Married To The Ruthless Billionaire Husband
To save her dying mother, Adaline walked into the Waldorf Astoria to deliver a shirt to her fiancé.
She didn't know her stepsister, June, had swapped her keycard. Adaline stumbled into a pitch-black suite and was brutally assaulted by a stranger in the dark.
The nightmare didn't end there. June paid off the only bone marrow donor for Adaline's mother to flee the city, and stole Adaline's fiancé. Bankrupt and desperate, Adaline was forced to sell herself into a loveless marriage with the ruthless billionaire Ferris Finch just to secure a medical team.
But when Ferris saw the dark, violent bruises covering her body, his eyes filled with absolute disgust.
"You make me sick. Pack up your cheap tricks."
He mocked her, calling her a filthy woman who couldn't even wash her lover's marks off before crawling into his house.
Adaline swallowed her pride and endured his cruel humiliation. When June publicly taunted her about the hotel assault, Adaline finally snapped, ending up handcuffed in a freezing police cell.
She thought she was completely out of moves, waiting to rot in prison while her new husband despised her.
But back at the estate, Ferris had just pulled the hotel's security footage.
Staring at the screen, the arrogant billionaire's face turned completely ashen.
He finally realized that the innocent woman he had destroyed in the dark that night, and the wife he was currently torturing, were the exact same person.
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Chapter 6
The morning sun sliced through the massive floor-to-ceiling windows, hitting Adaline directly in the eyes.
She groaned, her body aching. She had fallen asleep on the floor. She pushed herself up, her muscles stiff and protesting. She walked into the bathroom, washed her face, and changed back into the dried, wrinkled clothes from yesterday. She needed to get to the hospital.
Downstairs, the atmosphere in the study was volatile.
Ferris stood by the window, looking out at the manicured lawns. His assistant, Alex, stood by the desk, holding a sleek tablet.
"Sir, the background check on Miss Bennett is complete," Alex reported. "She was engaged to Baker Padilla until yesterday."
Ferris turned around. A dangerous glint flashed in his eyes. "Engaged. So she's not just a gold digger, she's a cheating liar." He slammed his hand against the windowsill.
Alex adjusted his glasses. He opened his briefcase and pulled out a clear plastic evidence bag. He placed it carefully on the desk.
Inside the bag was a crumpled, expensive men's dress shirt.
"The hotel cleaning staff found this kicked under the bed in Suite 801 at the Waldorf," Alex said quietly. "It is a custom piece, but the designer tags were forcefully removed. Our analysts traced the fabric weave to a boutique in Manhattan. Sir, this wasn't left by a corporate spy or a hired escort. It's a high-end gift."
Ferris froze. He stared at the shirt in the plastic bag.
His mind violently snapped back to the pitch-black hotel room. He remembered the desperate, terrified thrashing of the woman beneath him. He remembered the hot tears falling onto his hands.
A horrifying realization crashed into his brain.
The woman in the room wasn't an operative sent by his rivals to ruin him. She was an innocent woman. She had brought a gift for someone else. She had simply walked into the wrong room. His room.
And he had destroyed her.
A wave of nausea hit Ferris so hard he gripped the edge of the desk to stay upright. His chest tightened painfully. His breathing turned shallow.
"Find her," Ferris ordered, his voice ragged and hoarse. "Pull every camera. Use every contact. I don't care what it costs. Find the woman who owns that shirt. I will give her half my empire to compensate for what I did. And Alex? Keep a close eye on Miss Bennett's movements. Track her phone. I want to know exactly what kind of mess I'm marrying into."
Out in the hallway, Adaline had just reached the bottom of the stairs. She was walking past the slightly open door of the study.
Her footsteps halted.
She heard Ferris's voice, loud and desperate. Find her. Compensate her. Half my empire.
A bitter chill swept through Adaline's veins. She let out a silent, self-deprecating breath. So, the cold, untouchable Ferris Finch had a true love. A woman he was desperately searching for. A woman he was willing to give everything to.
