From Hidden Lover To His Boss: The Billionaire's Ultimate Regret

My brother Leo was thrown into a jail cell for defending his fiancée from a brutal assault by a billionaire heir. To save him, I gathered all the evidence and went to the police, but the heir's cousin, Damien Kensington—the most ruthless and powerful attorney in Manhattan—crushed my case in exactly five minutes. Damien didn't just stop at burying the truth. He bought off our only eyewitness with a hundred-thousand-dollar Rolex. He secretly blacklisted every law firm in New York from ever taking my brother's case. Worse, he systematically cut off all my options until I was forced to sign an ironclad NDA and work as a tutor in his own penthouse just to pay off Leo's legal debts. When I nearly died in a rainy alley trying to find the corrupted security footage, Damien dragged me back to his mansion, violently kissed me until I bled, and locked me in his bedroom. I woke up the next morning wearing nothing but his oversized dress shirt. I couldn't understand why a man of his immense wealth and power was going to such psychotic lengths to trap a broke, desperate girl like me. If he merely wanted to win an assault case for his cousin, why was he isolating me from the world, marking me as his own, and paying me a thousand dollars an hour just to keep me trapped under his roof? Looking at the fresh bandage he had wrapped around my ankle, I wiped my tears and made a decision. I would take his dirty money and use it to tear his empire down from the inside.

My fated mate brought my cousin to my home to privately break our engagement. He claimed his wolf didn't see me as his mate, while my cousin cried fake tears, hiding the fact that she was already seven weeks pregnant with his bastard child. In my previous life, I didn't know the truth. I cried and begged him not to leave. My weakness made me a laughingstock and allowed them to ruin my reputation. My father, who I later learned had murdered my mother to protect his own affair with my cousin's mother, helped them steal my family's wealth. They took everything from me, and I was eventually thrown to the Rogue wolves, my throat ripped open in the dark while they lived happily ever after. Until the moment the teeth tore through my flesh, I couldn't understand why my own family and my fated mate would conspire to destroy me so completely. Opening my eyes again, I was back in my sixteen-year-old body, right on the morning they came to deliver their prepared speech. This time, I didn't shed a single tear. "I want a formal, public rejection ceremony presided over by the elders." I exposed their affair to his terrifying Alpha uncle, blackmailed my murderous father for the family seal, and kicked my cousin out into the streets. And when she showed up at the high-society banquet wearing the exact same custom emerald gown as me to publicly humiliate me, I didn't run away in shame. Instead, I calmly pulled out a silver cigar cutter and sliced my silk dress all the way up to my thigh.

After catching my fiancé cheating with my adoptive sister, I broke off our engagement on the spot. In retaliation, my abusive adoptive parents sold me to Kaelen Knight, the Lycan King, to clear our pack's debts. He was rumored to be a ruthless, reclusive monster who had been horribly crippled in a fire centuries ago. To ensure my absolute ruin, my sister planted fake love letters to my ex in my luggage and anonymously destroyed my university scholarship, cutting off my only escape route to the human world. "A wolfless whore. You planned to drug me," Kaelen sneered, looking at the fake evidence with absolute disgust. Believing I was a spy, my new husband had his guards throw me into the freezing woods with the Dire Wolves, leaving me to survive the night alone. I was just a broken, wolfless Omega, entirely at the mercy of a cruel, powerless Lycan and a family that wanted me dead. But I was wrong about him being powerless. One night, I accidentally saw him rise from his wheelchair, his tall frame radiating an overwhelming, lethal aura. He wasn't crippled at all. The secret I thought was my shield was actually a loaded gun pointed at my head. Trapped with a terrifying predator, I had to stop playing the victim and fight for my life.

Ardella caught her fiancé Braden cheating with an actress in a downtown VIP room. It was supposed to be a simple business marriage to save her family's bankrupt company. But instead of supporting her, her uncle and aunt demanded she get on her knees and apologize to the cheating fiancé. They didn't care about her dignity; they only cared about the merger capital. Her cousin publicly mocked her, and her uncle threatened to permanently hide the police file revealing who murdered her father if she ruined the deal. To make matters worse, Ethelbert Stone, the terrifying billionaire who raised her—and the man she was desperately trying to escape—publicly claimed he didn't know her. Yet, moments later, he trapped her in his car, his eyes filled with a sick, possessive rage, reminding her that every inch of her belonged to him. She was completely cornered by a cheating fiancé, a parasitic family, and an obsessed former guardian. They had drained her father's trust fund dry and now wanted to sell her off to cover their debts. They really thought she was just a helpless pawn they could manipulate and discard at will. But they were dead wrong. Ardella calmly wiped her hands after throwing scalding tea at her aunt's feet, staring down at her greedy family. "The headline tomorrow will read: Price Group Bankrupt, Fails to Sell Niece to Cover Debts." She backed up the video of her fiancé's betrayal to ten different servers and sent a text to her private investigator. Tonight, at the elite society dinner, she was going to blow the scandal wide open and drag them all down with her.

My ten-year contract marriage was over. I had saved my sister's life by playing wife to a billionaire and mother to his two sons. Today, I was finally free. But at my stepson's birthday party, my public execution began when a deepfake porn video starring my face was broadcast to all of New York's elite. Then, my husband's ex-wife, Carolina, orchestrated my downfall. She stabbed herself and blamed me. The boys I raised screamed that I was a monster. And my husband, Justin, believing her lies, beat me so brutally that I miscarried the child I never knew I was carrying. He chose her. He chose the lie. He let our child die. But his mother, the woman who orchestrated our marriage, saved me. Months later, my ex-husband and stepsons found me in LA, crying and begging me to come home. I looked at the men who destroyed me and smiled. "No," I said calmly. "I don't need you anymore."

The kiss was cold. Not just the late hour, but his eyes, fixated on a spiking graph over my shoulder, measuring my every breath. "Perfect," Ethan murmured, pulling away. "The oxytocin response was exactly as predicted." He wasn' t talking to me. Our kiss, a desperate attempt to reconnect, was just data for his obsession: Project Seraph. Our home had become a lab, our life an experiment. I, Ava, a software engineer who' d set aside my career for his, felt like a ghost, a tool in his grand design. That night, a thin line of light from his locked office door beckoned. I used a backdoor I' d coded years ago. The room was a laboratory. And in the center, a shimmering, life-sized hologram of Sophia Reed-his dead ex-girlfriend. "Soon, Sophia. Soon you'll be whole again," he vowed, his voice filled with a reverence he hadn't shown me in years. Then, the horror. He saw me. "Ava? She' s served her purpose. Her neural patterns, her emotional responses… they were the perfect raw data to rebuild you." He filtered out my "weaknesses," my "softness," using our intimacy, our arguments, just to gather data. I stood frozen. It wasn't just a project. It was a resurrection. And I was the sacrifice. He didn't grieve her; he resented me for not being her. The chilling realization of his malice, extending even to my devastating miscarriage years ago, hit me like a physical blow. My love turned to ash. I would not be a template. I would not be erased. This wasn't about saving my marriage. This was about survival. And justice. I would burn his project to the ground.