My Fake Bankrupt Husband Is A Tycoon
I was trapped in a greasy diner by my own mother.
She was forcing me to marry my abusive cousin because he had paid her twenty thousand dollars.
To escape, I used a contract marriage app and begged a complete stranger to marry me at City Hall that very day.
Ethan drove a cheap Ford and wore a plain suit. I thought he was just an ordinary guy needing a fake wife.
When my mother found out, she brought thugs to destroy my flower shop—my only home and livelihood.
To protect Ethan from her endless extortion, I shielded him and screamed that he was bankrupt and drowning in credit card debt.
My mother fled in disgust, and Ethan took me into his apartment for the night.
But out of trauma and habit, I locked my bedroom door, muttering that he must be old and desperate.
He stormed out into the freezing night, leaving me terrified that I had ruined my only lifeline.
I didn't understand why he was so furiously offended, completely unaware that my "broke" husband was actually the most ruthless billionaire in New York, and I had just trampled his massive ego.
The next morning, his face was a mask of ice as he dragged me back to City Hall to annul the marriage and get rid of me.
"Annulment. Now," he demanded.
But the clerk just popped her gum and slid a pink paper across the counter.
"State law changed. Mandatory thirty-day cooling-off period."
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Chapter 3
Ethan turns down a narrow, empty alleyway adjacent to City Hall.
A black, armored Maybach 62S sits idling in the shadows. The rear door swings open. His executive assistant, K. Jennings, stands at attention.
Jennings takes the unbranded suit jacket Ethan strips off and tosses it directly into a nearby dumpster.
Ethan slides into the plush leather backseat of the Maybach. He loosens his tie, rolling his shoulders. The suffocating disguise of a middle-class worker falls away, replaced by the terrifying aura of the man who controls the Patterson Empire.
He pulls the marriage license from his pocket. He snaps a high-resolution photo with his phone and sends it to a contact labeled Eleanor.
Ten seconds later, the phone rings.
"You actually did it!" Eleanor's voice crackles through the speaker, breathless with laughter. "The heir to the Patterson fortune, married in a dingy City Hall!"
Ethan rubs his temples. "It's a piece of paper, Grandmother. It buys you peace of mind for your surgery. I am annulling it tomorrow."
"We'll see about that," Eleanor hums. "Bring the future Mrs. Patterson to the New York estate. I want to meet her."
"Goodbye, Grandmother." Ethan hangs up. He tosses the phone onto the seat. He looks at Jennings in the rearview mirror. "Run a full background check on Grace Glover. I want everything."
The subway ride to the Old City district takes forty minutes.
I walk down the cobblestone street toward Blooming Grace, the small flower shop I pour my soul into. I live in the tiny attic above it. It's my only safe haven.
I pull my keys from my bag. Before I can insert them into the lock, a screech of tires makes me jump.
A beat-up truck slams to a halt by the curb. Doris jumps out. Two massive men follow her-distant cousins from the Vaughan side of the family.
Doris kicks the glass door of the shop. It rattles violently.
"You little runaway whore!" Doris screams, pointing a thick finger at my face.
I back up quickly, retreating behind the wooden cash register counter. My hand drops below the counter, my fingers wrapping tightly around the cold metal handle of my heavy gardening shears.
Doris storms inside, her eyes darting to my hands. She sees the plastic ring.
"Where is Clarnce's ring?" she demands, her face turning purple. "He gave me twenty thousand dollars for you! You give me that money right now, or you're coming with us!"
"I don't have his money," I say, my voice shaking but my grip on the shears tightening. "And you can't force me to go anywhere. I'm married."
Doris pauses. Then, she throws her head back and barks out a harsh laugh. "Married? You expect me to believe that?"
I reach into my bag with my left hand. I pull out the marriage license and slam it onto the counter. The gold seal catches the light.
Doris stares at the paper. She reads the names. Her face drains of color, then flushes with a rage so intense she looks demonic. The realization that her twenty-thousand-dollar payday is gone snaps the last thread of her sanity.
