I Am Not Your Pawn Anymore
Barrett handed me a Montblanc pen and a legal document, his voice as cold as the rain lashing against his Tribeca penthouse. He told me to sign an admission of guilt for an SEC violation I never committed.
"Eighteen months in prison, Anaya," he said, adjusting his cufflinks without looking at me. "The trust fund is set up. You'll get twenty million dollars the moment you step out."
I was being sold. The man I had loved for ten years, the man whose secrets I had kept, was trading my freedom to save his merger with Adele Townsend. He had scrubbed the digital logs of Adele’s illegal trades and pinned everything on me. When I refused, he didn't see my heartbreak; he only saw a malfunction in a business transaction.
"Do not speak her name," he hissed when I mentioned Adele’s fraud. "This merger is bigger than you."
He forced the pen into my hand, calling me dramatic while his security guards dragged me to a locked bedroom to "cool down." I spent three days parched and starving, listening to the muffled sound of champagne corks popping down the hall. They were celebrating my destruction. My heart finally gave out in that luxury cage, the darkness swallowing me as I realized I was nothing more than a disposable asset to him.
I died in that room, alone and betrayed by the person I trusted most. How could he do this? How could a decade of loyalty be worth less than a stock price? Why did I let him treat me like a sacrificial lamb for so long?
GASP. I shot up in bed, my lungs burning, but I wasn't in the penthouse. I was in my old, peeling Brooklyn apartment, and the date on my phone was May 12th—three years ago.
My phone buzzed with a text from Barrett: "Where are you? Bring the Townsend files. Now."
A cold, cruel smile touched my lips as I typed the reply that would start his nightmare.
"I quit."
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Chapter 4
The Uber driver hesitated at the wrought-iron gates of the Meyers estate in East Hampton.
"You on the list, miss?"
"I'm the Chief of Staff," Anaya said, flashing an old ID she hadn't turned in. "Open it."
The gate swung open.
The party was in full swing. The bass of the house music thumped against the car windows. White tents, champagne towers, and a sea of people in linen and silk.
Anaya got out. She kept her sunglasses on. She wasn't here to socialize. She moved through the crowd like a ghost, heading toward the guest cottage.
"Well, look who decided to show up."
Anaya stopped.
Adele Townsend stood on the slate patio overlooking the infinity pool. She was holding a flute of champagne, surrounded by her court of socialites. She was wearing a white bikini and a sheer cover-up, looking every inch the future Mrs. Meyers.
Anaya tried to step around her. "Move, Adele."
Adele stepped into her path. "Did you come to beg for your job back? Or did you come to apologize for that little scene in the office?"
The music seemed to dip. People turned to watch. This was the entertainment. The heiress vs. the help.
Barrett was near the bar, talking to a group of investors. He turned, his eyes locking onto Anaya. He started walking toward them.
Adele leaned in close, her voice dropping to a venomous whisper. "You know, Barrett told me about your father. The gambler. The drunk. We all know you're just a gold digger, Anaya. You spread your legs for the boss hoping for a payout, and now you're mad the contract is terminated."
The rage that hit Anaya was cold. Absolute zero.
In her past life, she would have cried. She would have run away, confirming every rumor.
Not today.
Anaya looked at Adele's feet. She was standing on the wet slate, right at the edge of the pool, in four-inch wedges.
Physics.
Anaya didn't say a word. She simply reached out, placed her palm flat against Adele's shoulder, and shoved.
It wasn't a playful push. It was a solid, forceful thrust.
Adele's eyes went wide. Her arms windmilled.
Splash!
The sound was incredibly satisfying. Water sprayed over the expensive guests. The music cut out abruptly.
Adele surfaced, sputtering. Her hair extensions were plastered to her face, her mascara running instantly. She looked like a drowned rat.
"You bitch!" she screamed, thrashing in the water.
