The Wrong Twin He Buried
Elise has always lived in her twin sister's shadow-until she's forced to take her place and marry a ruthless billionaire to save her family. What begins as a desperate lie turns into a dangerous game of identity and power when her husband's secrets surface-and he may already know she isn't who she claims to be. As betrayal unfolds, Elise must decide whether to keep pretending or finally claim her own life.
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Chapter 3
The "gift" was a penthouse.
Fifty-seventh floor. Glass walls. A view of Manhattan that cost more than my dad's entire company used to be worth. The bedroom was already full of clothes in my size. Not Celeste's size - _my_ size. Dresses I'd liked on Instagram and never bought. A sketchbook with my initials. A copy of _The Count of Monte Cristo_ with the corners dog-eared at my favorite chapters.
I was standing in the middle of it, still in the wedding dress, when I found the safe.
Biometric. Thumbprint.
I pressed mine to it without thinking.
It opened.
Inside: a stack of cash, a passport, and a red leather diary. _Property of C. Kaine_ stamped on the cover in gold. Celeste's. I'd seen her write in it when we were kids. She stopped after Mom died. Said writing things down made them real.
The first page was dated three years ago.
_January 12th_
_I met him today. Not Dame - the other one. Lucien. He was at the Kaine Foundation gala, standing by the ice sculpture like he wanted to stab it. He doesn't look like his photos. He's thinner. Meaner. He called me Celeste and I didn't correct him. He said, "You hate these things too, don't you?" And I did. I really did._
My stomach dropped.
I flipped pages.
_February 3rd_
_Lucien kissed me behind the fundraiser tent. He tastes like whiskey and bad decisions. He thinks I'm engaged to his brother. I haven't told him. I can't. Dame looks at me like I'm a contract. Lucien looks at me like I'm a fire._
_March 19th_
_D knows. I don't know how, but he knows. He came to my apartment. Didn't yell. Just said, "You have two choices. End it, or I end him." He said it like he was discussing a stock split._
_April 1st_
_Lucien's gone. Boat accident. They said it was an accident. D told Dad it was a tragedy. He didn't even come to the funeral. He sent flowers. White roses. I hate roses. They give Elise hives._
I slammed the diary shut.
He knew. Damian knew Celeste was in love with Lucien. He knew three years ago. And he'd just told me, _"You said you'd quit the day you stopped loving me."_
But Celeste never loved him.
So who was he talking to?
A floorboard creaked behind me.
I spun, the diary clutched to my chest. Damian stood in the doorway, tie loosened, jacket off. He looked human for the first time all day. Tired.
"You found it," he said. Not a question.
"I wasn't-"
"Looking for it?" He stepped inside, shut the door. The lock clicked. "No. You were looking for her. You always are."
He knew. He knew I wasn't Celeste.
The room tilted. "Damian, I can explain-"
"Can you?" He crossed to the bar, poured two fingers of scotch. Didn't offer me one. "Explain why you've been forging her signature since you were sixteen? Explain why you took the fall for her DUI? Explain why you're wearing her dress, but you're standing in _your_ bedroom?"
Every word was a bullet. He'd counted them all.
"How long have you-"
"Known?" He drank. "Since the engagement party. You spilled red wine on your dress and didn't flinch. Celeste would have screamed. She hates merlot. You hate being embarrassed."
He set the glass down. "I proposed to her anyway."
"Why?" The word tore out of me. "If you knew she loved Lucien, if you knew I was-"
"Because she would have said no." He walked to me, slow, deliberate. Stopped a foot away. I could see the scar through his eyebrow now. It wasn't like mine. Mine was from the swing. His was surgical. Precise. "And I didn't want Celeste."
His thumb brushed my cheekbone, right under the scar. Same spot he'd touched during the kiss.
"I wanted the girl who took her punishments. The girl who memorized her coffee order. The girl who learned to drink it black, just in case."
My breath stopped.
"I wanted you, Elise."
The diary slipped from my hands.
He caught it before it hit the floor. Opened it to the last entry. One I hadn't read yet.
Dated yesterday. In handwriting I didn't recognize.
_She said yes. Finally. Get the papers ready. If Celeste runs, Elise will take her place. She always does. -D_
Yesterday. Before Celeste ran. Before I put on the dress.
He'd planned this.
The door to the penthouse slammed open.
"Hey, brother," a voice drawled from the living room. "Meet the woman who buried me."
Damian didn't even turn. "Right on time."
A man leaned against the doorframe. Same face as Damian. Same cold gray eyes. But his hair was longer. His suit was cheaper. And he had a grin that cut like a knife.
Lucien Kaine. Alive.
He looked straight at me and winked.
"You must be Elise. I've heard so much about you."
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7.4
Evelina Barrett was the legitimate daughter, yet she was framed for a disgusting sex scandal, expelled from the Ivy League, and locked out of her late mother's massive trust fund.
While she was thrown out to rot on the streets with a jagged, hideous red scar covering half her face, her father and step-family were throwing a lavish charity gala to celebrate her total ruin.
They laughed as they officially published her disownment notice in the Times to cut her off forever.
"Without the school halo, that ugly freak will be begging on the streets by tomorrow," her sister Aspen sneered.
Her stepmother Annabella toasted to taking out the trash, perfectly happy to steal Evelina's inheritance while ignoring the fact that Evelina knew exactly how they had murdered her mother.
For years, Evelina had been locked in a dark basement, abused by bodyguards, and treated worse than a stray dog.
Why should she, the true heir, suffer in the gutter while the leeches who destroyed her life enjoyed the wealth that rightfully belonged to her?
She refused to be their victim anymore.
Washing away her fake scar to reveal her true, breathtaking face, Evelina blackmailed New York's most lethal billionaire into marriage to secure the ultimate shield.
