The Unwanted Heiress And Her Silent Tears
Abigail was the biological heir to the wealthy Richmond family, finally brought home after sixteen years of living in poverty.
But her birth family didn't love her. They were completely obsessed with Debbra, the fake daughter who had been sent away after a DNA test.
Her biological brother looked at her faded clothes with unfiltered disgust. He left her standing in the freezing rain, screaming that it was her fault Debbra was gone.
Her mother shoved her hard against a wall just for touching a crystal music box.
"She is not my daughter! My daughter plays Chopin, not this pathetic hick!"
Even at her elite new school, her brother's friends threw her to the marble floor, mocking her as trash. In chemistry class, a boy deliberately knocked over a beaker, splashing corrosive acid onto her wrist.
No one helped her. They just ordered her to clean up the mess.
Abigail didn't ask to be switched at birth during a chaotic hospital storm. She didn't understand why her mere existence was treated as an unforgivable crime, while the imposter who stole her life was worshipped like a saint.
Washing her chemical burns alone in the empty lab, the last shred of her hope for a family completely died.
She calmly peeled off her rubber gloves and looked at her pale reflection. She decided to give up on their love and treat them as nothing more than strangers.
But just as she chose to become a ghost, a heavy thud echoed in the silent hallway, and a bloody hand slammed violently against the frosted glass of her door.
Chapters
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Chapter 1
The autumn wind off the East Coast cut through Abigail's secondhand jacket like it had a personal grudge.
She stood at Boston South Station gripping the frayed handles of her canvas bag, spine pressed against a concrete pillar, watching the city move like a current she hadn't been invited into. Men in tailored suits. Women in sharp trench coats. Leather shoes clicking against stone with the easy confidence of people who had never once doubted they belonged somewhere.
Abigail had been practicing her smile for three weeks.
She'd rehearsed it in the cracked bathroom mirror of her foster family's house in rural Ohio. A smile that said: I'm not asking for much. Just a chance. She'd told herself blood was blood. That it had to count for something.
The black Cadillac Escalade rolled into the pickup zone. The tires made a low, expensive sound on the asphalt.
The passenger door opened.
He was tall, with a sharp jaw and the rigid posture of someone who had been corrected his entire life until good posture became indistinguishable from coldness. A dark blue Ivy League blazer. Not a wrinkle on it.
Hank. Her biological brother. She had only ever seen him in one photograph.
Her heart slammed against her ribs. She took a breath, pulled up her practiced smile, and stepped forward.
Hank's eyes swept her once. They stopped — just for a fraction of a second — on her washed-out jeans and the scuffed toes of her sneakers.
The muscle in his jaw ticked.
Abigail saw it. The raw, unfiltered disgust. Her foot froze mid-step. The smile she had spent three weeks building crumbled off her face.
Then it was gone. Hank blinked, and in its place was a flawless, practiced gentleman's expression. He closed the distance between them in long, unhurried strides and stopped exactly two feet away. He gave a single curt nod.
"Welcome home."
"Thank you," Abigail whispered.
Her thick rural accent landed in the cold air between them like a stone dropped in still water. Hank's eyes darkened. He reached out, his immaculately manicured fingers lightly pinching the frayed strap of her canvas bag.
"Allow me."
Abigail's grip tightened instinctively. Their hands brushed — a half second of skin against skin — and Hank yanked his hand back as if she had burned him. The revulsion crossed his face so fast most people would have missed it.
Abigail didn't miss it.
The silence between them turned suffocating. Hank cleared his throat, adjusted his cuff, and gestured to the driver without looking at her again. The uniformed man stepped forward with a blank face, took the cheap bag, and deposited it in the massive trunk. It sat on the plush carpet like a piece of trash.
Hank pulled open the heavy rear door. He extended a hand — a perfect, mechanical gesture.
Abigail ducked her head and climbed inside. The scent of rich leather hit her first, then the blast of the climate control system. Her stomach turned with a sharp, disorienting wave of vertigo. She had never been in a car that smelled like money before.
She slid to the far side of the seat to make room.
The rear door slammed shut.
Hank walked around to the front passenger door and got in. The tall leather seat closed him off completely.
The Escalade merged onto the highway. Soft classical music drifted from the speakers. Abigail stared at the skyscrapers blurring past the tinted glass, and after a long moment of silence, forced herself to try.
"How is… how is Mom?" she asked, directing the words at the back of his head.
Hank looked at her in the rearview mirror. His eyes were flat.
"She is fine. Just busy today."
It wasn't an answer. It was a door being shut in her face.
Abigail lowered her eyes. She shoved her freezing hands into her jacket pockets and bit down hard on the inside of her cheek.
For the next forty minutes, Hank typed on his phone and did not speak another word.
By the time the wrought-iron gates of the Richmond estate swallowed the car whole, Abigail had quietly, carefully folded up her three-week-old smile and put it away. She wouldn't be needing it.
