News Flash Ex-husband, I'm Alive!
"I know you're pregnant, Valentina. That's why you have to die tonight. Two lives for the price of one, efficiency was always my strong suit."
On her third wedding anniversary, Valentina was gifted a shallow grave.
Her husband, Kennedy, the man she adored, was never a billionaire. He was a fraud who drugged her, watched her drown in a poisoned bath, and ordered her burial so he could marry his mistress.
He didn't know the gardener would hesitate. He didn't know she would crawl out of the mud, pregnant, broken, and alive. And he never imagined that ghosts would come back with teeth.
Dragged from the storm by Ian Kingston, the Titan of industry, Valentina is saved by a man so powerful that Kennedy is nothing more than a disposable bookkeeper in his empire.
To the world, Ian is a monster.
To Valentina, he is survival.
But Ian doesn't see a victim.
He sees Misha, his vanished wife, the mother of his two children, the woman who disappeared without a trace.
"You have 365 days to prove you aren't her, little bird. Until then, you will sleep in my bed, wear my name, and obey every rule I set."
Trapped in a deadly case of mistaken identity, Valentina signs the contract.
She becomes Misha Kingston, cold, ruthless, untouchable. Wrapped in emerald silk and Ian's dark protection, she walks back into the world that tried to bury her.
The next time Kennedy sees his dead wife, she isn't in a coffin.
She's in the arms of his boss. Wearing a queen's crown. Looking down at him from a throne of gold.
But as Ian's control turns into obsession, Valentina faces an impossible truth.
She is hiding a child conceived by her enemy... While being claimed by a king who refuses to let her go.
He buried a wife.
He's about to kneel before a Goddess.
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Chapter 4
"Mommy, you're finally back!"
The words were a physical blow, more shocking than the near-impact of the car. Valentina lay on the wet asphalt, the air forced from her lungs by the sheer weight of the two children clinging to her. Their warmth was a stark, jarring contrast to the icy rain and the stench of the gutter.
Ivy was sobbing into the crook of Valentina's neck, her small, gloved hands clutching the ruined fabric of Valentina's dress as if she were trying to sew her back into their lives with her fingernails. Ivan was anchored to her waist, his body shaking with a relief so profound it felt like a sob.
"No... no, little ones," Valentina wheezed, her voice a shredded, terrifying rasp. She tried to peel their small fingers away, her hands trembling with a mix of terror and an inexplicable, hollow ache. "You're mistaken... I'm not... I'm dirty... please, you'll get sick..."
"Don't leave again!" Ivy wailed, her voice rising in a frantic crescendo. "We waited every night at the window! Papa said you were just playing hide-and-seek, but it's been so long! Don't go back to the water, Mommy!"
Valentina's heart stopped. The water. How could this child know about the water? She looked at them through a haze of tears and exhaustion. They had her eyes, the same deep, liquid amber and her unruly waves though the girl's hair was a fiery red color.
The resemblance was so haunting, so impossible, that for a split second, Valentina wondered if the paralytic had finally reached her brain, weaving a beautiful, cruel hallucination to comfort her as she died.
She struggled to find her footing, her bare feet slipping in the oily sludge of the intersection. Panic, sharp and jagged, pierced through her fatigue. She had to run. If Kennedy's men found her here, these children would be caught in the crossfire of his malice.
"I have to go... please..." she whispered, trying to stand.
But as she gained her footing, the world went silent. The city's hum, the rain's hiss, it all vanished, sucked away by a heavy, predatory gravity.
A shadow fell over them, long and ominous.
Valentina looked up, her breath hitching. A man stood framed by the blinding white light of the car's headlamps. He was a titan in dark, expensive wool, his presence so overwhelming it seemed to command the very air to stay still.
His face was a masterpiece of cold, arrogant stone, a jawline that could cut through bone and eyes of frozen, piercing steel that held no room for mercy.
He didn't look at her like a victim. He looked at her like a thief caught with his most prized possession.
