Jilted Bride: Marrying The Dead War Hero

Kloe Guthrie dragged her crystal-encrusted wedding gown down the penthouse corridor, exhausted but ready to finally be alone with her new husband, Justen. But as she passed the presidential suite, a familiar, cloying perfume stopped her. Through the cracked door, she saw Justen brutally thrusting into her cousin, Candyce. "Like fucking a corpse with Kloe," Justen grunted, his voice thick with lust. "Worth it for the trust fund control, though." Candyce giggled, mocking Kloe's pathetic gratitude. Shattered, Kloe stumbled backward in the dark, only to be caught by Julian Larsen—Justen's billionaire best man. Instead of offering sympathy, Julian trapped her against the wall. He forced her to listen to her husband's cruel mockery, then dragged her into the opposite suite, tearing off her wedding dress and dismantling her dignity piece by piece. Everything she had believed for four years was a meticulously calculated lie. She was nothing but a boring prop to the man she loved, a naive fool meant to be drained of her family's immense wealth and laughed at behind closed doors. The humiliation and betrayal burned through her veins like acid. "You could cry," Julian whispered against her neck, his eyes predatory and dark. "Or you could make him regret he was ever born." Instead of running from the man cornering her in the dark, Kloe looked at the destroyed remains of her life, grabbed Julian's collar, and pulled him in. This time, she would make them all pay.

For ten years, I played the safe, "wolfless" emotional support animal for my werewolf best friend, Finn, secretly loving him while he chased his toxic ex. When she got engaged to a rival Alpha, he dragged me across the country to crash the mating ceremony, only to abandon me at the airport. His terrifying older brother, Alpha Knox, picked me up instead and shattered my world with one sentence: Finn had always known how I felt, and he intentionally weaponized my devotion. To prove how little I meant to him, Knox orchestrated a cruel test at a seedy Rogue club. While I sat right next to Finn in a sticky booth, Knox sent over a stripper. "You don't mind, right, Sloane? It's just a gift," Finn slurred. Without hesitating, he let the stripper straddle him right in front of me, burying his face in her neck to chase away the pain of his ex. A decade of my blind loyalty turned to ash in that smoke-filled room. I hated my defective, wolfless biology, but I hated him more for treating me like a stray dog begging for scraps. Why did I waste my entire youth protecting a male who didn't even see me as a woman? Suffocating on shame and fury, I fled to the cramped club bathroom to hide. *Click.* The deadbolt slid into place, and the intoxicating scent of a violent thunderstorm and spent gunpowder swallowed me whole. Alpha Knox Crawford stood against the locked door, his merciless eyes pinning me to the sink.

Helena was trapped in a contracted marriage with billionaire Gaston Vaughn. To his family, she was just a low-class tool meant to produce an heir. When a crazed attacker lunged at Gaston, Helena instinctively threw herself in front of the knife. But while she lay bleeding in the ICU, news broke that Gaston was at an OB-GYN clinic with a famous actress, who was reportedly pregnant with his child. To suppress the scandal, Gaston's grandmother threatened to destroy Helena's childhood orphanage unless she staged a romantic night at a luxury hotel. "You will be there, and you will be convincing." Delirious with a severe fever, Helena was left in a pitch-black suite, where a man finally came and slept with her. She thought her husband had finally shown her mercy. But the next morning, she woke up alone, finding a stranger's platinum cufflink on the nightstand. Then came a photo: Gaston was at the airport, tightly embracing his first love at the exact same time Helena was in that hotel bed. He hadn't just abandoned her. He had sent a proxy to defile her, fulfilling the family's breeding mandate so he could be free for his true love. The monstrous cruelty shattered her completely, causing her to cough up blood and collapse. Waking up in a secure hospital ward, the naive girl who had loved Gaston for fifteen years finally died. Her eyes turned to ice as she made a silent vow to disappear, survive, and tear the Vaughn dynasty to the ground.

