Return Of The Billionaire's Ghost Wife
I died in the terrifying plunge of Flight 815. But when I opened my eyes, I was lying in a luxurious bathtub, completely unharmed.
The door opened, and my husband Jordi walked in—looking fifteen years older, his eyes glacial. He pinned me to the wall, his thumb pressing against my windpipe, demanding to know who hired me to play his dead wife.
I managed to prove I was the real Isadora, biologically still twenty-eight years old. But my nightmare had just begun.
My twenty-three-year-old son Hector looked at my unaged face with pure hatred.
"Get this cheap replica out of my father's house, or I'll have him declared incompetent!"
My twenty-year-old daughter Blossom, now a spoiled stranger treating Jordi like a personal ATM, screamed at me over the phone.
Even Jordi's ambitious female colleague showed up at our estate, treating me like a temporary toy she could easily replace.
In the space of a single breath, I had lost fifteen years. My children had grown up without me, learning to hate instead of grieve. Now, they looked at their real mother as if I were a monster trying to steal my own inheritance.
But I didn't return from the dead just to be pushed out.
I put on my old green silk dress, stepped in front of the female executive, and smiled.
If they want to treat me like a threat, I'll fight them all to get my family back.
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Chapter 1
The water was warm.
Too warm.
Isadora's eyes snapped open, her lungs seizing as if she'd been drowning. She jerked upright, water sloshing violently over the rim of a massive freestanding tub, soaking the Calacatta marble floor.
She wasn't drowning.
She wasn't in the ocean.
Her hands gripped the smooth porcelain edge, knuckles white. She looked down at herself-naked, submerged in water that was unnaturally warm and carried a strange, cloying scent she didn't recognize. Her skin was unblemished. No cuts. No bruises. No burns from jet fuel or salt from seawater.
Just smooth, pale skin. Perfect. Untouched.
Her breath came in short, ragged bursts. This wasn't right. None of this was right. The last thing she remembered was the screaming. The metal tearing. The impossible cold of the Pacific rushing through the cabin as Flight 815 plunged toward the black water.
She'd been dying. She was sure of it.
Isadora tried to stand, her legs trembling beneath her. The bathroom-because that's what this was, some kind of obscene luxury bathroom with brass fixtures and marble walls that probably cost more than her parents' house-swam in her vision. She made it halfway up before her knees buckled, her hip slamming against the tub's edge, her palm slapping wet marble.
The door opened.
No knock. No warning. Just the soft whisper of hinges and a silhouette filling the frame, backlit by light from somewhere beyond. The figure was tall. Broad-shouldered. Familiar in a way that made her chest ache even as her instincts screamed danger.
"Jordi?"
Her voice cracked. She hated how small she sounded. How desperate.
He didn't answer.
He stepped inside, each footfall deliberate on the heated floor. The door clicked shut behind him, sealing them in. Isadora couldn't see his face, not yet, but she could feel him-the weight of his presence, the way he seemed to consume the oxygen in the room.
She reached for a towel. Her fingers brushed terry cloth.
His hand closed around her wrist.
The grip was iron. Cold. Nothing like the warmth she remembered, the way his thumb used to trace circles against her pulse when they lay in bed talking about nothing. This hand was a vise, yanking her forward, out of the tub, her feet slipping, her body colliding with his chest before he shoved her backward.
Her spine hit the marble wall.
The shock of cold stone against wet skin stole her breath. His other hand found her throat-not squeezing, not yet, but resting there with terrifying precision, his thumb pressing against her windpipe in silent warning.
"Look at me," he said.
She did.
And she didn't know him.
The face was Jordi's-the sharp cheekbones, the jawline she'd traced with her fingers a thousand times. But everything else was wrong. His eyes, those blue eyes that used to crinkle when he laughed, were sunken. Glacial. They looked at her like she was a specimen. A problem to be solved.
"Who sent you?"
His voice was gravel and smoke, stripped of any melody she recognized.
"I don't-" She coughed, his fingers tightening just enough to remind her who controlled the air. "Jordi, it's me. It's Isadora."
He laughed.
The sound was worse than his silence. It was dry, humorless, scraping against her nerves like sandpaper.
"Isadora Vaughan died fifteen years ago." He leaned closer, his breath warm against her ear, his body pinning her to the wall. "Flight 815. I identified her personal effects myself. Watched them lower an empty coffin into the ground because there was nothing left to bury."
Fifteen years.
The number hit her like a physical blow. Her vision tunneled. She turned her head, desperate for something to anchor her, and found it in the mirror across from them-a massive gilt-edged thing that reflected the scene in cruel clarity.
A woman with her face. Her exact face. Young. Unlined. Twenty-eight, maybe twenty-nine. No gray at the temples. No lines around the eyes from laughing at their children's jokes.
Her hand rose instinctively, touching her own cheek. The woman in the mirror did the same.
"The resemblance is perfect," Jordi said, his fingers leaving her throat to grip her chin, forcing her to face him. "Whoever did the work-Reyes family? Kerrs?-they got creative. Memory implants, too, judging by the performance." His thumb traced her cheekbone, clinical, assessing. "How much did they pay you? Enough to risk the Vaughan trust? Enough to die for it?"
"I don't know what you're talking about." Her voice shook. She hated it. "I don't know any-"
"Your handler's name." His hand returned to her throat, pressure building slowly, deliberately. "You get one chance. One."
Tears blurred her vision. Not from fear-though God, she was afraid-but from the sheer wrongness of this. From looking into her husband's eyes and seeing nothing. No recognition. No love. Just calculation and something darker, something that looked almost like hope being strangled in real time.
"I don't have a handler." She forced the words out, her fingers clawing at his wrist, useless against his strength. "Jordi, please. Look at me. Look at-"
"Your silence is your answer."
