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 6
The bath was a masterpiece of marble and gold, but to Valentina, the steam felt like the humid breath of a predator.
As she scrubbed the graveyard grit and dried copper of her own blood from her skin, her hands hovered protectively, almost reflexively over the slight, firm swell of her lower abdomen.
Four months. She was carrying the seed of a murderer, and now she was trapped in the lair of a king.
If Ian Kingston, the man whose power felt like a physical weight in every room, realized his wife was carrying another man's blood, the 365-day contract wouldn't just be void. It would be her death warrant.
She dressed in the dress the maid had left, a liquid-silk garment in a deep, venomous emerald. It clung to her damp skin like a second, more expensive layer of armor.
She looked into the vanity mirror and suppressed a scream. Misha. With her dark hair slicked back and her amber eyes narrowed in survival, the resemblance was no longer a coincidence; it was a curse.
I am a ghost with a heartbeat, she whispered to the glass. And tonight, I start haunting.
She descended the grand mahogany staircase, her bare feet silent. Below, the sunken lounge was bathed in the amber glow of a fire that didn't reach the chill in her bones.
"The offshore accounts are settled, Mr. Kingston. The resort's acquisition is complete. I've liquidated the remaining assets as per your instructions."
Valentina's heart didn't just beat; it detonated. She knew that voice. It was the voice that had whispered poetry in college, the voice that had lied about his love for her, and the voice that had snarled as his thumbs crushed her windpipe.
She rounded the corner, her knuckles white as she gripped the cold stone of the archway.
There, perched on the edge of a velvet chair, was Kennedy.
But he wasn't the titan he'd pretended to be. He looked small, an ant in the presence of a god. He wore a cheap, off-the-rack suit and clutched a briefcase like a shield.
Opposite him sat Ian, draped in a black silk robe, swirling a glass of neat bourbon. Kennedy wasn't a CEO as he claimed. He was Ian's bookkeeper. A scavenger eating the crumbs of a real man's fortune.
Valentina stepped into the light of the massive crystal chandelier.
The rustle of her silk dress was a gunshot in the silence. Both men looked up.
Kennedy's face didn't just turn pale; it turned the color of a fresh corpse. His jaw dropped, his eyes bulging as if the floor had opened up to reveal the hell he'd tried to send her to.
He scrambled to his feet, his briefcase thudding to the rug, spilling papers like white feathers.
"Valentina?" he choked out, his voice a pathetic, terrified wheeze. "You're... you're... supposed to be..."
Ian's eyes, cold and sharp as surgical steel, narrowed. He stood up with the slow, lethal grace of a panther, his gaze flickering between his wife and the shaking man. The temperature in the room plummeted.
"You recognize her, Kennedy?" Ian's voice was a low, dangerous vibration.
Kennedy was paralyzed. He had seen the dirt hit her face. He had watched her sink into that poisoned tub. "She..." he stammered, his finger trembling as he pointed at her. "She looks... she's..."
Ian stepped toward Valentina, his presence a dark, overwhelming shadow. He wrapped a heavy arm around her waist, hauling her flush against his side.
The heat of him was intoxicating, sandalwood, smoke, and pure authority. Valentina didn't pull away. She leaned into him, using his massive frame as a shield against the monster she used to love. The monster who wanted to kill her.
"This is my wife, Misha Kingston," Ian announced, his voice laced with a possessive, territorial pride that cut through Kennedy's sanity. "Misha, this is Kennedy. My lead accountant. He handles the tedious details of my smaller holdings."
Accountant. The word was a slap. Every "business trip" Kennedy took, every "million-dollar deal" he bragged about, it was all Ian Kingston's laundry.
Kennedy was a fraud living on Ian's leftovers, and he had tried to kill her to protect his pathetic, stolen life.
"Wife?" Kennedy gasped, his knees literally knocking together. He looked like he was about to pass out. "But... she's... Misha?"
Valentina felt a surge of lethal, venomous adrenaline. She saw the sweat beading on Kennedy's brow.
He thought he was losing his mind. He thought she was a vengeful spirit who came to claim him.
She looked up at Ian, ignoring the 365-day contract, ignoring the danger. She saw a weapon, and she decided to pull the trigger. She may not be Misha, but she can use this to her advantage.
Before Ian could speak, Valentina reached up, her fingers sliding into the dark, thick hair at the nape of his neck. She pulled his head down and kissed him, a deep, searing, explosive kiss that tasted of bourbon and sudden, shocked hunger.
Ian stiffened for a fraction of a second, his brain catching up to the sudden heat, before he groaned low in his throat. His hands clamped onto her hips, pulling her so tight the emerald silk was the only thing between them.
He kissed her back with a ferocity that spoke of months of starved desire, his tongue claiming hers in front of the man who had tried to bury her.
Valentina broke the kiss, her lips swollen and her eyes burning with a dark, triumphant light. She turned her gaze to Kennedy, who was staring at them with a look of pure, unadulterated horror.
"Yes, wife," she purred, her voice dripping with a wicked, honeyed poison as she stepped toward him, the emerald silk shimmering like the scales of a serpent.
"Do you have a problem with that, Kennedy? Or do you always look like you've seen a ghost when a lady enters the room?"
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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.