Barrett reached the edge of the pool. He looked from Adele to Anaya, his face a mixture of shock and fury. He didn't jump in immediately; he just stared at Anaya.
"Have you lost your mind?" he roared.
Anaya stood on the edge, looking down at them. She felt ten feet tall.
"No," she said calmly. "I found it."
She reached into her purse. She pulled out a piece of paper. It was a formal, printed resignation letter. She had folded it into a sharp paper airplane.
She flicked her wrist.
The paper plane glided through the air, looping once before landing softly on the surface of the pool, bobbing right in front of Barrett's face.
"Consider that my formal notice," she said. "We're done, Barrett. In every sense of the word."
She turned her back on them.
A hush had fallen over the party. She could feel a hundred pairs of eyes on her back, but she didn't care.
She walked to the guest cottage, keyed in the code, and opened the safe. Her passport. A stack of cash. She shoved them into her bag.
She walked out the back gate, where her Uber was waiting.
As the car pulled away, she didn't look back at the mansion. She didn't look back at the chaos she had caused. She looked forward.
One bridge burned. One to go.
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9.5
Janice had seen Karl's affection and felt his betrayal.
On their anniversary, while she was in pain and bleeding, Karl left her on the street to see his lover.
She bore it and tricked him into signing the divorce papers. "I want you gone!"
After divorce, she reclaimed her status as a billionaire heiress, with her three brothers doting on her and making her a rich darling.
When Karl saw what he'd thrown, he regretted it. He tore up the divorce papers. "I don't agree to the divorce!"
Declan moved through high society as an untouchable man. Janice avoided him, but they kept meeting.
At a party, her ex harassed her. Declan came and saved her.
She thanked him, only for him to whisper, "Don't thank me. Marry me?"
***
9.8
Adeline's stepmother had secretly drugged her for years, turning a child genius into a drooling, mentally disabled laughingstock just so her stepsister could steal her life.
But when her greedy father sold her off to Griffin Herring—a violent, untouchable billionaire psychopath—to save his company, things took a deadly turn.
Before the wedding, Griffin attacked her in a dark alley, nearly snapping her neck before stealing her grandfather's silver necklace.
That necklace held a micro-drive with her family's deepest secrets, and without it, she had nothing.
Back at the estate, her situation only worsened. Her stepsister Damaris paraded around in the Herring family's diamond engagement gifts, trying to force-feed Adeline wet dog food on an Instagram live stream.
When Adeline's calculated "clumsiness" ruined the video, her furious father locked her in a damp, rusted basement.
"Give her to the psycho," her stepmother hissed through the door. "Let him lock her away forever."
Listening from the shadows, Adeline's fists clenched until her palms bled.
Her supposed mental fog wasn't a tragedy—it was a calculated assassination of her mind. They had destroyed her childhood and were now throwing her to a monster just to keep the billions.
The dull, empty look in Adeline's eyes vanished instantly, replaced by a razor-sharp, chilling clarity.
She pulled a thin surgical needle from her messy bun and picked the heavy iron padlock in ten seconds. It was time to break into the billionaire's penthouse, take back her necklace, and tear them all apart.
7.9
Cora Foster was a brilliant archaeologist, but a jagged burn scar across her face made the world treat her like a contagious monster.
During an elite excavation of a Gilded Age crypt, touching an ancient artifact triggered a terrifying memory. She remembered being Seraphina Beaumont, a socialite brutally buried alive by her vain, cruel sister, Isolde.
When the team pried open the crypt's pristine mahogany casket, they cheered, believing the mummified corpse inside was Seraphina. But Cora recognized the onyx hairpin and the angular jawline. It was Isolde. The sister who had stolen her life, mocked her agony, and left her to suffocate in the dark. Her colleagues scoffed at her forensic proof, dismissing her as a scarred, delusional liability.
Worse, the ruthless billionaire funding the expedition, Julian Montgomery, was the spitting image of Alistair—the man Seraphina had deeply loved. Why was Julian staring at her ruined face with such intense, inexplicable recognition? And why did Isolde take Seraphina's most precious silver ring to the grave?