"Smash it," Doris snarls.
She grabs a heavy ceramic pot holding a rare orchid and hurls it at the floor.
The ceramic shatters. Dirt explodes across the hardwood.
"No!" I scream, lunging forward.
One of the cousins shoves me hard in the chest. I stumble backward, crashing into a display shelf.
The two men tear through the shop. They flip tables. They stomp on the delicate roses I spent weeks cultivating. Glass vases explode against the walls. Water and crushed petals cover the floor in a slippery, tragic mess.
I scramble to the corner, throwing my body over a tray of succulents that belong to my sister, Eloise. A falling glass vase clips my hand.
A sharp pain slices across the back of my hand. Warm blood instantly wells up, dripping onto the green leaves of the succulents. I bite my lip so hard I taste copper. Tears of pure hatred blur my vision.
Outside, Greta, the owner of the convenience store next door, peers through the window. Her eyes go wide. She immediately pulls out her phone and dials 911. The two men are massive, their menacing postures silencing the few onlookers who had started to gather at the door, making it clear no one is to interfere.
Doris grabs a handful of my hair, yanking my head back.
"You call that bastard you married," Doris spits in my face. "You tell him he owes me twenty grand, or I will burn this place to the ground with you in it."
The wail of police sirens pierces the air. Red and blue lights flash against the broken glass of my shop.
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9.0
Adaline Poole thought she had escaped her family's toxic corporate grip by moving to London and adopting a stray cat named Monty.
But when she returns to her empty apartment, her father delivers a chilling ultimatum: he has kidnapped the cat and will euthanize it by morning unless she accepts an arranged marriage with Barron Cooke, a notoriously elusive billionaire.
Her entire family becomes complicit in her sale. Her mother demands she secure their elite status, and her brother secretly spies on her social media to feed Barron her every move. Horrified to discover Barron is a thirty-three-year-old "fossil" twelve years her senior, Adaline resorts to sabotage. She goes to a Soho club, takes a scandalous photo with a frat boy, and sends it to the old billionaire to disgust him into canceling their upcoming dinner.
But her rebellion backfires horribly when the frat boy spikes her drink with a powerful narcotic. As her body burns with a terrifying, feverish heat, she collapses in a dark corridor. Stripped of her phone and betrayed by her bloodline, she is left utterly defenseless as a predator approaches to drag her away.
Suddenly, the heavy fire door is kicked open by a towering, terrifyingly handsome stranger who effortlessly neutralizes her attacker.
"Please... help me," Adaline begs, deliriously throwing her burning body into his arms.
She has absolutely no idea that the handsome savior she is clinging to is Barron Cooke himself.
8.4
Everly spent four years playing the perfect, accommodating wife to Carson Moss, swallowing every grievance just to secure medical treatments for their sick daughter.
But at a high-society banquet she exhausted herself organizing, Carson's pregnant mistress crashed the party.
The woman shoved an ultrasound of Carson's "real heir" directly into Everly's frail grandfather's face.
The shock triggered a massive heart attack.
Carson refused to use his private helicopter to save the dying old man, choosing to protect his mistress and his company's IPO instead. Her grandfather died on the hospital table.
Instead of remorse, her mother-in-law demanded Everly publicly cover up the murder.
"You will do exactly as I say, or I will freeze every single cent of the medical trust fund paying for your crippled daughter's treatments."
When a battered Everly returned to the estate, she discovered her three-year-old daughter covered in dark bruises and pinch marks. Her in-laws were deliberately torturing her disabled child.
Everly couldn't comprehend how a family could be so utterly heartless. Her only family was murdered, her child was abused, and her husband threw a five-million-dollar check at her face as hush money.
They thought she would just break and quietly disappear.
But when a terrifyingly powerful billionaire unexpectedly blocked Carson's security team from locking her up, Everly finally saw her window.
She grabbed her sleeping daughter and ran out into the freezing storm, making a blood-bound vow to make the entire Moss family bleed.
