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 8
She found the photographs in a drawer.
Not hidden, exactly, but buried beneath silk scarves and jewelry boxes in the dresser she'd once shared with Jordi. Evidence of the life she'd missed, preserved in glossy prints and digital frames that showed dates she couldn't process.
Hector at thirteen, awkward and adolescent, receiving some kind of academic award. At sixteen, behind the wheel of a car that cost more than their first apartment. At twenty, in a tuxedo that didn't fit quite right, standing beside a woman with dark hair and a calculating smile.
"His date to the Met Gala," Jordi said from the doorway. She hadn't heard him enter, too absorbed in the evidence of her absence. "Last year. The relationship didn't last."
"Who is she?"
"Nobody important." He crossed to her, his hand finding her shoulder with careful neutrality. "A socialite. Someone the board thought would be-appropriate."
"Appropriate." Isadora turned the frame, studied her son's face. He looked happy, she realized. Or something like happy. The expression of a young man who'd learned to perform contentment because he'd forgotten what the real thing felt like. "And the twins? Where are their pictures?"
Jordi's hand tightened. Just for a moment. Then released.
"Benjamin keeps his distance. Oxford, as I said. He visits for holidays, sometimes. When he needs-" A pause. "When he needs something."
"And Blossom?"
The silence stretched. Isadora turned, found Jordi's expression carefully blank, and felt her stomach drop. She looked back at the photos, her eyes scanning the edges of the frames. There was one picture of Blossom, half-hidden behind Hector's graduation portrait. The girl in the photo was stunning, but her eyes were glassy, her smile brittle, and she was painfully thin.
"Jordi," Isadora said, picking up the frame, her thumb brushing the glass over her daughter's hollow cheek. "What happened to my daughter? She looks... she looks lost."
"Nothing happened." He said it too quickly, stepping forward to gently pry the frame from her hands. "She's just... finding her way. She's in the city, pursuing her-her art. She has an apartment, an allowance, everything she needs."
"Everything she needs." Isadora repeated the words, hearing the hollowness beneath them. "Or everything you think she should need? Why is her photo hidden, Jordi? Why does she look like she hasn't slept in a week?"
"Issy-"
"Show me." She stood, her heart hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs. "I want to see her. Talk to her. I want to-"
"She won't answer." The admission came quietly, almost gently. "I've tried. Hundreds of times. She takes my calls when she wants money, hangs up when I ask about her life. The last time we spoke... she told me I was dead to her. That I'd been dead since you-since you left."
Isadora felt the words like a physical blow. She reached for the dresser, found its edge, held on. "Why?"
"Because I failed her." Jordi's voice was flat, stripped of the emotion he'd shown earlier, replaced by a rigid defensive posture he must have honed over years of board meetings and bitter arguments. "Because I was so busy searching for you that I missed... the warning signs. She had a difficult adolescence. She rebelled."
"Rebelled?" Isadora's voice rose. "That's not just rebellion in her eyes, Jordi. Tell me the truth."
He looked away, his jaw clenching so hard she thought his teeth might crack. "She had a bad phase. A few years ago. She made some poor choices with the wrong crowd."
Isadora closed her eyes, trying to breathe, reading between the lines of his corporate, sanitized explanation. Her daughter, her baby girl, alone in a world that had taken her mother and left her with a ghost for a father. "And now?" she pressed, her voice trembling.
"Now she keeps her distance," Jordi moved closer, his hand finding hers where it gripped the dresser. "I have people who watch. Discreetly. They report when she-when there's reason to be concerned."
"You have her spied on."
"I have her protected." The defensiveness was automatic, familiar. The Jordi she'd always known, the one who'd built walls first and asked questions later. "I couldn't-can't-lose another child, Issy. I can't survive that."
She opened her eyes. Looked at him-at the man who'd kept her clothes and her painting and her memory, who'd searched for her through madness and despair, who'd failed their children in ways he couldn't acknowledge and couldn't forgive.
"We need to fix this," she said. "All of it. Hector's anger, Blossom's-" She stopped, couldn't say the word. "Benjamin's distance. We need to find a way to be family again, even if-" She squeezed his hand. "Even if they never believe who I am. Even if the DNA tests prove nothing, change nothing. We need to try."
Jordi nodded, his expression shifting, hope and fear warring for dominance.
"There's a gala," he said. "Next week. Vaughan Foundation fundraiser. Hector will be there, representing the company. Blossom usually attends-the social aspect, the photographers, she enjoys that." He paused, his thumb tracing circles against her palm. "If you were there. If they saw you, spoke to you, in a setting where-"
"Where I could be impressive?" Isadora laughed, the sound brittle. "Where I could prove my value before they decide whether to accept me?"
"Where you could be seen." He corrected gently. "Where the world could see what I've seen. What I know." He brought her hand to his lips, pressed a kiss to her knuckles. "Where you could begin to claim your life back."
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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.