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 3
The tablet felt heavy in her hands. Too light, somehow, for what it contained-her son's face, reduced to pixels and glass, waiting on the other end of a video call she wasn't ready to make.
"He's at the office," Jordi said from behind her, his hand resting on her shoulder with careful neutrality. "I told him I needed to discuss something urgent. He doesn't know-" A pause. "He doesn't know anything."
Isadora stared at the screen. The call button glowed green, patient and terrible.
"Maybe this isn't the right way." Jordi's thumb traced circles against her collarbone, a nervous habit she'd forgotten he had. "Maybe I should go to him first. Explain. Prepare him for-"
"For what?" She didn't look up. "How do you prepare someone for this?"
The silence stretched. She could feel him searching for an answer, finding nothing. They'd spent the last hour in a strange limbo-eating food she didn't taste, dressing in clothes that fit perfectly because apparently he'd kept her sizes on file, or maybe he'd bought new ones, she couldn't bring herself to ask. Learning the basic facts of her absence like students cramming for an exam she was destined to fail.
Hector. Twenty-three. VP of Strategic Development at Vaughan Holdings, which meant he'd been fast-tracked through an MBA and straight into the family business. Single, according to Jordi's careful recitation, though there'd been a "situation" with a colleague last year that Jordi clearly didn't want to discuss.
Blossom and Benjamin. Twenty. Fraternal twins. Blossom at NYU studying art history, though Jordi's mouth had tightened when he said it, suggesting the studying was theoretical at best. Benjamin at Oxford, something about economics and a "phase" involving polo and a minor scandal with a minor royal that Jordi had handled with lawyers and money.
They were outlines. Sketches of people who shared her DNA and nothing else.
"Call him," she said.
"Issy-"
"He's my son." Her voice was softer, laced with desperation. "Jordi, please. I need to see him. Even if he hates me, I just need to see what he's become."
His hand tightened on her shoulder, then released. She heard him move, felt the sofa cushion shift as he sat beside her, close enough that their thighs touched. He reached past her, his finger hovering over the green button.
"Whatever happens," he said, "remember that he doesn't know. That he can't know. Not until-"
"Not until what? Until you decide he's ready? Until I've passed some test?" She turned to look at him, saw the fear and hope warring in his expression, the desperate need to control an uncontrollable situation. "He's my son. I don't need your permission to speak to my son."
The words came out harsher than she intended. She saw him flinch, saw something shutter behind his eyes, and hated herself for it. But she didn't apologize. Couldn't. Not when her heart was hammering against her ribs like it wanted out, not when her hands were sweating against the tablet's cool surface.
Jordi pressed the button.
The connection took forever. Ringing tones that sounded like they came from another century, another world. Isadora counted them-one, two, three-her breath shallow, her vision narrowing to the small rectangle of screen where her son's face would appear.
He answered on the fifth ring.
And he was beautiful.
She'd prepared herself for change. For the passage of time, the hardening of boy into man. But nothing could have prepared her for this-this stranger with her husband's jaw and her own eyes, looking at her with polite impatience that shifted, in the space of a heartbeat, to confusion.
"Father?" Hector's voice was deeper than she remembered. Polished, almost, in a way that suggested expensive education and careful cultivation. "What's going on? I'm in the middle of-"
He stopped. His eyes-her eyes, she could see it now, the exact shade of gray-green that she'd inherited from her mother-found her face on the screen. Moved across her features with methodical precision. Returned to her eyes.
And filled with hatred.
"Who is this?" The polish cracked, revealing something raw and furious underneath. "What the hell is this, Father? Some kind of joke?"
"Hector, listen-" Jordi leaned forward, his hand reaching for the tablet, but Isadora held it away. She needed to see. Needed to be seen.
"I'm not a joke," she said. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears, too high, too desperate. "Hector, I'm-"
"Don't." The word was a whip crack. Hector's face filled the screen as he leaned closer to his own camera, his expression contorted with something that looked almost like pain beneath the rage. "Don't you dare say it. Don't you dare pretend to be-"
"She's not pretending." Jordi's voice was iron now, the voice he used in boardrooms and hostile takeovers. "Hector, I need you to calm down and listen-"
"Calm down?" The laugh that followed was worse than Jordi's had been in the bathroom-sharper, more broken, the sound of a young man who'd learned young that emotion was weakness and was failing that lesson in real time. "You bring some-some imposter into your home, put her on a video call with me, and you want me to calm down?"
Imposter.
The word hit Isadora like a physical blow. She felt Jordi tense beside her, felt his hand close around her wrist with warning pressure, but she couldn't look away from the screen. From her son's face, twisted with grief she'd caused and couldn't heal.
"She's wearing Mother's bathrobe." Hector's voice had dropped to something almost conversational, which was somehow worse than the shouting. "Did you plan that, Father? Did you think that detail would convince me? That seeing some stranger in her clothes, in her-" He stopped, his jaw working. "Fifteen years. Fifteen years, and this is how you decide to move on? With some cheap replica?"
"She's not-"
"I don't care what she is." Hector's eyes found hers again, and she saw it then-the grief beneath the rage, the little boy who'd lost his mother and never learned how to mourn. "I don't care what you're paying her. What you've promised her. Get her out of my father's house, or I will make you regret ever taking this job."
The screen went black.
Isadora sat frozen, the tablet heavy in her lap, her son's hatred echoing in the sudden silence. She felt Jordi take the device from her unresisting hands, felt him set it aside, felt his arms come around her with desperate gentleness.
But she couldn't respond. Couldn't move.
My son, she thought. My baby.
Who thought she was a monster.
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8.0
Elena never planned on marrying a stranger, especially not someone engaged to her sister. But when her sister disappears days before the wedding, Elena is forced into an arrangement she never agreed to, with a man she knew nothing about.
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.