She remembered how he had looked at her with pure disgust last night, refusing to make a single phone call to save her mother. Because his heart and his resources were reserved for someone else.
Ferris heard the floorboard creak. His head snapped toward the door.
He saw Adaline standing there. The intense guilt in his chest instantly vanished, replaced by a flare of defensive anger. He hated being spied on.
He strode to the door and pulled it wide open. He glared down at her.
"Eavesdropping now?" Ferris sneered, adjusting his cufflinks with sharp, jerky movements. "Keep your pathetic little tricks to yourself."
Adaline didn't flinch. She looked up at him, her eyes completely dead. "I have zero interest in your tragic love life, Mr. Finch."
She turned on her heel and walked toward the front door. Her spine was perfectly straight.
Ferris watched her walk away. Her absolute indifference grated against his nerves. He clenched his jaw, his hand balling into a fist against the doorframe.
Adaline walked out the front doors. Alistair offered to have a driver take her, but she ignored him. She pulled out her phone and ordered an Uber.
She climbed into the backseat of the generic sedan. She looked out the window as the estate disappeared behind the iron gates. Ferris Finch was officially an enemy.
Her phone buzzed. A text from the hospital. Her mother was stable, but the lack of a donor was a ticking time bomb.
Adaline gripped her phone tightly. Her knuckles turned white. She was going to find the donor who backed out. She was going to fix this herself.
The Uber merged onto the highway, speeding toward Manhattan.
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9.1
With only fifteen days of cash flow left to save her tech startup, Aida had no choice but to seek a five-million-dollar bridge loan from Brendan Walls, a ruthless billionaire predator.
He agreed to sign the check, but on one sickening condition. He demanded Aida act as bait to get close to his corporate rival, Grayson Lott, treating her like a high-end call girl for a business transaction.
Forced to comply to save her employees, Aida let Grayson take her to a windowless underground club, where he secretly spiked her whiskey.
As the drugs paralyzed her body, triggering horrific flashbacks of a brutal assault from six years ago, Aida locked herself in the bathroom. She had to shatter a mirror and slice her own thigh open with a jagged shard of glass just to stay conscious enough to call Brendan for help.
Brendan's armored SUV immediately smashed through the club's wall to save her, and Grayson was arrested. But lying in the hospital, the horrifying truth finally clicked in Aida's mind.
The rescue was too fast. Brendan’s men hadn't rushed from Midtown; they had been parked outside the entire time. He had watched Grayson drug her and waited for the felony to happen just so he could legally seize Grayson's company. He had gambled her life and trauma for a hostile takeover.
When Brendan casually tossed a signed contract and luxury car keys onto her hospital bed as hush money, the last thread of Aida's sanity snapped.
"The deal is dead. NovaTech is mine. If you ever come near me again, I will kill you."
Bleeding and shaking with icy rage, Aida threw the keys at his chest, formally declaring war on the monster who thought he could buy her soul.
9.3
Jessie's biological parents brought her back from a Rust Belt wasteland just to force her into marrying a paralyzed heir to save their bankrupt empire.
Three years later, when the global doomsday apocalypse hit, her own family shoved her into a swarm of infected corpses.
As she was being torn apart by mutated hounds, she was stunned by what she saw.
Her fake sister, Harley, was clutching the antique silver necklace she had stolen from Jessie—an heirloom that secretly contained a magical spatial dimension.
When the infected swarmed them, her biological mother didn't even look back.
"Jessie is just white trash, she is perfectly suited to buy us time to run!"
Harley used Jessie's stolen necklace to live in absolute safety and luxury, while Jessie's windpipe was ripped out in the rotting wasteland.
Until she died, Jessie didn't understand. She was their true flesh and blood.
Why did her parents hate her so much? Why was she sacrificed so easily while the fake daughter got everything?
Opening her eyes again, the blinding glare of a crystal chandelier stabbed into her retinas.