Driven by a century of agonizing grief, Cora secretly pried the tarnished ring from the mummy's stiff, dead fingers and dropped it into her pocket.
"What are you looking at, Foster?"
Julian's deep voice vibrated inches from her ear, his cold, predatory eyes locked directly onto her half-open pocket.
7.4
In my past life, I swallowed a handful of pills because my billionaire husband, Holt, treated me like invisible decoration, and my ex-lover, Cary, promised me a way out.
But as I lay choking on my own vomit in a burning Brooklyn warehouse, the brutal truth was finally revealed.
Cary was just using me to drain Holt's assets, and the mastermind behind my tragic downfall was my best friend of ten years, Lilith.
She had spent years feeding my insecurities, convincing me that suicide was my only escape, just so she could use my death to humiliate my husband and steal his empire.
When Holt rushed into the flames to save me, they shot him dead. His blood soaked my dress as Cary and Lilith walked away with everything we owned.
Until my last breath, I couldn't understand it.
Why did my best friend want me dead? Who were the shadowy backers funding their betrayal, and why did they hate my husband so much?
Opening my eyes again, I was back in my bedroom, the lethal pills still sitting on my nightstand.
The pathetic, weeping socialite died in that fire.
I calmly flushed the pills down the toilet, opened my laptop to awaken my hidden intelligence network, and prepared to destroy them all.
7.1
I worked eighty-hour weeks on Wall Street just to keep my sick brother alive, enduring endless humiliation from the wealthy family that adopted us.
But when I went to surprise my boyfriend of three years, I found him kissing my spoiled adoptive sister, Tatum.
They were celebrating their engagement to merge their powerful families.
To keep me quiet, my adoptive mother, Eleanor, threatened to freeze my brother's medical trust fund unless I attended the party to play the supportive sister.
Instead, I discovered Eleanor had been embezzling from my brother's life-saving fund to cover her own bad investments.
The nightmare worsened when a drunken Ryder cornered me in my apartment stairwell.
"Once I marry Tatum, Eleanor is giving me control of Liam's trust fund to buy out my father's board members."
He planned to drain my brother's medical money, dump Tatum, and keep me as his mistress.
For a decade, I suffered their abuse hoping for a shred of decency, only to realize they were plotting to leave my brother to die on the streets for corporate greed.
Calling the police wouldn't stop these billionaires. I needed absolute power.
Remembering the dark, predatory gaze of Jaren Jarvis—the ruthless billionaire who had watched me fight back at the party—I canceled my call to 911.
If they wanted to destroy my only family, I was going to use the devil himself to crush theirs.
7.4
For five years, I abandoned my status as the heiress of the powerful Montgomery family to play the role of a poor, submissive housewife for Barrett.
Then, a bank notification popped up on my phone. Barrett had forged my digital signature and transferred our entire $50 million joint trust fund to a woman named Crista Reid.
When I called his boardroom to confront him, he humiliated me in front of a dozen Wall Street executives.
"Stop acting like a hysterical housewife. You're living in a penthouse I pay for, so don't embarrass yourself."
I broke into his encrypted laptop and uncovered the sickening truth. Crista was his mistress, and they had a five-year-old son together.
Barrett hadn't just stolen my money; he had spent years painting me as a helpless charity case he rescued, completely erasing the fact that my financial models built his entire company.
He thought I was just a discarded peasant he could manipulate, cheat on, and replace. He truly believed he held absolute power over my life.
He had no idea that I still possessed the highest security clearance of the Montgomery empire.
I pulled an old BlackBerry from a hidden wall compartment, plugged it in, and dialed my family's lawyer.
"Draft the prenup for Commodore Clayton IV," I ordered, choosing to marry Wall Street's most ruthless predator. "I'm done playing the peasant."