The Mad Heiress's Dangerous Mercenary Lover
I spent ten years locked in an asylum, heavily sedated, until my wealthy family dragged me back to their Hamptons estate. I pretended to be a brain-damaged lunatic to survive.
They didn't bring me back out of love. The Holden family was bleeding money, and they desperately needed me dead to inherit my massive trust fund shares.
My step-cousin Cristian was the mastermind behind the purge. First, he tried to quietly murder our billionaire grandfather with a mutated toxic orchid. Then, he ordered a guard to drop a deadly Gaboon viper into my bedroom in the dead of night. My father was a spineless coward, my mother was drugged into a stupor by the family doctor, and my brother was a crippled addict. They all stood by as I was thrown into the freezing mud, treated like garbage.
"She is a disgrace to this family! Get her back to the asylum immediately!"
My uncle roared, completely unaware that my brain was forged in a decade of clandestine warfare. But the strangest part wasn't my hidden combat skills. It was that my blood relatives could suddenly hear my cold, tactical inner thoughts.
Through my silent, telepathic broadcasts, I exposed Cristian's poison to my grandfather, woke my mother from her chemical haze, and turned my paralyzed brother into a ruthless, blood-soaked protector. Still playing the shivering, crazy girl, I smiled in the dark. The real war had just begun.
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Chapter 2
The heavy oak double doors of the Holden estate flew open.
Cold wind and rain whipped into the grand hall, making the massive crystal chandelier sway. Hale stepped inside, his boots tracking mud onto the priceless Persian rug. He held Cilla by the back of her soaked hospital gown, dragging her like a rag doll.
The shouting in the hall stopped instantly.
Gideon Holden stood by the marble fireplace, his face red with rage. His wife, Meredith, stood beside him, holding a champagne flute. They both stared at the dripping wet mess that had just invaded their pristine territory.
Hale walked to the center of the hall and let go. Cilla crumpled to the floor. She collapsed into a shivering ball, tucking her knees to her chest and burying her face in her arms.
Gideon took a step back, his lip curling in disgust. "What the hell is this? Why is that thing in the main house?"
Meredith pinched her nose between two fingers. "The smell. Reginald, call security. She belongs in a facility, not on my rug."
Cilla shook harder, her shoulders heaving with silent sobs. But behind her arms, her eyes were open. Sharp. Calculating.
Gideon's suit cuff is frayed. He's cash poor again. And Meredith's necklace is last season's Cartier. The second branch is bleeding cash. They're desperate.
How do I know that? a small, detached part of her wondered. Ten years of reading old fashion magazines in the sanitarium's library. The nurses thought I was just drooling on the pages. They never noticed my eyes moving.
Hale stood a few feet away. He heard the voice in his head as clear as a bell. It was a cold, analytical broadcast, completely at odds with the sobbing mess on the floor. His eyes narrowed slightly.
Under New York trust law, the voice continued, as long as I'm breathing, my fifteen percent is untouchable. You vultures can't get a single cent.
Hale's breath hitched. He stared at the shivering girl on the floor, a sense of profound wrongness washing over him. It was as if two different signals were broadcasting from the same source. He had to fight the urge to check her for a hidden earpiece or signs of advanced dissociative identity disorder.
Gideon stomped forward, pointing a shaking finger at Cilla. "She's a disgrace! A stain on the Holden name! Send her back to Oakridge tonight!"
Cilla threw her head back and let out a piercing scream. It echoed off the high ceilings. Before anyone could react, she scrambled to her feet and lunged at Gideon.
She didn't punch him. She just threw her filthy, mud-caked body directly at him.
A sharp, undignified cry escaped Gideon's lips. He stumbled backward, tripping over his own feet, and crashed into the antique sofa. His arm hit the coffee table, sending a silver tray flying. Hot coffee splashed all over his custom shirt.
Chaos erupted. Meredith shrieked, dropping her champagne flute. The crystal shattered on the marble.
Cilla scurried back into her corner. She pressed her hands over her ears, rocking back and forth, staring blankly at the wall. But the corner of her mouth twitched. Just a fraction of an inch.
That's right, you old bastard. That's just the appetizer.
