MARRYING THE BILLIONAIRE DON TO RUIN MY THREE BETRAYING FIANCÉS

Three men I was supposed to marry stood on the shoulder of the highway, brushing gravel out of one woman's hair.

The woman wasn't me.

I lay on the white line forty feet away, my ribs collapsing inward like a folding chair, blood spreading beneath my shoulder blades in a slow black tide. The truck that hit me was still skidding sideways, its trailer carving a long screaming arc across both lanes. None of them looked. Not Yoel. Not Liam. Not Nelson.

They were checking Amelia for a bruise.

The sky above me was pale blue, streaked with thin clouds, and on my fingertips — green dust. All that was left of my mother's emerald. Ninety years of Chapman history, ground into powder under a four-inch heel by a girl who'd been crying performance tears in my living room ten minutes earlier.

My vision tunneled. Sirens, somewhere. A horn. The smell of my own blood, copper and warm.

If I died on this road, the three men who'd been engaged to me for fifteen years would walk back to her arms. They'd marry her. They'd inherit everything my father built. They'd never even put my name on a headstone.

So I made a choice in the dark behind my eyes.

I wasn't going to die.

I was going to come back from this asphalt wearing a different name, on a different man's arm, and I was going to burn every one of them down to the foundation.

My name is Shirley Chapman.

And this is how I did it.