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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."
8.4
Carissa's son was dying in the ICU, and the bone marrow match had just failed.
The billionaire father, Guilford Gates, cornered her with a cruel ultimatum: naturally conceive a "savior sibling" to save their son. But what shocked Carissa more was his family's sudden accusation that she had heartlessly sold her baby to them three years ago.
"You sold your own flesh and blood to us for five million dollars, so your body belongs to the Gates family."
She was dragged into their gilded estate, treated like a filthy, rented womb. Guilford's new fiancée mocked her, the matriarch humiliated her, and Guilford looked at her with pure disgust. When she desperately tried to feed her sick son and accidentally made him vomit, Guilford violently shoved her away and banned her from the room.
Carissa was devastated and entirely confused. She had never seen a single cent of that five million. Driven by a desperate need for the truth, she investigated and uncovered a horrifying reality: her own father and stepmother had secretly trafficked her baby to the billionaire behind her back, leaving her to bear the ultimate blame.
Looking at the bank transfer record bought with her son's life, the last shred of Carissa's vulnerability died.
She signed the conception contract without asking for a single penny. She was going to use the Gates family's immense power to destroy the blood relatives who sold her, and she would survive this hell to take back her son.
9.6
Brenda Vincent thought her biggest nightmare was catching her boyfriend cheating with her roommate on her own sofa.
But her life truly derailed after a drunken night led her into the bed of Bryon Reeves, the ruthless billionaire CEO and older brother of the student she tutored.
Trying to pay off the most dangerous man in New York with a crumpled twenty-dollar bill was her first mistake.
Fleeing the hotel, she accidentally rear-ended his custom Maybach. Bryon used the massive repair bill to blackmail her into being his fake date, parading her at a gala just to make his sister-in-law jealous.
When Brenda finally snapped and fled the humiliation, only to be rescued by his biggest corporate rival, Bryon's twisted possessiveness turned completely destructive.
"If you feel kidnapped, call the police. But your teaching license will be permanently revoked."
He didn't just threaten her. He systematically dismantled her life, using his influence to force the university to freeze her tenure and suspend her without pay.
Brenda couldn't understand why this terrifying man was going to such extreme lengths to ruin a simple tutor who just wanted to be left alone.
Now, stripped of her career, her income, and her independence, she was forced into the sprawling Reeves Manor.
Hearing the heavy mahogany door lock from the outside in her signal-jammed bedroom, Brenda's panic slowly morphed into a cold, clinical rage.
She was trapped, but she refused to be his helpless pawn.
7.4
My mother was dying and desperately needed a half-million-dollar deposit for an experimental heart surgery by tomorrow.
I swallowed my pride and begged my wealthy husband, Garrick, to save her life.
Instead of helping, he laughed coldly and threw a thick stack of divorce papers right in my face.
"A hen that can't lay eggs gets slaughtered," he sneered, ruthlessly poking my flat stomach.
He revealed that his secretary, my supposed friend Lacey, was already pregnant with his heir.
To him, our three years of marriage was just a business transaction, and now that my family was bankrupt, I was nothing but damaged goods.
He flicked a humiliating five-thousand-dollar check at me as his final act of charity, then locked me out of our townhouse into the freezing, pouring rain.
I had spent years enduring agonizing hormone treatments for a fertility issue that wasn't even my fault, only to be discarded like trash when I needed him the most.
Was my dignity, my absolute devotion, and my mother's life really worth nothing to him?
Driven by pure, reckless desperation, I threw myself directly into the path of a moving Rolls-Royce Phantom on Fifth Avenue.
It belonged to Holden Tillman, the ruthless patriarch of the Tillman empire—and the uncle Garrick lived in absolute terror of.
I thought I was walking into my death, but instead, I became his fiancée, ready to make Garrick and Lacey pay for every tear I shed.
8.6
Marrying Theron Draix in a few days was a life long dream come true.
For seventeen years, I'd loved him, revolving my life around him, and in just three days, we should be married.
"Let's break up. I won't be attending the wedding," he said.
My life shattered in that instant.
Finding out he was in love with my adopted sister was worse. They had played me and controlled my emotions.
At the end, Mireya had killed me.
If I was given a second chance, I would never love Theron and never trust Mireya.
9.2
Lainey spent her last life destroying herself for Larry, only to become the woman he discarded most cruelly. He never loved her, never wanted her, and made no secret that his first love still owned his heart.
On their wedding day, he abandoned Lainey at the altar for that woman, then later used Lainey as nothing more than a stepping stone for his company's rise. In the end, he even had her kidney ripped from her.
Reborn at the very moment everything began, Lainey called off the wedding without hesitation. But after losing her, Larry begged desperately.
Lainey shot him a cold look, then turned and walked straight into the arms of a powerful, aloof man, who stared down at Larry with pure contempt. "She's my wife now."