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 5
Jordi found her on the balcony.
She'd dressed herself-clothes from a closet that still held her sizes, styles that had apparently come back into fashion or never left, she couldn't tell which-and made her way through the apartment she didn't recognize to the outdoor space that overlooked Central Park.
It was autumn. The trees were burning with color, orange and red and gold, and the air had the crisp edge that meant winter was coming. People moved through the park like ants, tiny and purposeful, living lives that had continued uninterrupted while she was-
Elsewhere.
"Issy."
She didn't turn. She heard him approach, felt him stop a few feet behind her, close enough to touch but not touching. Giving her space she hadn't asked for and didn't want.
"You drugged me." It wasn't a question. Her voice was low and shaking with a fury that surprised them both. "You held me, you promised you'd never leave me, and then you drugged me like an animal."
"Dr. Finch told you."
"Yes."
"The results. The-"
"Yes, Jordi. I know what he found." She turned then, saw him flinch at whatever was in her expression. "I know that I'm biologically impossible. That I should be forty-three and I'm not. That your doctor can't explain it and neither can I."
His face was carefully blank, the mask he'd worn in the bathroom before he recognized her. But his hands gave him away-clenching and unclenching at his sides, the fingers that had once played piano concertos for her now scarred and rough in ways she didn't understand.
"What do you remember?" he asked. "Exactly. Precisely. Don't-don't interpret, just tell me what you know."
"The flight." She turned back to the park, unable to look at him and lie, unable to tell the truth when she didn't know what it was. "Turbulence. The captain's voice, something about losing altitude. Then-pressure. The kind of pressure that makes your ears bleed. And cold. So cold I couldn't think."
She wrapped her arms around herself, felt the autumn wind cut through the thin sweater she'd found.
"Then I was here. In your bathroom. In water that smelled like eucalyptus and cost more than most people's rent." She laughed, harsh and brief. "I thought I was dead. I thought this was some kind of-of afterlife. A very specific, very expensive hell designed just for me."
"You're not dead."
"No." She looked at him again, at the man who'd been her husband and was now something else, something she was only beginning to understand. "I'm just lost. Fifteen years lost. And I don't know how to find my way back."
He moved then, closing the distance between them with two long strides. His hands found her shoulders, his grip firm but not painful, anchoring her in place.
"Then I'll find it for you." His voice was low, intense, the voice of a man who'd built empires and destroyed competitors and never learned how to accept defeat. "I'll give you everything you need. Time. Space. Information. Whatever it takes to-"
"And the children?" She watched his expression shutter, saw the mask slip back into place. "What about Hector, who thinks I'm some kind of prostitute you've hired to replace his mother? What about Blossom and Benjamin, who don't even know I exist?"
"I'll handle them."
"How?" She stepped back, forcing his hands to fall. "By drugging them, too? By hiring doctors to prove I'm real?"
The words hit home. She saw him flinch, saw something dark move behind his eyes.
"I shouldn't have-" He stopped, ran a hand through his hair, the gesture so familiar it hurt. "I panicked. You were collapsing, I couldn't-I didn't know how to help, and I thought if I could just get proof, if I could show you, show everyone-"
"That I'm not a threat." She finished for him. "That I'm not some spy sent to steal your secrets. That I'm exactly what I claim to be, even though what I claim is impossible."
"Yes."
They stood in silence, the autumn wind moving between them, the city spreading out below like a promise neither of them knew how to keep.
"I want to go home," she said finally. "Not here. Not this-this glass box you live in now. I want to go to the house. The real house. Where the children grew up, where our life-" She stopped, swallowed hard. "Where our life happened."
"The Hamptons." He said it like a prayer. "The estate. Yes. Of course. I'll have it prepared. I'll-"
"Now." She held his gaze, saw the resistance form and dissolve in the same breath. "I want to go now, Jordi. Before I lose my nerve. Before I convince myself that this is all a dream and I'm actually dead at the bottom of the Pacific."
He looked at her for a long moment, his expression unreadable. Then he reached into his pocket, pulled out a phone, and made a call she couldn't hear.
"Mr. Pim," he said, his eyes locked on hers, his tone stripped of the raw desperation he'd shown her, replaced by the chilling efficiency of a man who commanded empires. "Mrs. Vaughan is coming home. The west wing. Have it ready in an hour. And Pim..." A slight pause, a heartbeat where the CEO vanished and the husband returned. "The painting above the master fireplace. Make sure it's been cleaned and the lighting is perfect."
He ended the call. Held out his hand.
"Helicopter's on the roof," he said. "Twenty minutes to the estate. If you're sure-"
"I'm sure." She took his hand, felt the calluses and the scars and the warmth that was still, impossibly, still there beneath everything else. "I'm not sure of anything else. But I need to see our home. I need to remember what we were, before I can understand what we've become."
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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.