Hale watched her. A flicker of something akin to amusement registered deep in his cold eyes. He subtly adjusted his collar, a barely perceptible motion to mask the slight upward twitch of his lips.
The butler, Reginald, rushed in with two security guards. "Sir, ma'am, please step back!"
Hale pulled a clipboard from inside his coat. He walked over to the sputtering, coffee-soaked Gideon and held it out.
"Sign here," Hale said, his voice flat. "Delivery complete."
Gideon snatched the pen and scribbled his name. "Get out! All of you!"
Hale didn't argue. He turned on his heel and headed for the front doors.
Just as his foot crossed the threshold, a sound stopped him cold.
Thwack.
A heavy cane striking the marble floor. The sound rang out from the top of the curved staircase, silencing the entire room in an instant.
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7.2
Blaire woke up in a Manhattan penthouse, her body covered in bruises and her innocence stolen.
Before she could process the terror, her adoptive sister Danita burst in, acting heartbroken and accusing Blaire of shamelessly seducing the powerful Kamryn Lane. Kamryn threw a one-million-dollar check at Blaire's bleeding face, calling her a calculating gold digger.
That night, Blaire overheard a conversation in the family study that shattered her entire reality.
"Once she gives birth to the Lane family's seed, we'll stage an accident, drain her blood, and transplant her healthy heart into your chest."
Her adoptive mother and Danita were celebrating the success of their trap. She wasn't an adopted daughter; she was a living organ bank and a disposable surrogate. Even her adoptive brother, Calhoun, knew everything, trapping her in the dark hallways with a sick, possessive obsession to ensure she never escaped.
The horrific truth suffocated her. The family that had taken her in had raised her like livestock for slaughter. How could they smile at her every day while planning to carve out her heart?
Terrified but burning with a desperate will to survive, Blaire swallowed a Plan B pill to ruin their surrogate plot and fled the estate. To get the money and power she needed to crush her adoptive family, she pulled out Kamryn Lane's business card. This time, she would make a deal with the devil.
9.7
Emaline Finley was drowning in massive debt to keep her dying father alive, even enduring a humiliating blind date with an arrogant man just to find a financial lifeline.
But the fatal blow came from her former best friend, Kitty. Kitty, who was already engaged to Emaline's ex-boyfriend, deliberately told Emaline's father that his expensive treatments were bleeding his daughter dry.
Out of extreme guilt, her father threw away his life-saving medication and checked himself out of the hospital to die at home. When Emaline found him, he was coughing up pools of bright red blood, his lungs rapidly collapsing. As the paramedics rushed him away, Kitty called to gloat, mocking Emaline's poverty and telling her to go watch her father die.
Emaline was completely shattered, suffocating under the sheer injustice of it all. She had been betrayed, stripped of her dignity, and was now forced to watch her only parent slip away because of a cruel, spiteful lie.
Just as her world went dark, a wildly wealthy stranger stepped in. Cullen Preston, the mysterious man who had witnessed her humiliating date, paid the astronomical medical bills and brought in the city's top surgeon to pull her father back from death. But his salvation wasn't charity.
"Consider it a dowry."
He bought her father's life, and in exchange, he demanded Emaline as his wife.
9.3
Elliana sat on the cold marble floor, staring at the two pink lines on the pregnancy test. Overjoyed, she went to her husband Garrett’s study to surprise him.
But the room was empty. On his iPad, she accidentally opened a muted security video from the night before. As a graphic novelist trained in facial anatomy, she easily read Garrett’s lips as he spoke to their housekeeper.
"Increase the hallucinogens and the birth control. Let her become a complete lunatic."
The truth shattered her reality. Her three years of inexplicable exhaustion and mental collapses were orchestrated to keep her away from her ex-fiancé, who was now married to Garrett’s sister, Cristina. The nightmare worsened during a horrific highway crash. As their SUV flipped and caught fire, Garrett ruthlessly abandoned a pregnant Elliana in the crushed backseat. He dragged Cristina to safety, leaving Elliana to burn. She survived, but her right hand—her drawing hand—was permanently destroyed.
Lying in the hospital with her career ruined and her intellectual property stolen by the husband who forged her signature while she was drugged, a freezing void of hatred consumed her. She was nothing but a sedated decoy to hide Garrett's twisted, incestuous obsession with his own sister.