8.1
Desperate for a way out of rejection and poverty, Pearl Augustine accepts a nanny job with an outrageous salary-working for billionaire Ace Warren. What she doesn't expect is his daughter.
Mia Warren is spoiled, sharp-tongued, and feared by everyone in the mansion. Behind her cruelty is a lonely child longing for a mother. As Pearl becomes the only one who can reach her, walls begin to fall-especially those around Ace, a grieving man hiding behind wealth and control.
What started as "just a job" quickly turns into something dangerous: attachment.
Sometimes, healing begins where you least expect it.
7.1
For seven years, I hid my identity as a wealthy heiress to be with my boyfriend, Ewing. I followed him across the country and made myself small so he could feel big.
On Thanksgiving, he ditched our celebration for his first love, Bree, who supposedly had a "burst pipe."
Later, she posted an intimate selfie with him, calling him her "hero."
Then she sent me a video of him at a bar, laughing with his friends.
"She's just being dramatic," he slurred, smirking at the camera. "A new necklace and she'll forget all about it. She's easy."
Easy. Seven years of my life, my love, my sacrifice-all reduced to that one word. I realized I was never his partner. I was just a placeholder.
I didn't cry. I packed my bags, booked a one-way flight to New York, and sent him one final text before blocking his number.
"Don't bother coming home. I'm getting married."
9.3
Ginny was chained to a concrete pillar in an abandoned warehouse, bleeding and betrayed by the two people she trusted most.
Her fiancé, Brant, and her adopted sister, Coretta, had just slashed her face open. Brant coldly admitted she was nothing but a disposable key to a vault, right before he tossed a lighter onto the gasoline-soaked floor.
As Ginny burned alive in the roaring inferno, the heavy iron doors were violently smashed open. Bedford Parks—the notoriously ruthless, germaphobic "monster" of Silicon Valley whom Ginny had always feared—charged straight into the flames. Ignoring the blistering heat, he shielded her charred body with his own. A massive steel beam collapsed, snapping his spine.
"I love you."
He coughed up blood, whispering his final words against her blackened skin before dying to protect her.
Hovering as a ghost, Ginny's soul screamed in agonizing realization. She had spent her life terrified of Bedford, yet he was the only one who truly loved her, while her supposed family laughed at her gruesome murder.
Suddenly, a blinding white light swallowed the warehouse.
Ginny gasped for air, opening her eyes to find herself sitting in the back of a luxury Maybach. She was eighteen again, wearing the humiliating clown makeup Coretta had tricked her into wearing on the day she was brought back to the wealthy Steele estate.
Ginny stared at her reflection, her dark eyes turning cold and sharp.
This time, she would tear her betrayers apart piece by piece, and she would protect her "monster."
7.1
To survive a forced one-year marriage contract with the ultra-wealthy Chavez family, Averi Marsh disguised herself as a pathetic, ugly duckling.
She caked her flawless skin in muddy yellow foundation, wore thick glasses, and played the part of a trembling, uneducated orphan.
The entire family treated her like literal garbage.
The youngest brother publicly swore he would rather cut off his own hand than marry a piece of trailer park trash.
Her nominal fiancé, Clarke, looked at her with cold disdain, allowing his glamorous companion to humiliate Averi by forcing her into a neon pink clown dress.
At a high-society party, a socialite shoved her into an infinity pool, laughing as the heavy fabric dragged her to the bottom.
They all wanted to see the poor girl broken, humiliated, and driven out of their pristine world.
What they didn't know was that beneath the hideous sweaters was a breathtaking, lethal predator.
They had no idea she was 'Spectre', the undefeated underground racing god who had just humiliated the arrogant Clarke on the track.
They didn't know she could shatter a bully's wrist in seconds or bankrupt their wealthy friends with a single text message.
But when the chlorinated pool water washed away her ugly makeup, the family's ambitious second son caught a glimpse of her true, flawless face.
The game of hide-and-seek was officially over.
The Chavez family thought they were torturing a helpless sheep, but they were about to realize they had locked themselves in a cage with a wolf.