My Son's Death, His Cruel Betrayal
For seven years, I gave up my life as a genius engineer to be the perfect wife for my husband, Jonathan, a U.S. Senator. But when our five-year-old son drowned, he didn't comfort me. He comforted his adopted sister, Hailey, and blamed me for our son's death.
At the wake, he stood by as his family beat me, calling me a murderer. He watched them shove my head into a freezing pond, forcing me to feel the same terror our son felt in his last moments.
His protection was always for Hailey, never for me.
Then I learned the horrifying truth. Jonathan was there when our son fell in the water. He saw him struggling, but he chose to comfort a panicking Hailey first.
He let our son die.
So I filed for divorce in secret and vanished into a classified research project. But when he tracked me down, begging for a second chance in front of his new colleagues, I played a recording for everyone to hear. It was Hailey's voice, gleefully admitting that Jonathan had chosen her over his own dying child.
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Chapter 7
Krystal POV:
He paused, his hand hovering in the air behind me. My words were a shield, impenetrable, unyielding. I used to make him that soup even when I was sick, even when my hands trembled from exhaustion. I used to laugh it off, tell him his hard work deserved the best. He never once offered to make it for me. Not once.
Now, his stomach hurt, and I couldn't care less. I just wanted him gone.
"Krystal," he pleaded, his voice cracking. "What is it? What do you want from me? You're suffocating me with this silence. This coldness. It's… it's killing me."
I turned my head slightly, just enough to catch his gaze. "Suffocating?" I repeated, my tone like ice. "Is that what you call it? All those times I asked for your attention, for your time, for your simple presence, and you told me I was 'suffocating' you? You told me I was 'too clingy,' 'too demanding'? Is that what you mean, Jonathan?"
He reeled back as if I had struck him. His jaw hung open, his face pale. He remembered. Every cruel word, every dismissive gesture. He remembered all the times he had brushed me off, telling me to "handle it myself," calling my concerns "petty" compared to his grand political ambitions. He remembered, and the memory was a physical pain, a sharp, burning agony in his own chest.
He sighed, running a hand over his face. "You're still angry about Leo," he said, the words heavy with a misplaced certainty. "I know, Krystal. I know I messed up. But I promise you, I'll make it up to you. I'll fix everything. I'll win you back."
He leaned down, pressing a soft kiss to my forehead. It felt like nothing. A ghost of a touch, devoid of meaning. Then he was gone.
The door clicked shut. I waited, counting the seconds, until I heard the distant rumble of his car pulling away.
My phone, which I had retrieved from the floor, buzzed. It was the civil affairs bureau.
"Dr. Mercado," the clerk's voice was bright. "Your divorce application has been finalized. You can pick up your certificate this afternoon."
Another call came almost immediately. The aerospace base.
"Dr. Mercado, the confidential project is ready to launch. We'll be sending a team to pick you up. Are you still able to leave within two weeks?"
"Yes," I confirmed, my voice steady, betraying none of the turmoil inside. "I'll be ready. Please arrange for the pick-up at the civil affairs bureau. I won't be returning to the house."
I hung up, a hollow ache in my chest. This was it. The day I' d been planning for, meticulously, for months. The day I finally broke free. But before I left, there was one last thing I needed to do. One final, agonizing piece of the puzzle.
I rose from the hospital bed, my body still stiff and sore, but propelled by a grim determination. I grabbed the crutches the nurse had left for me and slowly, painfully, made my way down the hall. To Hailey' s room.
She looked up as I entered, a smug, triumphant smirk on her face. Gone was the fragile, sweet facade. Her eyes, cold and calculating, fixed on me.
"So, the little mouse finally came to say goodbye?" she sneered. "Jonathan is mine now, Krystal. He always has been. He just needed you for show."
I leaned heavily on my crutches, my gaze unwavering. "I don't care about your childish games of possession, Hailey," I said, my voice barely a whisper. "I just want the truth. Did you intentionally let Leo drown?"
She let out a harsh, barking laugh, a sound that twisted my gut. "Intentionally? Oh, Krystal, you wouldn't believe what people are capable of. The truth would shatter you."
"Try me," I said, gritting my teeth, my knuckles white on the crutches. "I'm already broken."
She leaned forward, her voice dropping to a theatrical whisper, savoring every word. "Jonathan... he was actually there, you know. At the lake house. Right before Leo went under."
My blood ran cold. My heart slammed against my ribs, a desperate, frantic beat.
"He saw Leo struggling," she continued, her eyes gleaming with malicious pleasure. "But he didn't jump in immediately, did he? No. He saw me panicking, saw me on the verge of a breakdown. And he chose to comfort me first."
The world tilted. My vision blurred, red-tinged. My veins felt like they were bursting, hot and violent. The sterile hospital room warped into a slaughterhouse, the white walls splattered with red. Jonathan. My husband. My son' s father. He was there. And he chose her. Over Leo.
A single, burning tear escaped, tracing a path through the dust and grime on my cheek. The last tear. I vowed it then. The very last.
I wiped it away with the back of my hand, my body trembling, but my resolve hardening into steel. I turned, pushing myself on my crutches, my head held high. No more, Jonathan. No more. There would be no tomorrow for us.
I spent the rest of the day and all night outside the civil affairs bureau. I just sat there, waiting. At precisely 9 AM, I walked in, my divorce certificate in hand. I asked the clerk to mail Jonathan's. There was no need for him to pick it up.
As I stepped out, a military jeep, dark and imposing, pulled up to the curb. It was time.
Before I got in, I opened my bag. Inside, a sealed envelope. It contained a copy of the recorded conversation with Hailey, along with a detailed report I had meticulously prepared. I dropped it into the nearest mailbox, addressed to Jonathan's superior. Justice for Leo. And for me.