When Garrett knelt by her hospital bed with fake tears, Elliana didn't scream or expose him. Instead, she forced a pathetic, dependent smile, playing the perfect broken wife. She was going back to his penthouse to steal his encrypted files, ready to feed him to Manhattan's most cutthroat divorce lawyer and watch his empire burn.
7.4
Alaya woke up in the sterile hospital room to a devastating reality: her six-month-old baby was gone, lost in a horrific car crash.
But as the memories crashed into her, she realized she had been reborn. She was back three years before her ultimate death, back to the moment she remembered lying bleeding on the asphalt while her husband, Hardy, shielded his mistress from the freezing rain.
When Hardy finally showed up at the ward, he coldly dismissed the crash as a mere accident and immediately left to comfort his young lover. To make matters worse, Alaya secretly checked her medical files and found a terrifying detail: someone had intentionally slipped beta-blockers into her system, a lethal drug for her transplanted heart. And Hardy didn't care about her dead baby or her irreversible infertility. He only coldly confirmed with the doctor that her heart was still viable.
A horrifying suspicion made Alaya's blood run cold. Why was her husband so obsessed with protecting her transplanted heart while treating her like garbage? And why was his perfectly healthy mistress secretly racking up massive bills at an advanced cardiac hospital?
Realizing she was nothing but a vessel in a twisted, deadly game, Alaya didn't shed another tear.
She packed her belongings, left her flawless diamond wedding ring on the cold marble table, and vanished from their penthouse.
When Hardy finally tracked her down, she threw a thick stack of documents onto the table.
"Sign the divorce papers," she said, her eyes completely dead.
9.7
Gemma expected the tearing agony of the bullet wound that had just ended her life.
Instead, her trembling fingers met the cool, smooth friction of heavy silk.
She stared into the mirror. Her face was flawless, completely devoid of the jagged scar that had marred her cheek for the last five years.
It was exactly ten years ago. The day of her engagement party to the ruthless billionaire, Brion Hubbard.
In her past life, her "best friend" Katelyn convinced her to run away with a scheming scumbag.
Katelyn claimed Brion was a heartless tyrant who would ruin her. Gemma had foolishly believed those fake tears.
That choice led to her family's bankruptcy, her brutal disfigurement, and ultimately, a fatal bomb explosion.
The only person who tried to save her was Brion, his blood-soaked body shielding hers from the blast.
She even realized too late that the strawberry cream cakes she always made for him were full of dairy.
He wasn't leaving to cheat on her. He was locking himself in a medical bay, fighting fatal allergic shock, just to accept a tiny scrap of her affection.
Gemma had been so incredibly blind. Why did she trust the venomous snakes who destroyed her, while hating the man who died for her?
Hearing Katelyn frantically knocking on the dressing room door, urging her to run away again, a towering hatred surged through Gemma's veins.
This time, she wasn't going to run.
She was going to expose the traitors, take back her family's wealth, and claim the tyrant for herself.
8.0
After years of a freezing, loveless marriage, my billionaire husband Israel finally threw me out to make room for his new lover, Ayla.
Before I even packed my bags, he ordered a crew to shred the Dogwood tree in our backyard and pour thick concrete into the crater, claiming it was a symbol of my infidelity.
He didn't know that buried beneath those roots was the urn containing the ashes of our unborn baby.
Stripped of everything, I tried to rebuild my shattered life by securing a supporting role in an indie film.
But Israel bought the entire production studio just to cast Ayla as the lead, demanding I act as her pathetic stepping stone.
When I refused, he cornered me on set with a sickening audio recording.
"We want one million dollars. This will ruin Karen forever."
It was my own parents. They had forged my medical records, planning to sell a story to the tabloids that I was a violent, delusional schizophrenic.
Israel smiled coldly, threatening to lock me in a padded room on an involuntary psychiatric hold unless I signed an unpaid contract to serve Ayla unconditionally.
My own flesh and blood had sold me out to a ruthless monster for cash.
Staring at the extortion contract, the last shred of desperation and love in my chest burned away into cold, gray ash.
To survive a monster, you have to become one.
I picked up his pen, violently signed my name, and prepared to rip his precious Ayla to shreds on camera.