Neglected Wife: Hidden Heiress's Cold Revenge
I stood in the pouring rain at my father-in-law's funeral, the heels of my black pumps sinking into the mud. I was Mrs. Vargas, the wife of New York's most powerful billionaire, yet I was standing at the edge of the crowd like a forgotten statue.
Ten feet away, under the dry shelter of the family tent, my husband Hayes held another woman against his chest. It wasn't me he was whispering comfort to; it was Felicity, his late brother's widow and childhood sweetheart.
The humiliation didn't end at the cemetery. Hayes moved Felicity and her son into our home, relegating me to the guest wing while she took over the primary suites. He watched silently as her son smashed the only photograph of my deceased parents, then demanded I apologize for "scaring" the boy with my reaction. When Felicity's negligence ruined a twelve-million-dollar family heirloom, Hayes had the audacity to ask me to use my own savings to buy her a "consolation" engagement ring. He treated me like a parasite, never realizing I was a brilliant scientist with a hidden fortune and three patents to my name.
I realized then that our three-year marriage was a hollow farce. Hayes had never even touched me, claiming he wanted to "remain pure" for his memory of Felicity. I was nothing more than a business merger, a smudge on the lens of the perfect family portrait he was building with another man's widow.
The breaking point came during a lethal blizzard. Hayes promised to accompany me to my family's mandatory gala-a tradition where my absence meant a death sentence. But at the last second, he stood me up to stay home and tend to Felicity's stubbed toe. Left alone to face the wrath of the Santos Matriarch, I was forced to kneel in the freezing snow as punishment until my lungs began to fail and my vision blurred.
Just as the darkness started to take me, a black Maybach smashed through the iron gates. My exiled brother, the man the world calls "The Wolf," stepped out of the storm to reclaim what Hayes had discarded. Hayes thought I was a helpless doll who couldn't survive a day without his trust fund, but he's about to find out what happens when you let a Santos daughter freeze.
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Chapter 8
Friday morning.
Hayes left for work early. He grabbed the briefcase from the console table, his mind consumed with worry. He didn't check the side pocket. He never did. He just shoved his laptop into the main compartment, shouting into his phone at a specialist he was trying to hire for Felicity's "gastritis," a condition the previous doctor had dismissed as mild indigestion.
Eliana was in the kitchen when her phone rang.
It was the Matriarch's assistant.
"Mrs. Vargas. The Matriarch expects Hayes to attend tonight. He has not RSVP'd."
Eliana gripped the phone. "He has to come?"
"It is a family showing. If he is not there, the Matriarch will assume the alliance is broken. And you know the punishment for breaking the alliance."
Eliana felt sick. The punishment. The "Correction."
"I'll bring him," Eliana whispered.
She hung up and called Hayes.
"Hayes," she said. "Please. Tonight. The Santos Gala. You have to come."
Hayes sighed on the other end. "Eliana, I'm busy. I have a board meeting to try and unfreeze my assets."
"It's life or death, Hayes. Please. Just for an hour."
Hayes heard the desperation in her voice. He paused.
"Fine. I'll meet you here at 7. But we leave by 9."
"Thank you," Eliana breathed.
She spent the afternoon getting ready. She wore a dark blue velvet gown, high-necked, long-sleeved. Armor.
At 6:30, she was waiting in the foyer.
Upstairs, Felicity was watching. She saw Eliana looking beautiful. She felt a surge of jealousy.
She picked up her phone. She called her friend, loud enough for Hayes to hear as he walked down the hall.
"Yeah, so I think I'll go on that date tonight. He's a doctor. Very handsome. I need to move on, right?"
Hayes stopped outside the door. A date?
He burst into the room. "You're going on a date?"
Felicity looked at him with wide, innocent eyes. "Well, Hayes... you're married. You're going out with your wife tonight. I can't just sit here waiting for you forever. I need a man who puts me first."
Hayes felt a surge of possessive panic. The thought of another man touching Felicity-touching his brother's widow-drove him mad.
"No," he said. "You're not going."
"But you're leaving!" Felicity cried.
Hayes looked at his watch. It was 6:50. Eliana was waiting downstairs.
He looked at Felicity's tear-streaked face.
He made a choice.
He took out his phone and texted Eliana.
Emergency board meeting. Can't make it. Go alone.
Downstairs, Eliana's phone buzzed.
She read the text.
She didn't cry. She didn't scream. She just felt her soul turn into ice.
He lied. She knew he lied. There was no board meeting at 7 PM on a Friday.
He chose her. Again.
Eliana looked at the door. Outside, the snow was falling heavily. A blizzard was starting.
She could run. But the Santos guards would find her. If she didn't show up, they would hunt her down.
She had to go. Alone. To the slaughter.
She opened the heavy front door. The wind hit her like a physical blow.
"Goodbye, Hayes," she whispered.
She walked out into the snow, got into her Audi, and drove toward the darkness.
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7.1
I woke up gasping for air, expecting the cold concrete of a prison cell, but my fingers sank into the plush leather of a luxury Lincoln. I was twenty-four again, wearing the silver silk dress from the night my life was systematically destroyed.
Beside me sat my cousin Catrina, the woman whose carefully crafted lies had orchestrated my ruin and sent me to a penitentiary for five years.
In my first life, this was the night the dominoes fell. Catrina stole my jewelry to paint me as mentally unstable, and by morning, I was stripped of my medical license and labeled a criminal. My mother’s family, the Montgomerys, stood by and watched as my father’s company was devoured by wolves, treating my existence like a "liability" that needed to be managed. I still felt the phantom tremors in my hands from prison fights and the stinging betrayal of being discarded by the people I called family.
