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 5
Lisbon was a lie.
I knew it the second I landed at JFK and saw Marco, the wedding planner, waiting at baggage claim with two coffees and a black eye.
"Celeste?" he said, then saw my face. "Elise."
"You weren't in Lisbon," I said.
"And you weren't supposed to be here." He shoved one coffee at me. Chamomile tea. _My_ drink. "She told me to make sure you got on the plane. Said if you didn't run, you'd die."
I didn't drink it. "Where is she?"
"Funeral home." He wouldn't meet my eyes. "For you."
---
The casket was closed.
That was the first clue. The second was Dad, sobbing into a handkerchief that cost more than my rent. The third was the obituary in the program:
_Elise Marie Kaine, beloved daughter and sister. Died tragically in a car accident on her wedding night. She is survived by her sister, Celeste, and her husband, Damian Kaine._
I was standing in the back, in a hoodie and sunglasses, reading about my own death.
Celeste was at the pulpit. Not crying. She was never a good actress. "Elise was the good one," she said, voice shaking on cue. "She spent her life fixing my mistakes. Last night was no different."
Damian sat in the front row. Black suit. No expression. He hadn't spoken to police, according to the news. He'd just identified the body. _Burned beyond recognition. Dental records matched._
I'd never been to a dentist in New York.
Marco leaned in. "The car was yours. Registered in your name. Found at the bottom of the Hudson with a body in the driver's seat. Wearing your bridesmaid dress."
Celeste's bridesmaid dress. The one I took off to put on the wedding gown.
"She planned this," I whispered.
"She planned it three years ago," Marco said. "When Lucien 'died.' That wasn't Damian. That was her."
---
I cornered Celeste in the funeral home bathroom.
She didn't scream when she saw me. She just locked the door.
"You were supposed to be on a plane to Brazil," she said.
"I forge signatures, not obituaries. What the hell, Celeste?"
She was shaking. Not with grief. With rage. "You don't get it. You never did. Mom didn't die in a car crash, Elise. She killed herself. Because of Dad. Because of the debt. Because of _me_. I was the one who told her about the affair. I was twelve."
I went cold.
"Damian found out," she kept going. "Three years ago. He was going to tell Dad. It would have destroyed him. So I made a deal with Lucien. We fake his death, he disappears, and Damian gets the company clean. No scandal. No suicide Part 2."
"Lucien didn't embezzle," I said.
"No. I did. I funneled money to pay off Mom's gambling debts. The ones Dad didn't know about. Lucien took the fall because I-" She choked. "Because I loved him. And he loved me. Not the version Damian wanted. Me."
"So you killed me to run with him?"
"I didn't kill you!" She grabbed my arms. "The body in the car is mine, Elise. Or it was supposed to be. Dental records, medical records - I switched them years ago. Every X-ray, every filling. I was setting it up. In case I ever needed to disappear."
"Why now?"
"Because Damian was never going to let you go." Her eyes were wild. "He doesn't love you. He collects you. Like those photos. Like the bedroom. He told me, if you ever tried to leave, he'd make sure there was no Elise left to find. So I gave him one."
The door rattled.
Damian's voice. Calm. "Celeste? You've been in there a while."
Celeste's face went white. She shoved a burner phone into my hand. "Lucien's at the docks. Pier 54. He has the real merger documents. The ones that burn Kaine Corp to the ground. Take them. Run. Don't trust Damian. Don't trust _me_."
"Why are you helping me?"
"Because I'm the bad twin," she said. "And you're the only person who ever took my punishments."
The lock clicked.
Damian opened the door.
He saw me.
He didn't look surprised.
He looked at Celeste. "You were supposed to be in the casket, darling."
Then he looked at me. "And you were supposed to be in Brazil."
He pulled a gun.
Not on me.
On Celeste.
"She's the loose end, Elise. Not you. She faked Lucien's death. She embezzled. She switched the dental records. She put _you_ in that car in every legal way that matters. I was just cleaning up her mess. Like you always did."
Celeste didn't flinch. "Tell her the rest, Dame. Tell her why you need me dead."
Damian's finger tightened on the trigger.
"Because the real contingency clause," he said to me, "doesn't give the company to the wife. It gives it to the surviving twin. I married Celeste on paper. But if she dies, and you're legally declared dead... there's no one left to inherit but me."
He smiled.
"That was the plan. Until you forged her name."
He turned the gun on me.
"Now I just need one body. Yours or hers. The police won't check twice."
The burner phone in my hand buzzed.
Text from Lucien: _Cops are here. It was a setup. D called them. Run._
Sirens wailed outside the funeral home.
Damian's smile didn't drop. "Checkmate," he said again.
This time, he meant it.
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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.