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 5
The smell hit her the moment she opened the front door of the row house in Astoria. Stale cigarette smoke, old frying oil, and despair.
"You're back."
Brenda, her stepmother, didn't look up from the TV. She was painting her toenails on the coffee table. "Did you bring the money? Your dad owes Tony three grand."
Tiffany, her stepsister, was lounging on the sofa, scrolling on her phone. She eyed Anaya's Balenciaga bag with naked envy. "Is that new? Can I have it?"
Anaya walked past them, her heels clicking on the linoleum. She went to the back room.
Her father, Earl, was passed out on the recliner. The TV was blaring a horse racing channel. He looked old, broken, and pathetic.
Anaya felt a pang of pity, but she strangled it. Pity was what had kept her tethered to this sinking ship for a decade. Pity was why she had almost been assaulted by a loan shark in her last life, trying to pay off Earl's debts.
She walked back to the living room.
Brenda stood up, blocking her path. She held out a greasy business card. "Tony said if you go to dinner with him, he might waive the interest. He likes you, Anaya. You should be nice to him."
Anaya took the card. She looked at it. Tony's Auto Repair & Loans.
She remembered the dinner. She remembered Tony's hands under the table. She remembered running out into the rain, sobbing.
She ripped the card in half. Then in quarters. She let the pieces flutter to the floor.
"Hey!" Brenda screeched. "You ungrateful little-"
Anaya slammed a folder onto the coffee table. The sound made Tiffany jump.
"This is the deed transfer," Anaya said, her voice cutting through the room like a knife. "I am signing over my half of the house to you. It's worth two hundred thousand dollars in equity."
Brenda's eyes widened. Greed instantly replaced anger. "You... you're giving us the house?"
"In exchange for this." Anaya pulled out a second document. Emancipation and Severance of Familial Ties. It wasn't a standard legal form, but it was binding if notarized. "And a promise that you never contact me again."
"Why would we sign that?" Tiffany sneered. "We can just take the house and still call you for money."
Anaya pulled out her phone. She tapped the screen and played a recording.
It was Brenda's voice. "...yeah, just forge Earl's signature on the insurance policy. If he drinks himself to death, we get double indemnity."
Brenda's face went white.
Anaya had recorded it years ago-or rather, she would have recorded it in the future. But in this timeline, she knew exactly where Brenda kept her diary detailing the scheme. She had snapped photos of the pages before coming downstairs.
"I have photos of your diary, Brenda," Anaya lied smoothly, bluffing with the truth of the future. "Sign the paper. Or I go to the cops for conspiracy to commit insurance fraud."
Earl stirred in the other room. "Anaya? Is that my girl? Do you have twenty bucks?"
Anaya didn't look toward his voice. That part of her was dead.
Brenda snatched the pen. Her hands were shaking. She signed the document.
Anaya took the paper, checked the signature, and put it in her bag.
"Goodbye, Brenda," she said. "Enjoy the house. The bank is foreclosing in three months anyway."
She walked out.
"You bitch!" Brenda screamed after her.
Anaya stepped out onto the sidewalk. The Queens air felt lighter.
She got back into the waiting taxi. "New Jersey," she told the driver. "Nana Rose's house."
As the car crossed the bridge, her phone buzzed. A notification from her banking app.
ALERT: Your secondary credit card ending in 4490 has been frozen by the primary account holder.
Barrett. He was cutting off her money. He thought that would bring her crawling back.
Anaya reached into her wallet. She pulled out the black Amex Centurion card. It was heavy, made of titanium.
She rolled down the window. The wind whipped her hair. Below, the East River churned, dark and murky.
She flicked the card. It spun in the air, catching the last rays of the sun, before disappearing into the water. He thinks this is his power over me, she thought with cold satisfaction. He has no idea about the crypto wallet, about the knowledge I hold. This card isn't a lifeline; it's a leash. And I'm cutting it myself.
She had her own money now. She had the knowledge of the next three years of market trends. She didn't need his.
She needed to disappear.
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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."