I was the lowest Omega of the Silver Moon Pack, treated like dirt and expected to scrub floors while Liam, the new Alpha, prepared for his succession ceremony on my eighteenth birthday. At the stroke of midnight, the fated mate bond suddenly struck us. The future Alpha was my destined mate, but instead of accepting me, he looked at my dirty clothes with pure disgust. He publicly rejected me in front of hundreds of pack members and visiting delegates. "I cannot be tied to a weak, pathetic Omega," he declared, pulling the Beta's daughter close. I was forced to accept the rejection, the snapping bond tearing my soul apart. No one offered help as I convulsed on the floor. I underwent a torturous first shift and was thrown out into the freezing snow like garbage. I thought my life was over, condemned to die alone. But when I looked at my reflection in the frozen pond, I froze. I was a flawless, glowing White Wolf—a legendary bloodline thought to be extinct for centuries. How could a worthless Omega like me possess the sacred power of the Moon Goddess? Before I could process this, a terrifyingly powerful man stepped out of the dark woods. It was Alpha Kael of the ruthless Blood Eclipse Pack, a monster known for wiping out entire bloodlines. He draped his heavy coat over my shivering body, and a new, fiery mate bond instantly ignited in my chest. "Found you," he whispered, his eyes turning pitch black. "My little white wolf."

Strapped to the cold metal table in the hospital basement, I begged my Fated Mate, Alpha Marcus, for mercy. He ignored my tears. With a voice devoid of warmth, he ordered the doctor to inject liquid silver into my veins—a poison designed to dissolve the wolf spirit. "Do it," he commanded. "If she remains a wolf, she is a liability. As a human, she can stay as an Omega." I screamed as the silver acid ate through my soul, severing the connection to my wolf. Marcus didn't flinch. He wasn't saving me from my burn injuries; he was clearing the path for his mistress, Rachel, and their secret illegitimate son. Broken and wolfless, I was forced to watch him publicly claim his bastard child as the new heir. He thought I was submissive. He thought I would quietly fade into the servant's quarters to be his charity case. He didn't know I had cracked his safe and found the DNA tests proving his three-year betrayal. On the morning of his wedding to Rachel, I smiled as I climbed into the car that would take me to my "exile." Ten minutes later, my scheduled email exposing every lie hit the Council of Elders. And while Marcus fell to his knees screaming at the sight of my burning vehicle, realizing he had destroyed his True Mate for a fraud, I was already gone.

I was forty-eight hours into my shift, smelling of stale sweat and clutching a red-stamped bill for my mother's life support. As a scholarship intern, I was a ghost in the hospital, working myself to the bone just to keep her ventilator humming. Then Dr. Thorne shoved a metal clipboard into my chest and ordered me to perform a surgical prep on a VIP patient for a circumcision. But the moment the cold betadine touched the man's skin, he lunged at me like a predator, his hand crushing my wrist until the bone nearly snapped. "I'm here for a kidney stone. What kind of incompetent butcher shop is this?" He wasn't a patient; he was Conrad Marks, a lethal billionaire, and Thorne had intentionally set me up to assault him. Within minutes, a five-million-dollar lawsuit was filed, and the Dean ordered security to shred my license and throw me out of the building. My phone buzzed with a final notice: the facility was stopping my mother's meds at midnight because my payment had failed. I was a doctor who had just been framed and a daughter about to watch her mother die. I didn't understand why Thorne would ruin me so casually, but with my mother's life on the line, I had nothing left to lose. I slipped past the guards and back into the billionaire's suite with a set of silver needles and a desperate bargain. I stopped his agony in seconds, and when he looked at me with those cold, lethal eyes, I offered a trade: I would be the fake girlfriend his family demanded if he would save my mother and bury the lawsuit. "Deal," he said, his grip on my waist tightening with dark possession. I signed the contract, realizing I hadn't just saved my career-I had sold my soul to the most dangerous man in New York.