His face was inches from hers now, close enough that she could see the broken capillaries in his eyes, the tremor in his jaw that he couldn't quite control. He was holding himself together with thread and spite, she realized. Had been for a long time.
"Assets that outlive their usefulness," he whispered, his thumb finding her pulse point, feeling it flutter like a trapped bird, "need to be liquidated."
The word hung between them. Final. Absolute.
Isadora stopped struggling. She let her hands fall from his wrist, let her body go limp against the wall, her only movement the desperate rise and fall of her chest as she fought for air he hadn't quite stolen yet.
She was going to die.
In her own bathroom-because this was his bathroom, their bathroom, she recognized the view of Central Park through the frosted window now-in the arms of the man who'd promised to love her until death did them part.
The irony tasted like copper and salt.
Jordi's grip tightened. Just a fraction. Enough to tell her he was deciding. Weighing her value against the risk of keeping her alive, of whatever game she represented in the war he clearly thought they were fighting.
She closed her eyes.
And waited.
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8.0
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Nathaniel Sinclair, billionaire heir with his dreamy looks and charming attitude is just as unenthusiastic about the situation as she is. Their marriage begins with distance, awkward silences and the quiet understanding that neither of them asked for this.
But as days turn into weeks and forced proximity becomes a regular thing, Elena starts to wonder: what happens when two people trapped in an arrangement begin to fall for each other?
It was never meant to be love. But love has a way of rewriting the rules.
8.8
On the eve of my glamorous Waldorf Astoria wedding, I went to the penthouse to surprise my fiancé, Hugh, wearing my late mother's heirloom pearls.
Instead, I heard my stepsister's familiar laugh and caught them tangled together on the sofa.
Through the cracked door, I heard Hugh slur that he was only marrying me for my family's financial backing.
"As soon as I secure my inheritance, she's the first thing I'm getting rid of," he promised her.
Floy giggled and asked for my mother's pearl necklace, my only legacy. Hugh agreed without hesitation, mocking my dead mother's naivety and my desperate dreams of building a family.
Every sweet word he had ever said was a lie, a knife he had been patiently sliding between my ribs for years. They planned to strip me of everything the moment I signed the prenup.
I didn't cry or scream. The crushing weight of their betrayal hollowed me out, leaving behind a terrifying, absolute calm.
Why should I be the one to lose everything while they stole my future and insulted my mother's memory?
I calmly walked down the hall, set the prenuptial agreement on fire, and vanished into the rainy night.
If Hugh wanted to play dirty for the Maxwell empire, I would play for keeps.
Using a forgotten, century-old family covenant, I was going to marry Hugh's uncle-the comatose, paralyzed war hero, Fleet Maxwell.
I would return not as a naive bride, but as their worst nightmare: his aunt, and the new lady of the house.
7.9
Justice was dragged back from the slums by her biological father, only to be sold off to the billionaire Aguirre family. Her purpose was simple: marry their comatose heir to secure a three-hundred-million-dollar lifeline for his company.
Her stepmother and stepsister sneered at her cheap canvas shoes, treating her like a contagious disease.
"A high school dropout from the slums marrying a billionaire? It's a miracle your trashy bloodline is getting anywhere near the estate," her stepsister Emery mocked.
At the sprawling estate, the "comatose" heir, Auguste, was secretly conscious. Disgusted by his new bride, he orchestrated her enrollment at an elite prep school, hoping the ruthless rich kids would break her. On her very first day, Emery ambushed her, loudly broadcasting Justice's "dropout" status to the entire classroom and turning her into an instant social pariah. The teachers tried to humiliate her with impossible calculus, and the students treated her like garbage.
They all thought she was just a pathetic, uneducated pawn they could easily crush and discard. They had no idea that her "dropout" file was a manufactured ghost, or that the Aguirre family's top intelligence network had just hit a military-grade firewall trying to look into her past.
Justice didn't panic. She flawlessly solved the university-level equation on the board, then walked into the cafeteria and looked right at Emery.
"She has no Barnes blood. She is a squatter living in my father's house."
With three casual sentences, Justice completely incinerated her stepsister's elite life. The billionaire heir wanted to play games? She was about to show them all what a real monster looked like.
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.
9.3
Adrian Blackwood , billionaire CEO of Blackwood Holdings, Alpha of the Blackwood Pack... Mated to a weak, broken and wolfless female?!! No way! This is impossible, this must a sick prank by the moon goddess and fate.
9.8
For two years, I was the perfect, obedient wife to wealthy heir Grady Maddox.
Then I found a hidden compartment in his study desk. Inside were dozens of explicit polaroids of his adopted sister, Jasmine, and a worn leather diary.
The diary revealed the sickening truth.
"Kaya is the perfect shield. As long as I have a wife, no one will ever look too closely at me and my little Yue."
When Jasmine deliberately knocked a bowl of boiling soup onto my hand, Grady didn't even glance at my blistering skin.
He frantically checked Jasmine for nonexistent scratches and yelled at me.
"Why weren't you paying attention? Look at the mess you've made! You scared her."
He then kicked me out to our empty penthouse as punishment, only to move Jasmine in the very next day, letting her parade around in his dress shirts and giving her my favorite custom furniture.
Looking at the husband I had devoted my life to fawning over the sister he was secretly sleeping with, I didn't feel heartbroken. I just felt a deep, suffocating disgust.
I was nothing but a paper wall meant to hide their twisted affair.
I didn't cry, and I didn't beg for his love.
I simply locked him out of the bedroom, gathered my financial records, and called Manhattan's most ruthless divorce attorney.
I was securing my escape, completely unaware that Grady's estranged, terrifyingly powerful older brother had been waiting ten years for this exact moment.