The Dead Wife's Spectacular Secret Return
Five years ago, I faked my death in a yacht explosion just to escape my ruthless, controlling husband, Gerald Sinclair. Now, I have returned to Boston as the new Dean of Medicine at St. Jude Hospital.
My only goal was to secretly check on my seven-year-old daughter, Cassidy. But what I saw shattered my heart. She was locked inside a heavily guarded VIP suite like a prisoner, so psychologically broken that she was standing on a windowsill, ready to jump.
Gerald's armed security team treated the hospital like a military base, forcing her to swallow heavy psychiatric pills. When she managed to escape through the air ducts and collapsed into my arms in the courtyard, her small, feverish body trembled violently.
"No! I don't want to go back to the white room!"
She begged me, crying in terror. But because my identity was a secret, I could only watch helplessly as Gerald's security chief tore my own child from my embrace and locked her back in the cage.
I didn't understand why Gerald would rather destroy our daughter's mind than let us go. Was his twisted obsession and need for control worth driving his own flesh and blood to the brink of death?
Now, my cover is blown. Gerald just received the message that I am alive, and he is flying back in a blind rage, freezing my accounts and locking down the entire city to trap me.
But he forgot one thing. I am no longer the helpless wife he backed into a corner. This time, I am taking my daughter back.
Chapters
Share
Chapter 5
Cassidy dragged her body through the dark, narrow HVAC duct. The metal was freezing. Dust coated her throat, making her want to cough, but she bit her hand to keep quiet.
The sharp edges of the metal joints scraped against her bare knees. Warm blood trickled down her legs, but she didn't stop moving.
She looked down through a slotted vent. Below her, men in black suits were running in circles. Clinton's voice boomed from their radios.
Cassidy kept crawling. She found a maintenance hatch that looked loose. She pushed her thin shoulder against the metal grate. It popped open with a dull thud.
She slipped through the hole and fell into a dark supply closet.
Her ankle twisted hard when she hit the floor. A sharp pain shot up her leg. Tears filled her eyes. She gasped, quickly covering her mouth with both hands. She dragged herself behind a row of mop buckets.
Footsteps pounded outside the door. The handle turned. Two guards shined flashlights into the closet. The bright beam swept over the buckets, missing her by inches.
"Clear," one of them grunted. They slammed the door shut.
Cassidy let out a shaky breath. She waited until the footsteps faded. She pushed herself up, putting her weight on her good leg. She limped out of the closet.
She avoided the main hallways. She knew how to hide from cameras. She had learned it living in the Sinclair mansion.
At the end of a long corridor, she saw a glass door leading to an outdoor courtyard. The afternoon sun poured through the glass. It looked warm.
Cassidy pushed the heavy door open. The cold autumn wind hit her face. It smelled like dead leaves. Her head was spinning from the fever.
The courtyard was completely empty. The lockdown had cleared everyone out. Only a stone fountain bubbled in the center.
Cassidy limped toward the fountain to hide behind the statue. Her vision started to blur. Her body shook violently.
Then, she heard it. The steady, calm click of high heels on the stone path.
Cassidy peeked around the statue. A woman in a beige trench coat was walking toward her, looking down at a cell phone.
Panic seized Cassidy. She thought it was someone coming to lock her back in the white room. She tried to step backward, but her foot slipped on a patch of wet moss.
She fell forward.
She didn't hit the hard stone. She crashed into something soft.
Catherine dropped her phone the second she saw the child falling. She dropped to her knees and caught the girl against her chest.
The impact knocked them both onto the damp grass. Mud smeared across Catherine's coat. Her phone tumbled harmlessly onto a soft patch of damp moss nearby.
Cassidy screamed. She pushed her small hands against Catherine's chest, fighting like a trapped animal.
Catherine looked down. She saw the pale face, the terrified eyes, the bleeding knees.
Her heart stopped. The breath left her lungs. It was the face from the photograph.
Catherine grabbed Cassidy's arms and pulled her tight against her chest. She wrapped her arms around the small body. Tears exploded from Catherine's eyes, soaking into the shoulder of the hospital gown.
Cassidy froze. The woman was crying.
Then, Cassidy smelled it. A faint, sweet scent of chamomile.
The smell bypassed her panicked brain and hit something deep inside her memory. Her tight muscles suddenly went completely loose.
