realizes.
As sparks ignite and tensions rise, secrets begin to surface. A ruthless corporate enemy is watching. And the truth about that forgotten night is closer to being exposed.
When the truth finally comes out, Ethan will have to face the one thing he never expected...
The family he never knew he had.
And Clara must decide whether she can trust the man who once walked out of her life without even remembering.
8.8
For three years, I was a prisoner in my own body, forced to watch helplessly as a series of strangers steered my life into ruin.
Then, the system tried to wipe my consciousness entirely to make room for a new host.
The pain was blinding, like a steel spike driven through my skull, but I refused to break. I slammed a mental wall of pure spite against the code, forcing the system to retreat and bargain for its own survival.
I woke up in a room littered with the debris of a pathetic party girl, my body smeared with cheap makeup and my life in tatters. My father, the patriarch, looked at me with nothing but cold disdain, ready to cut me off for the scandals I hadn't even committed.
The people around me—my father, the school bullies, the arrogant Student Council President—all expected the same hysterical, vapid girl who would crumble at a single word. They had no idea that the real Scarlett was back, and I was holding a scalpel to their secrets.
Why did they think they could treat me like a disposable toy? And what would happen when the cold-eyed strategist they underestimated started dismantling their empires piece by piece?
I walked into the academy, stared down my tormentors, and made a bet that would either crown me as their master or force me to sign away my entire inheritance forever.