Return Of The Lethal Unwanted Heiress

On my wedding day, the wedding planner looked at me with pity in her eyes. She told me the groom had called with a last-minute request. He wanted the name on the floral arch changed from "Elena" to "Sofia." Five years of loyalty to Dante Romero, and I found out he was planning a "secret" ceremony with his mistress an hour before ours. He claimed she was dying of cancer. He said it was her final wish to be a bride, and that as a good mafia wife, I should understand. He swore it was just charity. But I had seen the texts where he called me "furniture." I had watched him step over my body when I fell down the stairs at a club, just so he could leave with her. And this morning, I watched Sofia walk into the hotel lobby wearing *my* custom French lace wedding dress, smirking as she clung to his arm. Dante thinks I'm crying in the bridal suite. He thinks I will sit in the front row of his "fake" wedding and wait for my turn like a dutiful puppet. He is wrong. I wiped my tears and picked up my phone. I didn't cancel the wedding date. I just changed the location to the ballroom next door. And I changed the groom. As Dante says his vows to his mistress, I am walking down the aisle to meet the only man the Romero family fears. The Reaper.

I stood in the grand parlor and warned Zander that if he walked out to his mistress again, I would find another mate. He laughed in my face and called me a broken Omega whose ruined body no man would ever touch. Three days later a glowing parchment arrived. It showed two pups growing inside me, and a note from Alpha Silas promised he would come claim me as his Luna. Zander returned from patrol and mocked me for still sitting by the fire. I handed him the elders’ dissolution papers and told him I was leaving with nothing but my old moon-dog. He sneered that I was throwing a tantrum and rode off to Daphne. In the tavern Sasha hurled wine at them. Daphne spat that I was filthy and barren from the rogues who had destroyed me. Zander threw me aside when I lunged at her. Later he let Daphne butcher my loyal dog in the courtyard and called it practice for dark magic. I gathered the pieces of my only companion and felt the last thread of our bond snap. I could not understand how the man who once claimed to have saved me had spent ten years guarding a lie he knew was stolen. I turned my back on the territory, walked through the snow to Wintermoon, and let Silas mark me under the full moon while Zander howled alone outside the gates.

After six years of failed fertility treatments, my fiancé Blake and I were finally expecting our miracle child. Our shared dream, the one that had held us together through years of heartache, was finally coming true. But then I discovered he was faking amnesia to cheat on me. Heartbroken, I went to the hospital to end the pregnancy we had so desperately wanted. As I lay recovering, his mistress was rushed into the ER, bleeding out. She needed my rare blood type to survive. Blake found me, held me down, and forcibly drew my blood to save her. He called me selfish for hesitating, twisting my pain into a weapon against me. "This is why I don't love you, Eliza," he sneered. "This cold, selfish streak." That was the moment the woman he knew died. Weeks later, at his live-streamed wedding where he begged for my return, I sent him a package. Inside was the aborted embryo of the child he denied, and a recording of him confessing everything.

For three years, I endured a freezing, arranged marriage with Julian Carlisle-Vance, foolishly hoping my childhood crush would eventually warm his heart. But the moment his "friend" Seraphina called about a minor wrist ache, he abandoned me in our bed, rushing to her side and publicly flaunting his devotion online. When I finally handed him the divorce papers, willing to walk away with absolutely nothing, he refused to sign. Instead, he blackmailed me. He blocked the settlement for my younger brother's impending assault charges, using his freedom as leverage to force me into a sick ultimatum. "The marriage stays on paper, but in private, you will be my mistress." He wanted to strip me of my dignity, keeping me as a secret plaything while my own father conspired with Seraphina, putting my late mother's precious jadeite necklace up for auction just to punish my disobedience. Julian even twisted a moment of my vulnerability, accusing me of secretly loving his dead brother, using that paranoid delusion as an excuse to ruthlessly degrade me. I didn't understand why the man I loved hated me so much, or why my own family would sell my mother's soul to the highest bidder just to keep me leashed to a psychopath. But when I saw my mother's necklace headlining the Sotheby's VIP preview, the suffocating despair inside me finally burned away into a cold, clear rage. I wiped my tears and calmly began planning my appearance at the auction. They thought the necklace was a chain to bind me, but I was going to make it my weapon.

When our family empire crumbled, my sister and I were sold off as collateral to the Chicago Outfit. My fierce sister Frankie was forced to marry Damien Moretti, the terrifying Don. I was shackled to his brother Leo, a notorious, degenerate playboy. I thought my life was over, but the real nightmare began on our wedding night. A terrified maid handed me the wrong room key. Exhausted and numb, I crawled into a dark honeymoon suite, praying my new husband would be too drunk to find me. Instead, the heavy door opened, and a man fueled by a drug-laced drink stepped in. He was ruthless, punishing, and entirely stripped away my dignity in the pitch black. When the morning light finally broke, I turned my head, expecting to see Leo's boyish face. Instead, I saw a profile carved from ice. Damien Moretti. The Don. My sister's husband. The very man who had previously called me a "liability" and ruined my life. When he realized who I was, his eyes filled with absolute, chilling disgust. He dragged me out of the ruined sheets, threw me onto the floor of a freezing shower, and demanded to know why I had sneaked into his suite. "You ruined me. How am I supposed to look at Frankie? You should have just killed me. Kill me now, Damien. It would be a mercy compared to this." I sobbed, the freezing water mingling with my tears. He just stared down at me with cold, unreadable intent. I was now trapped in a house of monsters, carrying the Don's darkest secret, and I had to figure out how to survive without destroying my sister.

My boyfriend and stepsister murdered me for my inheritance, their celebratory kiss a final insult above my broken body on the rain-slicked concrete of the port. As my soul floated inches from my own face, a tyrant the world knew only as a disfigured cripple, Charles Moses, arrived with a team of soldiers. He ignored my killers, who were now begging for their lives. Instead, he fell to his knees in the mud and blood. He cradled my lifeless head in his hands, and a gut-wrenching sob of pure agony tore from his throat before he carried my body into the black ocean. As the water closed over us, I didn't understand. Why did this monster, a man I had never met, weep for me as if I was his entire world? My eyes snapped open. I was five years in the past, coughing up water in a hospital bed. It was the night my family screamed at me for ruining my stepsister's dress after she'd tried to drown me. When they offered to marry me off to the "crippled monster" Charles Moses to save my perfect stepsister from that fate, I didn't fight them. I smiled and said yes. This time, I would walk straight into the lion's den myself.