Cassidy stopped fighting. She slowly lifted her hands and grabbed the lapels of the beige coat. She buried her face in the woman's neck.
Catherine felt the small hands holding onto her. She closed her eyes and buried her face in Cassidy's hair. She let out a broken, quiet sob. She rubbed her hand up and down the girl's back.
Cassidy's hot tears burned Catherine's skin. "I'm so tired," Cassidy whispered into her neck.
The glass doors of the courtyard exploded open.
Clinton burst through the doors, followed by three guards. He saw the two figures on the grass. His hand ripped the pistol from the holster of the guard beside him.
Catherine heard the noise. She snapped her head up.
She shoved Cassidy behind her back, shielding the child with her own body. Catherine glared at Clinton. Her eyes were wild, filled with pure, murderous rage.
You may also like
8.9
I returned to New York for my welcome-home party, expecting a warm embrace from Edwin, my devoted fiancé of twenty years.
Instead, his first words to me were a cold, public warning to stay away from his new girlfriend, Kacy.
He stood in my family's hotel, shielding a girl I had never even met, and painted me as a vicious, jealous bully.
"She is very sensitive, Kaitlyn. Her background is tough. Please, be gentle with her. Don't upset her."
He humiliated me in front of our entire elite circle, allowing them to mock me as the aggressive, discarded ex while he carried her away like a fragile princess.
For twenty years, I had been his loyal shadow, fixing his mistakes and loving him unconditionally.
I couldn't understand how decades of deep devotion could be instantly erased by a few crocodile tears and a manipulative damsel act.
He was absolutely certain I would throw a tantrum, cry, and eventually crawl back to beg for his attention.
But he was wrong.
He didn't know that Everett Rowe, a billionaire tech mogul, had been patiently waiting five years to marry me.
He also didn't know that during my three years abroad, I wasn't just studying art—I became "K.B.", the ruthless Wall Street predator who could swallow his family's empire whole.
I calmly pulled out my phone, ignored the mocking whispers around me, and typed a single message to Everett.
"Yes. I'll marry you."
8.2
I went to a private clinic for a routine physical, only to find out I was pregnant.
It was impossible. I took my birth control every single day. But when the doctor tested my pills, they turned out to be high-purity vitamin placebos. My billionaire husband, Denton, had been systematically replacing my medication.
Yet, on our anniversary, he brought my sister Beverly home, demanding a divorce so he could marry her. When I refused to sign a settlement that left me with nothing, he froze my accounts and blacklisted me across New York.
My own father disowned me. When an old friend offered me a job just so I could afford prenatal care, Denton launched a ruthless financial attack to bankrupt his firm.
Then, Beverly got into a car crash. Denton's bodyguards dragged me off the street and forced me into a hospital trauma room. Beverly was hemorrhaging, and I was the only blood match.
I cried and begged Denton to stop, desperately trying to protect my fragile pregnancy without exposing my baby to the monster who controlled my life.
"Please, my body can't handle this. Don't do this to me!"
But he just looked at me with pure disgust and ordered his men to strap me to the chair, forcing the needle into my vein while threatening to kill me if his mistress died.
As I dragged my bleeding, cramping body out of the hospital into the freezing snow, my last shred of hope died.
I touched my stomach and made a vow: I would disappear, and I would make them all pay.
9.5
Blaire's mother gave her a ruthless ultimatum: find a husband today, or never call her mother again.
Desperate to escape the suffocating control and disastrous blind dates, Blaire agreed to a fake marriage with a stranger she met through an old woman.
She thought she was marrying a dirt-poor salesman drowning in mortgage debt.
They lived in a rundown Queens apartment and split the living expenses fifty-fifty.
He drove a sputtering Toyota Camry, established extreme territorial rules, and treated her like a gold-digging biohazard.
When she accidentally tripped and spilled hot soup on him, he didn't help her up, instead accusing her of using pathetic tricks to seduce him.
Her own mother even crashed their apartment, ruthlessly mocking his pathetic financial state and calling him a total loser.
Blaire endured his coldness and extreme germaphobia, genuinely pitying him for his stressful, low-paying job.
She refunded his money and defended his dignity, refusing to take advantage of a struggling man.