The jeep door opened. I climbed in, my heart feeling lighter than it had in years. Finally. Free.
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8.5
"You don't get to hurt me and then make me responsible for how guilty you feel about it."
"Friends don't stand next to you, learn everything about you, and then use it to get close to the one person they know matters."
Aria thought she knew two things for certain: she was going to graduate with her best friend, Iris, by her side, and she was in love with her boyfriend, Liam.
One kiss changed everything. But as the secrets of their "before" come to light, Aria realizes the betrayal didn't start at a party or in a moment of weakness. It started weeks ago, in the conversations she wasn't part of and the moments she wasn't invited to.
Now, Aria has to decide if she can find herself again in the wreckage of the people she trusted most-or if some bridges are meant to be burned
8.4
"You don't belong in my world," he growled, his hand tightening around my waist.
"Then why do you keep pulling me deeper into it?" I whispered.
Ten years ago, I lost everything, my parents, my innocence, my trust in fate.
I only remember his shaking hands... and the birthmark on his arm.
Now, the most feared man in the city wants me.
A billionaire who commands blood and silence.
A mafia king who kneels only in the dark, only for me.
But what happens when I discover that the man I love...
...is the same man who destroyed my life?
8.4
My love. My ruin.
Ashton Hampton saved me from my mother's scandal. I gave him my whole heart.
Then he told me he was marrying another woman for business. My role? His hidden mistress.
At our engagement party, his new fiancée accused me of ruining her brooch. Ashton didn't question it. He demanded I apologize.
The crowd attacked. He watched.
I climbed onto a helicopter and disappeared.
Eighteen years later, I saw him on a park bench—broken, hollow, begging for one more word.
I gave him two: “No comment.”
7.4
Standing on the edge of a limestone quarry in the pouring rain, I thought we were just having another family argument.
Then my mother, Ardell, screamed that I’d let the life insurance lapse, and my brother, Hakeem, stepped out of the shadows with a cold, calculating look in his eyes.
I told them I knew the truth—that Hakeem had cut the brake lines on my father’s car—but they didn't flinch. Instead, Hakeem shoved me hard, sending me tumbling into the abyss.
I hit a jagged ledge thirty feet down, the sound of my spine snapping like a dry branch echoing through the rain. As I lay paralyzed and broken, my mother watched from above, asking if I was dead yet, before Hakeem whistled for the starving wild dogs that lived in the quarry floor.
"Nature will clean up the mess,"
Hakeem said, walking away while the first set of teeth sank into my throat.
The agony was a tidal wave, but the rage was hotter, a nuclear hatred for the family that stole my future and the daughter I’d never see grow up. I died in that dirt, consumed by fire and teeth, wondering how a mother could choose a car payment over her own child's life.
But then, I gasped for air, sitting bolt upright in my old trailer bedroom. I looked at the calendar: May 12, 2014.
I was seventeen again, but I wasn't the same girl. Inside this malnourished body was the mind of a world-class trauma surgeon and the elite hacker known as 'Phantom.'
This time, I wasn't going to the quarry; I was going for their throats.
8.2
April Scott only wanted to help her family until she crossed paths with Dr. Adrian Smith, the ruthless billionaire and her childhood crush, who is aware of her dark past and turns her life upside down in twenty-four hours. Her sister is hospitalized, her home is suddenly sold. April becomes the target of a deadly plot she doesn't understand.
Every time she tries to escape, Adrian is there... saving her, controlling her, or destroying her, she can't tell which. She could only sense he wanted something from her and she also finds herself drawn to him. But when a confrontation ends with Adrian presumed dead, April becomes a fugitive overnight. And the only person willing to protect her is a stranger with secrets of his own.
8.4
She was the daughter they lost. Now she's the daughter they're willing to sell.
Emma spent eighteen years as a forgotten girl in a forgotten village, until the day her wealthy biological family came to claim her. But her homecoming is no fairytale. Her place has already been taken by Fiona, the perfect adopted sister who sees Emma as nothing but a threat. And her parents? They didn't bring her back out of love. They brought her back to sign a contract.
Alex Hawthorne is the billionaire heir to the most powerful empire in the city, a genius reduced to a wheelchair after a mysterious accident. The world sees him as broken. His family sees him as a bargaining chip. When the Hawthornes demand a bride from the Williams family, Emma is offered up as the sacrifice.
The contract is simple: one year of marriage, and she walks away with enough money to disappear forever.
But no one knows who they're really dealing with.
They see a quiet country girl who doesn't belong. They don't know she's the secret protégé of a world-famous jewelry designer. They don't know she's the anonymous street racer who conquered every mountain road before she ever saw a city street. They don't know she entered an elite academy with the lowest score and rose to the top in a single semester because Emma never forgets anything.
And Alex? He knows none of this.
To him, she's just the contract bride. The quiet stand-in who agreed to a business transaction. He makes her a deal: play the part, and he'll sign the divorce papers when the year is up.
Until their wedding night, when he leans close with a teasing smirk and says, "If you want to give me a child in ten months, you will have to be on top."
She looks him straight in the eye, her lips curving into the faintest smile.
"Fine. But keep still, or I might accidentally tell everyone your legs work just fine."
He says nothing.
Three months later, the billionaire who once pitied his quiet bride cannot go a single day without her. Because every time he thinks he has figured her out, she surprises him all over again.
But in a world of gilded cages and hidden daggers, their marriage is built on a contract and the biggest clause hasn't been revealed yet.
He thinks he bought a pawn.
She's about to show him she's the queen.
And when the contract ends, one of them will break.