The Mad Wife's Spectacular Comeback
I was accused of pushing my sister down the stairs, facing a highly publicized second-degree murder charge.
My billionaire husband, Lachlan, insisted on a private psychiatric evaluation. I thought he was trying to build a medical defense to save me.
But through a cracked door, I overheard the psychiatrist talking to Lachlan's crisis PR team. Lachlan had bribed the doctor to officially diagnose me with severe paranoid schizophrenia.
The plan was flawless. They were going to involuntarily lock me in an asylum and strip me of my voting rights to steal my trust fund. Worse, Lachlan's team leaked my clinic photos to the press, using my "violent mental breakdown" to perfectly cover up his midnight hotel rendezvous with a Hollywood starlet.
I was forced to swallow heavy sedatives while the entire world labeled me a crazy, toxic wife. As the chemical fog dragged me into terrifying nightmares, I realized this family had always used me as their scapegoat, just like my adoptive mother did when I was a child.
They thought the drugs, the public ruin, and the isolation would break me into quiet submission.
But I secretly recorded the doctor's corrupt phone call. I went home, uploaded my million-dollar custom wedding dress to an auction site for exactly one dollar, and prepared to expose the Langley family's deadliest, bloodiest secret.
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Chapter 5
The suffocating scent of spilled perfume hung heavy in the air. Beth stood in the center of the ruined room. The sharp edges of broken glass dug into the soles of her feet, but the stinging pain only sharpened her focus. It proved she was real. It proved she wasn't crazy.
She walked over to the bed and stared down at the vibrating phone.
Lachlan's name flashed aggressively on the screen.
She didn't pick it up. She reached out with one finger, tapped the green accept button, and immediately hit the speaker icon.
She pulled her hand back as if the device might burn her. Her entire body was trembling, fighting the heavy lethargy of the sedatives and the sheer terror of what she was doing. But she locked her knees and stood tall.
"Are you completely out of your mind?!"
Lachlan's voice exploded from the phone's tiny speaker. He wasn't using his polished, media-trained tone. He was roaring, his breath ragged with pure fury.
Beth's hand shook violently as she reached out, gripping the heavy wooden bedpost to keep herself upright. Her knuckles turned a stark, bone-white. She closed her eyes, forcing the panic down into a tight little box in her chest.
When she finally spoke, her voice was shaking, but not with weakness. It shook with a mixture of raw adrenaline and venom.
"But Lachlan," she said, the words tasting like poison. "I must be out of my mind. Isn't that what your PR team is telling the whole world right now? I just got out of the psychiatric clinic, remember? Crazy people do crazy things."
The line went dead silent.
Beth could hear Lachlan's heavy, furious breathing through the speaker. She had used his own weapon against him, and it choked him.
"Take the auction down," Lachlan growled, his voice dropping to a lethal threat. "Take it down right now, Beth. Or I swear to God, I will freeze every credit card in your name, and I will have my lawyers sue you into the ground for defaming Zara."
Beth's eyes snapped open. The fear in her chest solidified into ice.
"You can't freeze my cards, Lachlan," Beth said, her voice dropping the frail act entirely. It was sharp as a razor. "Because I bought that dress using the trust fund my mother left me. It is pre-marital property. You touch my accounts, and the SEC will be crawling up your ass by morning."
She heard a muffled curse from the other end.
"As for defaming your little actress," Beth continued, her tone relentless. "That suit jacket you draped over her shoulders in Beverly Hills? I bought that for you on Savile Row last month. It's a limited edition. It has your initials embroidered in gold thread on the inside left pocket. I have the receipt. Should I post that on Twitter too?"
"Beth-" Lachlan started, his voice suddenly laced with panic.
In the background of the call, Beth could hear the frantic, clicking heels of K. Holloway rushing into Lachlan's room, likely shoving a new damage-control script into his hands.
Lachlan took a deep breath. When he spoke again, he tried to sound magnanimous, like a king offering mercy to a peasant.
"Listen to me," Lachlan said smoothly. "If you cooperate with K. Holloway's team, if you quietly go to the private sanitarium in Switzerland for a few months to 'rest,' I will make sure you are taken care of. You will still be Mrs. Langley."
Beth's stomach physically revolted at the sound of his condescension. She reached into her pocket, her fingers brushing the cold metal of her phone where the voice memo was saved.