She was back in the Manhattan penthouse on the exact day they sold her off.
This time, Jessie calmly signed the marriage contract, demanded a one hundred million dollar buyout, and walked out to prepare for the apocalypse.
9.0
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.
8.8
Alaia Dudley spent her life playing the devoted partner, completely unaware that her fiancé Austen was sleeping with another woman.
She thought the worst he could do was break her heart, until she found herself pinned to a cold operating table.
Austen held her down with a cruel smirk while a scalpel sliced through her sternum.
They cracked her chest open while she was still fully conscious.
The agonizing pain of her heart being cut out burned into her nerve endings.
She realized then that to him, she was never a lover—just a spare organ, a boring piece of wood to be discarded the second his true love needed it.
She died in excruciating agony, choking on her own blood while the man she loved walked away with her heart.
Until her last breath, she didn't understand why she had to suffer so brutally.
Why did she waste her life begging for a monster's attention? Why did they get a happy ending while she was carved up like an animal?
But then, ice-cold water flooded her lungs, and Alaia violently broke the surface of her bathwater.
Her trembling fingers touched her smooth, flawless chest. No scars. Her heart was still beating.
The date on her phone glared back at her: it was exactly five years ago.
Tonight was the exact night Austen first took his mistress to a hotel room.
This time, she wouldn't just expose them. She would use Wall Street's most terrifying tyrant as her personal weapon to strip them of everything they had.
9.8
Haylee always thought she belonged to the wealthy Bowen family.
But on the night of her birthday, her younger sister Cynthia handed her a crushing DNA report, sneered that she was taking her trust fund and fiancé, and shoved her violently off the yacht into the freezing Atlantic.
Washing ashore on a dark island, Haylee was brutally assaulted by a drugged stranger.
When she was finally rescued, she stared at a tiny television screen in absolute horror.
Her adoptive father was calmly declaring her mentally unstable and officially dead to the press.
Meanwhile, Cynthia was on screen flaunting a massive diamond ring from Haylee's own fiancé, inheriting everything that was rightfully hers.
Discarded like trash, stripped of her identity, and suddenly pregnant with a stranger's child, Haylee was forced to flee the country with nothing but a heavy silver signet ring she found in the dark.
She never understood how the family she had loved and trusted for years could erase her existence so ruthlessly.
"Are we going to see the bad people who bullied you, Mom?"
Five years later, Haylee stepped off a plane at JFK Airport, holding the hand of her genius five-year-old son.
She was no longer a helpless victim, but a top-tier medical director holding the key to a billion-dollar empire.
"We aren't running anymore," Haylee said softly, her voice laced with steel. "We're here to take everything back."
8.9
My family's company went bankrupt, and my biological father was lying in the ICU, kept alive by machines that cost tens of thousands a day.
I thought it was just a tragic business failure, until I caught my mother in bed with my stepfather.
They had secretly transferred all our assets months ago, deliberately bankrupting the company and leaving my father to die.
To pay the hospital bills, my stepfather forced me to a private club, trying to sell me to a sleazy investor.
When I refused, he slapped me across the face, and my mother just looked at me with cold, dead eyes.
"Be realistic, Jaelynn. A woman's body is a tool. Use it to get what you need."
Later, right before my father's emergency surgery, my stepfather signed a Do Not Resuscitate order and froze the medical accounts.
"If you don't get on your knees and spread your legs for him, I will tell the hospital to pull your father's plug."
Standing in the freezing rain, covered in mud and blood, I stared at the astronomical hospital bill in my hand.
My own family had plotted to murder my father and sell me to the highest bidder. The betrayal shattered every ounce of sanity I had left.
I didn't cry or beg them anymore.
Instead, I pulled out a water-stained, gold-embossed business card.
It belonged to Dolph Valentine, the most ruthless billionaire in New York and my ex-fiancé's uncle.
If they wanted to destroy my life, I was going to sell my soul to the biggest monster of them all and drag them straight to hell.