I had lived through five years of absolute hell, a former surgeon rotting in a cell while the people who framed me toasted to their success at galas I was no longer invited to.
"Don't be selfish, Dawn," Catrina whispered, reaching for the necklace that would later be used as evidence against me. "Let the jewelry shine on someone who actually matters."
She thought I was still the fragile victim she could manipulate, but she didn't realize I had returned from the grave with the cold, clinical calculation of a fixer.
Instead of walking into her trap at the gala, I forced the car onto a dark service road and dragged a dying billionaire, Jennings Stafford, from the wreckage of a burning SUV.
He was the only man powerful enough to destroy my enemies, and as I stitched his wounds with stolen supplies, I didn't ask for a thank you.
I looked him dead in the eye and proposed a contract that would set the world on fire.
"I want a strategic marriage. You get a harmless wife with a legacy name to calm your board, and I get immunity from everyone who ever touched me."
The bill for my five years in prison had finally come due, and I was here to collect.
7.4
When I called my husband while trapped in a kidnapper's warehouse, he laughed. "Stop faking," he said, "my delicate mistress needs her sleep." He hung up. I signed the divorce papers drenched in my own blood, giving up everything just to escape the monster I married.
His mother threw a broken umbrella at me in the rain. I had nothing—no money, no identity, no hope.
But the moment I turned away, eight black Escalades encircled the street. A man in a tailored suit stepped out of a Rolls-Royce, shielding me with an umbrella. In his hand was a DNA test—and twenty-three years of relentless search.
"Your last name isn't Smith," he said, wiping blood from my wrist with his handkerchief. "It's Wilder. The Wilder family. And the man who left you to die?" He smiled, icy. "He owes us nine billion dollars."
9.2
I brought the original drafts of the Lloyd Center to my stepsister’s high-society pool party, hoping the gift would finally earn my family's respect. I stood on the edge of the limestone patio, clutching the leather portfolio as fifty pairs of judgmental eyes watched my every move.
But the moment I handed the sketches to Corina, she retracted her hand, letting the portfolio sink into the chlorine before throwing herself into the pool with a theatrical scream.
My fiancé, Julian, didn't hesitate; he shoved me aside with enough force to twist my ankle and dove in to rescue her. He surfaced with Corina in his arms, looking at me with a mask of pure disgust while the crowd whispered that I was an unstable, illegitimate intruder. My stepmother Eugenia didn't even ask for an explanation before she stepped forward and slapped me across the face, ordering me to get out before she called the police.
"Sister, if you're still mad about the inheritance, just say it. Why did you push me?"
"Enough! God, Aria. Your jealousy is actually sickening."
I stood on shaking legs, looking at the man who had promised to know my heart for two years, only to realize he was just another wolf in the pack. The humiliation burned hotter than the sting on my face, and I realized that in their eyes, I would always be the trash they needed to take out.
I yanked the diamond ring off my finger, slammed it onto a table, and walked away from my old life forever. To claim my trust fund and survive, I walked into a dive bar and offered a marriage contract to a broke, mysterious artist named Harland. I thought I was just buying a temporary shield, but I didn't realize that my "poor" new husband was actually a billionaire predator who was already planning to burn my family's empire to the ground.
7.2
Talia Morgan is a broke final-year medical student with one nightmare she cannot escape - her mother is dying, and the hospital bills are impossible to pay.
Just when all hope is lost, she receives an unbelievable offer: a one-year contract marriage to billionaire tech CEO Adrian Blackwood... in exchange for $50,000.
No love.
No intimacy.
No emotions.
Just rules and signatures.
Adrian needs a wife to secure his inheritance. Talia needs money to save her mother. The deal is simple.
Until it isn't.
Living under the same roof with a cold, dangerously attractive billionaire brings unexpected complications:
• His jealous ex refuses to disappear
• His family starts to love her
• And every touch, every glance, begins to feel less like a contract and more like a promise
When Talia discovers she may be carrying the one man she was never supposed to love, the contract threatens to destroy everything.
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."
9.2
Emmett was a loyal footman at the wealthy Patterson estate, desperate to scrub the slum out of his blood.
He abandoned his family and gave his absolute devotion to the beautiful young miss, Clara.
But when the estate faced bankruptcy, Clara ruthlessly framed him for embezzlement to protect her family's wealth.
He was shoved into a police carriage in the freezing rain. Through the window, he saw Clara watching him with fake pity, looking at him like a stray dog being put down.
The judge slammed his gavel, sentencing him to a slow, agonizing death.
Because he had spent all his wages on tailored uniforms to fit in, his mother died in a cheap coffin from an untreated illness, leaving his siblings to starve.
As the thick, coarse rope crushed his windpipe, Emmett was filled with agonizing regret.
He didn't understand how the woman who smiled so sweetly could send him to the gallows without a single ounce of hesitation.
Opening his eyes again, Emmett found himself back in the servant's quarters, exactly three days before the Patterson family's downfall.
This time, he wouldn't be their loyal dog. He was going to be their executioner.
He planned to watch Clara sell herself to the savage new heir, Kearney Bernard, just to keep her luxury.
But at the welcome dinner, the terrifying new master ignored Clara completely, locked his dark, obsessive eyes on Emmett, and whispered.
"You are mine. Nobody touches you."