"I...I don't know who you are," Valentina whispered, her hand instinctively shielding the small bump of her stomach. She felt the children tighten their hold on her, their "Mommy" now a whimpered plea. "Please, let me go. I'm just... I'm no one."
She turned to bolt into the safety of the shadows, but she was too slow. Her body was a wreck, and he was a predator in his prime.
A hand, large and like a shackle of cold iron, clamped around her wrist. He yanked her back toward him with a violent, effortless grace. The heat from his palm burned through her skin, a terrifying contrast to the freezing rain.
Valentina was spun around, her chest colliding with the wall of his charcoal overcoat.
He leaned down, his face inches from hers, his scent of sandalwood, leather, and expensive tobacco enveloping her like a shroud.
"You've ran enough, and I have given you enough grace to play around," he growled, his voice a low, melodic vibration that felt like a death sentence.
His eyes searched her bruised, mud-stained face with a dark, twisted satisfaction. "Enough is enough, Misha. It's time to get home."
"I'm not... I'm not her!" she shrieked, her voice cracking into a pathetic whimper.
He didn't even blink. He looked over her head at the two men who had emerged from the front of the car, massive, silent guards who moved with the precision of machines.
"Put her in," he commanded, his voice cold and flat.
"No! No, stop!" Valentina thrashed, her weak muscles flailing against the iron grip of the guards as they stepped forward.
They grabbed her by the arms, lifting her off her feet as if she weighed nothing. Her silk bag, her only proof of life, was nearly knocked from her hand as she was hauled toward the yawning black interior of the car.
"Let me go! You don't understand! I'm not Misha!"
Her screams were swallowed by the night. One guard shoved her into the plush, leather-scented darkness of the backseat, while the other held the children back.
Valentina lunged for the opposite door, her fingers clawing at the handle, but a heavy thud signaled the child-locks engaging.
She was trapped.
As the man, the stranger, stepped into the car beside her, the door slammed shut, sealing her in a cage of luxury. The car roared to life, surging forward with a predatory growl, leaving the rain and the alley behind as Valentina was driven headfirst into a life that was not her own.
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9.5
My boyfriend, Jefferson, convinced me to give up my Yale scholarship for him. He was my secret, my escape from the shame of my mother's past, and I threw away my future for our love.
Then, at a gala, he publicly announced his engagement to Aubrey Carroll-the girl who made my high school years a living hell.
He trapped me in his mansion, forcing me to become her personal servant. She tortured me daily, culminating in her brutally killing our dog, Charlie, with a garden trowel.
When her friends arrived, they joined in, stripping me half-naked and live-streaming my panic attack for the world to see.
The man who once promised to protect me watched as they destroyed me.
But as I lay bleeding out on the floor, it wasn't an ambulance that arrived. It was the private security of Alexzander Stevens-my estranged, billionaire grandfather.
He revealed I was his sole heiress, and now, we were going to make them pay for every last tear.
9.6
On Valentine's Day, love is in the air-but so is danger.
At 30,000 feet, trainee captain Jane Harley proves she's more than just a rising pilot when she navigates a terrifying turbulence that leaves passengers shaken and lives hanging by a thread. Calm under pressurej and fiercely capable, Jane becomes the unexpected hero of Flight 423.
But while she's saving lives in the sky, fate is already setting something far more complicated in motion.
Among the passengers is the powerful and ambitious mother of Jayden-Aurelia Air's largest shareholder-whose midair health crisis is only the beginning of a chain of events. Grateful and intrigued, she sets her sights on Jane... not just as a hero, but as a future daughter-in-law.
Jayden, a grounded pilot with a sharp mind and guarded heart, has no interest in his mother's schemes-until one unexpected name changes everything.
In a world of wealth, expectations, and high-altitude emotions, two lives are about to collide.
Love, ambition, and fate take flight in Falling at 30,000 Feet.
7.6
I was the fiancée of the Chicago Outfit’s heir, a bond sealed by blood and eighteen years of history.
But when his mistress pushed me into the freezing pool at our engagement gala, Jax didn’t swim toward me.
He swam past me.