"Lachlan," Beth said, her voice trembling so hard she almost choked on the words. She was terrified, but she pushed through it. "Dr. Finch left his office door open today. While he was on the phone with K. Holloway. Discussing my fake diagnosis and the offshore wire transfer."
A horrifying, suffocating silence fell over the line.
"What?" Lachlan breathed, the bottom dropping out of his voice.
"I recorded it," Beth lied about the length, her heart hammering wildly. "I have the audio file. And I am going to email it to TMZ in exactly five minutes if you don't back off."
"Beth, don't you dare-"
Beth reached down and hit the red button. The call disconnected. She immediately blocked his number.
Her legs finally gave out. She collapsed onto the edge of the mattress, gasping for air. The bluff had worked for now, but she had just painted a massive target on her own back. Lachlan wouldn't just send lawyers now; he would send fixers.
She grabbed the television remote from the nightstand and pointed it at the massive flat-screen TV mounted on the wall.
She hit the power button. She needed noise. She needed to know what the outside world was doing.
The screen flared to life, tuned to CNN's breaking news coverage.
The camera was zoomed in on a podium in South Bay. Standing behind the microphones was a man in a sharp navy-blue suit. His jawline was rigid, and his dark eyes stared into the camera lenses with the predatory focus of a hawk.
The chyron at the bottom of the screen read: ARNETT LANGLEY, ILLEGITIMATE SON OF LANGLEY DYNASTY, ANNOUNCES INDEPENDENT RUN FOR GOVERNOR.
Beth stared at the screen. Her heart began to beat a different rhythm.
Arnett Langley. The bastard son. The outcast. The man who hated the Langley family as much as she did.
He was a rogue element. A variable Lachlan couldn't easily control. He existed to provide political friction for Lachlan's corporate expansion, but right now, to Beth, he looked like a weapon.
On the TV, Arnett was delivering a ruthless, eloquent takedown of corporate monopolies controlling state politics. The crowd was roaring.
Beth looked at Arnett's fierce expression. A reckless, suicidal plan crystallized in her mind. The enemy of my enemy is my shield.
"Since I'm going to die anyway," Beth whispered to the empty room, her eyes locked on the screen, "I think I'll just tear your whole empire to shreds."
But as she tried to stand, the room violently tilted. The floor rushed up to meet her. Finch's sedatives finally overwhelmed her exhausted nervous system, dragging her down into darkness.
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7.8
Alexis signed the divorce papers, leaving her with no assets, no alimony, and just the clothes on her back.
To forget her abusive husband Carlos, she got drunk and bought a high-end gigolo for the night with her last 800 dollars.
But the man she slept with wasn't an escort. He was Jarrett Hughes, a ruthless billionaire CEO.
And while she was gone, her ex-husband was busy destroying her entire life.
Carlos framed her with fake photos of her cheating to justify the penniless divorce.
Then came the real nightmare.
Carlos and her own aunt secretly drained her family's corporate accounts, driving her father to jump off a building.
At the hospital, her grieving mother blamed her for the tragedy, violently attacking her in the ER.
To top it off, her cousin Josie—who was secretly sleeping with Carlos—held her father's ashes hostage.
"Crawl on your knees and pick it up, or the ashes go in the river," Josie sneered, throwing cash into the freezing slush.
Stripped of her marriage, her father, and her dignity, Alexis sat bleeding in the snow.
She couldn't understand why the people she loved most had coordinated such a brutal slaughter against her.
But Carlos and Josie made one fatal mistake.
They didn't know the "gigolo" Alexis had accidentally bought was the most powerful man in New York.
Alexis looked at the towering billionaire standing behind her, a vengeful fire burning in her eyes.
"I need you to get my father's ashes back," she said, pulling him into a kiss right in front of her ex-husband. "I don't care what it takes."
7.8
I was Grayson Warren’s "broken doll," a disgraced socialite kept on a short leash to pay off my family’s debts. To the world, I was a fragile liability; to Grayson, I was a pet he could humiliate for sport, forcing me to play the role of a mentally unstable girl while I secretly gathered evidence against his empire.
The cruelty peaked when Grayson forced me to break three years of sobriety in front of his investors, mocking my struggle before making me kneel on a golf course to scrub his shoes. He treated my life like a game, literally betting my sanity against a corporate board seat while he soft-launched a new relationship with a high-profile PR queen.