Then, she put on a black mourning dress, ordered a dark web ghost crew, and climbed into a heavy semi-truck.
At exactly 6:00 PM, she smashed through the iron gates of her family's elegant gala, delivering three pure black coffins directly to the lawn.
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.
8.7
Emerson worked grueling twelve-hour shifts just to keep her five-year-old son, Leo, alive. Her only lifeline was her partner Alden, who was willing to give up his wealthy family to protect them.
But when Leo's bone marrow completely failed, the doctor delivered a death sentence. The only way to save him was a two-million-dollar treatment, or having another child with his biological father.
That father was Finnegan Mcconnell, the ruthless billionaire who had accused Emerson of faking her pregnancy and abandoned her five years ago.
Desperate for the medical fees, Emerson submitted her designs to Finnegan's company.
Instead of advancing the money, Finnegan tore her portfolio to shreds and trapped her as a prisoner in his estate.
To force her complete submission, he systematically destroyed her reality. He framed Alden with federal charges, leaving him facing twenty years in prison.
Alden's mother stormed into the pediatric ICU, violently strangling Emerson against the wall.
"Beg Finnegan to let my son go! You are a curse!"
Even Emerson's own adoptive mother showed up at the hospital, just to publicly mock her dying child.
Emerson was suffocating in despair. Finnegan already had a beautiful new wife and a five-year-old daughter—absolute proof he had been cheating while she was pregnant and alone.
He had his perfect family. Why did he have to hunt her down and sever every lifeline she had left, just to watch her drown?
With her son's heart monitor fading and Alden locked in a cell, her pride finally shattered.
Emerson walked into the top-floor executive office and dropped to her knees at the devil's feet, but the desperate mother looking up at him was preparing for a devastating revenge.
9.8
When I woke up on the muddy bank of the freezing river, I unlocked a brutal, unfiltered preview of my actual future.
For the past six months, I had been the town's ultimate joke, chasing after a city boy who looked at me like a diseased insect. Everyone thought I jumped into the river because he rejected me.
But the nightmare didn't stop there. In the future I foresaw, my entire family was destroyed. My eldest brother was handcuffed and dragged into a squad car. My second brother died in a pool of blood on the asphalt. My parents passed away from sheer grief and humiliation, and our farm was foreclosed.
Meanwhile, Bart Hawkins—my family's sworn enemy, the boy everyone accused of pushing me, but who actually jumped in to save my life—became a billionaire tech mogul. I ended up starving to death in a damp, moldy basement, completely alone.
I finally understood that I was just a pathetic, tragic side character meant to drag my family into hell. My own sister-in-law, Felicie, had been stealing our food and money, laughing at my misery behind my back.
But right now, my mother was still alive, my brothers were safe, and the farm was ours.
When Felicie walked into my bedroom, playing the devoted sister-in-law with a bowl of clear, meatless broth while a stolen roasted chicken thigh leaked grease through her apron pocket, I didn't play along.
"What's in your pocket, Felicie?"
This time, I was going to tear that horrific future apart with my bare hands.
9.5
Janet woke up gasping, the phantom fire of a deadly explosion still scorching her lungs. She had been reborn three years in the past, on the exact day her mother forced her into a marriage contract with Gaylord Bradford, a paralyzed and severely disfigured billionaire.
Before she could even process her second chance, her cousin Kandy kicked the bedroom door open, flaunting a massive diamond ring. Kandy, who had also been reborn, smugly announced she had stolen Janet's Wall Street golden boy fiancé, Jax Adler.
"You're going to marry that paralyzed monster," Kandy spat, gloating that she would build a billionaire dynasty with Jax while Janet wiped drool off a rotting corpse. Kandy expected Janet to have a complete mental collapse, completely unaware that Gaylord's own medical team was secretly injecting him with lethal neurotoxins to finish him off.
But Janet only felt a cold, clinical pity. Kandy's "prophetic" memories were a polluted lie. Jax was actually sterile and dying of irreversible kidney failure, while Gaylord wasn't a dying freak—he was a dormant god whose body was merely in a high-dimensional hibernation. Why would Janet mourn losing a doomed fraud?
Leaving her delusional cousin behind, Janet packed her bags and headed straight to Gaylord's maximum-security military cell. She physically tackled his corrupt doctor, drove three bio-electric silver needles into the crippled king's spine to awaken his deadened nerves, and looked him dead in his glacial blue eye.
"Sign the marriage contract," Janet whispered. "I will make you walk again, and we will take back everything."
7.9
Erin woke up in her luxurious Fifth Avenue penthouse, three days after returning from the cold, sterile psychiatric hospital where her husband had locked her away.
On the night of their third anniversary, Crockett Winters came home smelling of his mistress's perfume, expecting his docile wife to serve him.
Instead of playing the obedient fool, Erin calmly exposed the million-dollar diamonds he had just bought for his lover.
Furious at her sudden defiance, Crockett tried to physically intimidate her, pinning her against a wall to reassert his dominance.
When his aggression failed, he threw a brutal divorce agreement on the table.
"Sign it, and you walk away with nothing. You can't survive without me, and you know it."
He sneered, convinced the ironclad prenup would terrify her. He thought her rebellion was just a pathetic, jealous tantrum, a desperate play for his attention while he continued to pamper his mistress.
He truly believed she was just a beautiful canary who would eventually crawl back to her gilded cage in tears.
But Erin didn't cry, and she didn't sign the papers.
Instead, she locked him out of the master suite and pulled out his unlimited Centurion card.
In a single night, she calmly spent ninety million dollars of his money to buy up prime real estate and hidden assets, taking the first step to build an empire that would completely destroy him.