He scooped up the girl who pushed me, cradling her like fragile glass, while I struggled against the weight of my gown in the murky water.
When I finally dragged myself out, shivering and humiliated before the entire underworld, Jax didn’t offer a hand. He offered a scowl.
"You’re making a scene, Eliana. Go home."
Later, when that same mistress shoved me down the stairs, shattering my knee and my dance career, Jax stepped over my broken body to comfort her.
I overheard him telling his friends, "I’m just breaking her spirit. She needs to learn she’s property, not a partner. Once she’s desperate enough, she’ll be the perfect obedient wife."
He thought I was a dog that would always return to its master. He thought he could starve me of affection until I begged for scraps.
He was wrong.
While he was busy playing protector to his mistress, I wasn't crying in my room.
I was packing his ring into a cardboard box.
I cancelled my transfer to UCLA and enrolled at NYU instead.
By the time Jax realized his "property" was missing, I was already in New York, standing next to a man who looked at me like a queen, not a possession.
9.3
On the first anniversary of our reconciliation, I thought my tech mogul husband and I had finally turned a corner. Then I discovered our entire marriage was a spectator sport. It was a cruel, year-long revenge game orchestrated by him and his lover, and I was the punchline.
For their amusement, I was poisoned with food contaminated with dog feces, publicly humiliated with a twenty-million-dollar auction scam, and beaten until my ribs broke by his family's private security. I endured it all, playing the part of the clueless, loving wife while they laughed about it in a group chat called "The Jillian Andrews Comedy Hour."
But their grand finale was a step too far. I overheard him calmly planning to leave me to die in a remote cabin during a blizzard, a "tragic accident" that would finally set him free to be with his mistress.
He thought he was writing the final chapter of my life.
He didn't know I was about to use his murder plot as my own perfect escape. I faked my death, vanished into thin air, and left him to explain to the world how his beloved wife disappeared off the face of the earth.
9.0
The biopsy report slid across the cold metal desk, stamped with a brutal death sentence: advanced gastric cancer. Aretha had exactly ninety days left to live.
It was her twenty-sixth birthday, but her phone only rang with a furious call from her husband, Anders.
"Do you have any idea how much of a joke you made this family look like today? Post a public apology to Kelli right now."
He had completely forgotten her birthday, only caring that she skipped her adopted sister's yacht party.
When Aretha dragged her failing body back to the family estate, her biological mother slapped her across the face just for looking pale and embarrassing them in front of guests.
Seeing Aretha wasn't submitting to the usual abuse, Kelli deliberately threw herself down the stairs, playing the innocent, depressed victim.
Anders rushed in and shoved Aretha brutally against the wall to protect Kelli, while her biological father delivered his ultimate threat.
"I am freezing your trust fund. Get on your knees and apologize to Kelli right now, or you won't see another dime."
A massive, suffocating sense of absurdity washed over Aretha. She had spent six years lowering her head and begging for their approval, only to be treated like a disposable placeholder. Why should she spend her final days enduring this agonizing torture for people who didn't even care if she breathed?
Aretha wiped the blood from her chin and laughed. She publicly severed all ties with her family, whipped the signed divorce papers directly at Anders's face, and walked out into the freezing storm—ready to fight for her own life.
8.0
My wedding was tomorrow. I was a crisis counselor who had finally found peace with my loving fiancé, Dexter, and my best friend, Barbara.
A late-night call about a forced marriage led me to a hotel penthouse, where I found them naked in bed together.
It was all a cruel, three-year "savior game." They were bored heirs, and I was their project. They destroyed my career, caused me to lose our baby, and put my mother in the hospital.
They forced me to be a bridesmaid at their wedding-the one that should have been mine.
In front of hundreds of guests, they exposed my traumatic past and then tried to marry me off to a drunken stranger as a joke.
As I stood there, broken, a text from Barbara arrived.
"Your mother saw the livestream. She had a heart attack. She's not going to make it."
With nothing left, I ran to the 20th-floor window and jumped. They thought they had erased me. But my death was just the beginning.