When the pressure triggered a massive panic attack, Grayson abandoned me in a private clinic just so he wouldn't miss a dinner reservation. Even my own mother turned against me, threatening to leak my psychiatric records and brand me a "violent delusional" if I didn't beg for Grayson’s forgiveness. I was trapped between a man who owned my debt and a mother who valued her estate over my daughter’s life.
I realized then that they would never let me go; they would only break me until there was nothing left. They thought they had erased my soul, but they forgot I was the only witness to the night my true love, Felix, was murdered. I was done being the victim.
I faked a suicide jump off the Queensboro Bridge to go off the grid, then crashed Grayson’s elite gala in a dress that signaled his downfall. Just as Grayson tried to physically crush me one last time, the room went silent. Felix Law, the man the world thought was dead for three years, walked out of the shadows with a federal warrant in his hand.
"Take your hands off her, Warren."
The game didn't just change; it ended. Felix was back from the dead, and this time, we were burning the empire to the ground together.
9.3
They say you can't have it all. I'm about to prove them wrong-or destroy myself trying.
When my struggling mother married billionaire Richard Stone, I thought I was gaining a family. Instead, I found three stepbrothers who became my obsession, my downfall, and my salvation.
Dominic, the eldest, cold and commanding, who kisses me like he's claiming his kingdom and looks at me like I'm the only thing he can't control.
Julian, the charming playboy who hides a vulnerable soul beneath his perfect smile, making me feel like I'm the only woman he's ever truly seen.
Asher, the brooding artist who paints me like I'm his muse and touches me like I'm his masterpiece, seeing parts of my soul I didn't know existed.
They're forbidden. They're dangerous. They're everything I shouldn't want.
But when I discover my father didn't die by suicide that he was murdered by the very man who now calls himself my stepfather, these three powerful men becomes my unlikely allies.
First it was a forbidden attraction, now it's an arrangement that defies every rule.
The rules are simple:
I'll give each of them a chance.
I'll take everything they offer.
And in the end, I'll have to make the hardest decision of my life:
Choose one of them. Choose all of them. Or choose myself.
8.0
Abigayle was the proud heir to the Pena Group, living a perfect life and engaged to Jeffery Sullivan.
But the morning after a charity gala, she woke up drugged in a hotel room, blinded by paparazzi cameras. Her fiancé and her best friend stood at the foot of the bed, throwing a forged pregnancy report at her face to publicly frame her for cheating.
The betrayal was only the beginning of the slaughter. Before she could even clear her name, the Sullivan family ruthlessly bankrupted her family's company overnight. Her father was rushed to the ICU with a heart attack, her brother was run off the road into a coma, and violent repo men raided her penthouse. Just as she was thrown out into the freezing rain, Jeffery's terrifying uncle, Donovan Sullivan—the very mastermind who engineered her family's ruin—stepped in. He offered to cover the life-saving medical bills, but only if she agreed to become his personal plaything.
Abigayle's blood turned to ice. She couldn't understand how the people she trusted most could plot such a vicious, coordinated destruction just to break an engagement. How dared the man who destroyed her entire family stand there playing the savior, trying to buy her body with her own stolen wealth?
Facing a $100,000 hospital deadline and abandoned by everyone she knew, she didn't shed another tear.
"I will never beg him."
Clutching her last diamond bracelet, she hailed a cab straight to the biggest pawnshop in the Diamond District. The Sullivans thought they had buried her, but her counterattack was just beginning.
8.4
Everything in Chris' world changes when he meets Kate.
Chris Cena who is a young billionaire CEO controls one of the most powerful empires built by his late father.
Chris lives under the shadow of his mother, Elisabeth Cena. The ruthless woman who once ruled the empire before handing it to him.
Kate Milmar who is brillant, sensual and emotionally guarded moves confidently among powerful men without ever allowing herself to belong to any of them.
When she publicly challenges a wealthy client, her fearless defiance immediately captures Chris's attention.
Chris offers her a dangerous proposal for her to leave her world and exclusively belong to him.
As their attraction grows slowly, Kate notices strange cracks in the history of the Cena Empire. Chris's father died suddenly years earlier and in the aftermath, Elisabeth took control of the company briefly before passing it to her son.
What once seemed like a normal transition begins to look suspicious as Kate uncovers missing records, hidden documents and a mysterious change in the company's will.
Elisabeth sees Kate as a threat to both her son and the legacy she had built and a silent war begins between the two women .
Chris gets caught between his loyalty to his mother and the growing feelings he has for Kate.
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.