But she couldn't understand why this supposedly broke guy possessed such a lethal, commanding aura, or why an incredibly expensive cashmere blanket mysteriously appeared on her when she was freezing on the couch.
Until her brother called with a shocking warning.
"Blaire, the name on your marriage certificate belongs to the notoriously secretive billionaire CEO of New York's top financial syndicate!"
Blaire laughed out loud, completely unaware that behind the bedroom door, her "broke" husband was frantically ordering his PR team to bury his true identity.
7.1
I was the top commander of a black-ops military program. After slaughtering my way through a hellish mission, I reached the extraction helicopter, trusting my second-in-command to watch my back.
But the moment our hands locked, he didn't pull me up. Instead, he plunged a syringe of lethal neurotoxin directly into my neck.
He aimed his gun at my chest, coldly stating that I was too dangerous to live. My lungs stopped, and I died in a pool of my own blood. But the endless blackness suddenly shattered. My consciousness violently forced its way into a new, broken shell. I woke up in a freezing alley, soaked in muddy rain.
This body belonged to seventeen-year-old Eliza Wyatt. A massive wave of foreign memories crashed into my brain. Her own younger sister had just stood at the top of the stairs with a mocking smile, watching street thugs beat Eliza to death.
"Take good care of the Wyatt family's eldest daughter. Tonight is the night she finally disappears."
The endless humiliation, the cold stares of her family, and the brutal betrayal by her own blood flashed before my eyes. Why was this fragile girl treated like garbage and pushed to her death by the very people who should have protected her?
I looked down at my pale, trembling hands. The top commander was dead, but in this bleeding shell, Eliza Wyatt was very much alive. I picked up a switchblade from the bloody puddle and stood up in the storm. It was time to hunt.
7.0
Erika was a disgraced ex-wife, struggling to survive in a freezing Brooklyn slum to raise her five-year-old son.
But her billionaire ex-husband, Doyle Morgan, wasn't done destroying her. He orchestrated a cruel trap, forcing her to deliver a custom sapphire brooch to his new mistress, just to watch her get humiliated and severely burned by scalding coffee.
When Erika fought back and refused to beg, Doyle's punishment was swift. He demoted her to scrubbing executive toilets with raw, bleeding hands. Starved, exhausted, and pushed to the absolute brink of organ failure, she finally collapsed lifelessly in front of him in Central Park.
For five years, she had endured his relentless torment and the world's mockery just to keep her child safe. Doyle despised her, convinced her son was the filthy proof of her cheating with another man.
He didn't know the boy was actually the child of his deceased older brother, conceived in a dark, drugged hotel room. Why couldn't he just leave them alone to suffer in peace?
But when Erika woke up in the VIP hospital ward, the nightmare took a terrifying turn. Doyle pinned her weak wrists to the mattress, his eyes burning with a dark, possessive obsession. He had figured out the truth about the boy's bloodline.
"He's a Morgan. He has my family's blood in his veins, and I will not allow my nephew to be raised in a slum. If you can't care for him, I will. From this moment on, you and that boy belong to me. And you are never leaving my sight again."
8.7
I was dying in a cold hospital bed, listening to the monitor count down my final seconds.
As a ghost, I watched my own funeral. My popular friends and wealthy family soon moved on, but one person stayed.
Cas Riley. The invisible outcast from the back of my history class.
He brought a white rose to my grave every single day, withering away until he collapsed on the frozen ground, dying of a broken heart for a girl who barely knew his name.
Opening my eyes again, the hospital smell was gone. I was reborn back in my high school classroom.
I immediately tracked him down, only to witness the brutal hell he was trapped in.
He was humiliated by a cruel foreman for pennies, violently slapped by his uncle over his sick mother's medical money, and forced into bloody street fights.
He was starving, covered in bruises, and completely alone.
When I tried to buy him medicine and step into his life to protect him, he violently pushed me away in the pouring rain.
"Stay out of my life! To protect you, I have to fight, and when I fight, I lose everything!"
He wasn't rejecting me out of hate. He was terrified that his dark, violent reality would drag me down with him.
Standing soaked in the rain, my resolve hardened like steel.
Gentle kindness wasn't going to save him from this hell.
To protect the boy who died for me, I had to become ruthless enough to tear down his entire rotten world and build him a new one.