The Invisible Wife’s Silent Sacrifice
Claire spent every waking moment protecting the transplanted heart beating inside her billionaire husband, Cooper. Though his grandfather forced their marriage, she loved him enough to endure his endless coldness.
When she received a frantic text saying Cooper was in a fatal car wreck, she ran through a freezing storm to save him. But she pushed open the VIP club doors only to find no doctors. Instead, Cooper was making out with his mistress, Kendall, while his wealthy friends erupted into malicious laughter at Claire's soaked, panicked state. It was all a cruel prank.
To force a divorce, Cooper treated her like garbage. He threw the custom meals she secretly cooked for his failing liver into the trash, giving Kendall the credit. When Claire begged him to stop drinking hard liquor for the sake of his fragile heart, he made a sickening demand.
"Go kiss that waiter on the mouth right now, and I won't touch another drop."
To keep him alive, Claire swallowed her pride and kissed the terrified boy while cameras flashed.
But her total degradation didn't earn his mercy. Cooper called her a sickening gold digger and walked out with his mistress, leaving Claire to the wolves. His best friend poured a sticky martini over her head, tore the strap of her dress, and raised a massive fist to smash her face. She had sacrificed her soul to keep his heart beating, only to be destroyed by it.
Just as the fist swung down, the heavy oak door was kicked off its hinges. Cooper stood in the doorway, his eyes burning with a terrifying, primal fury. He had only returned for a forgotten phone, but seeing another man's hands on his legal wife ignited a possessive rage that was about to burn the entire room down.
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Chapter 9
At 1:00 AM, Claire's phone buzzed on the nightstand.
It was a text from Joshuah. Just a GPS pin drop and a single sentence: Mr. Guthrie is consuming a significant amount of alcohol.
The location was a hyper-exclusive, underground nightclub in Soho.
Claire remembered the red warning asterisks on the medical report. She didn't bother changing out of her slip dress; she just threw a heavy trench coat over it, shoved her bare feet into boots, and ran out the door.
When she pushed through the heavy, soundproofed doors of the club, a wall of deafening, chest-rattling bass hit her.
The room was bathed in strobing neon lights. The air was thick with the smell of sweat, expensive perfume, and vaporized alcohol. Bodies writhed on the dance floor in a chaotic mass.
Claire pushed her way through the sweaty crowd, taking elbows to the ribs, her eyes scanning the dark perimeter for the VIP booths.
In the deepest, most secluded alcove, she found him.
Cooper was slouched back on a curved leather sofa, surrounded by his wealthy friends. Kendall was pressed tightly against his side.
In Cooper's hand was a massive crystal tumbler filled to the brim with dark, straight liquor. He raised it to his lips, tilting his head back.
Claire's mind went entirely blank.
She lunged across the low glass table. Her hand shot out and clamped around the crystal glass just as the liquid touched his lips.
She yanked it hard.
The whiskey splashed violently out of the glass, soaking the front of Cooper's white dress shirt.
Cormac, sitting across the table, immediately signaled the DJ.
The heavy bass cut out instantly. The sudden, dead silence in the VIP section was deafening.
Every single person in the booth stared at Claire. They looked at her disheveled hair, her coat thrown over a nightgown, panting like a madwoman.
Cooper slowly lowered his empty hand. He looked down at his ruined shirt, then slowly raised his eyes to Claire.
His gaze was murderous.
"Who gave you the right," he asked, his voice dangerously soft, "to walk in here?"
Claire gripped the sticky glass, her knuckles white. "Please," she begged, her voice trembling. "For your grandfather's sake. Put the alcohol down. You can't drink this."
Hearing her use Sterling as a shield again pushed Cooper over the edge.
He leaned back into the sofa, crossing his long legs. A cruel, vicious smile spread across his handsome face.
He pointed a long finger at a young, terrified male waiter holding a tray nearby.
"You want me to stop drinking?" Cooper asked loudly, ensuring everyone in the booth could hear. "Fine. Go kiss the waiter on the mouth. Right now. Do it, and I won't touch another drop tonight."
The booth erupted. The men howled with laughter, whistling and slamming the table.
Kendall covered her mouth with her hand, pretending to be shocked, but her eyes danced with pure, malicious glee.
The young waiter froze, his face turning bright red, looking around in panic.
Claire stood paralyzed. The humiliation washed over her in freezing waves. She stared at her husband, searching for any sign that he was joking. There was none. He wanted to break her.
Cooper casually reached for a fresh bottle of tequila on the table, wrapping his hand around the neck.
Claire closed her eyes. She thought of the erratic green lines on the EKG monitor, and the frail old man in the hospital bed. Her dignity meant absolutely nothing.
She turned around. Moving like a mechanical doll, she walked slowly toward the trembling waiter.
The jeers and whistles grew louder, echoing in her ears.
She stopped in front of the boy. She rose up on her tiptoes.
She squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her lips against the very edge of the waiter's cheek for one agonizing second.
The blinding flash of a smartphone camera went off, capturing the exact moment of her total degradation.
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9.5
On the day she discovers she is pregnant, Amara is handed divorce papers by the man she loved for three years. Betrayed by her husband and her best friend, she walks away with nothing-except the secret growing inside her.
But what Ethan Cole doesn't know is that the woman he abandoned is not weak... and not alone.
When Amara returns as a powerful heiress, no longer the woman he could control, Ethan begins to regret everything. But as secrets unravel and the truth about her pregnancy comes closer to light, one question remains-
When he finally finds out the child is his... will it already be too late?
8.7
Five years ago, I was the invisible scholarship charity case at an elite Manhattan prep school, trying to survive in a sea of trust-fund babies.
Arlo Hammond, the untouchable billionaire heir, made sure to completely dismantle my soul.
When his wealthy friends asked if he noticed me, his mocking laughter echoed down the hallway.
"Are you out of your mind? You seriously think I'd be interested in a boring little nerd like her?"
But the moment we were alone, he would corner me in dark alleys, pinning my wrists against brick walls with terrifying, possessive jealousy if my phone even buzzed. He played his twisted games until I was left standing in the rain with my shattered dignity.
Now, I am an Assistant District Attorney. I spent years burying those memories under mountains of legal files.
But tonight, he returned.
When we crossed paths at an exclusive club, he looked at me with the cool detachment he'd give a piece of furniture. In front of a crowd of elites, he coldly declared:
"We have absolutely nothing to do with each other anymore."
Then he walked away to pick up a supermodel, leaving me trembling from the sheer humiliation.
I didn't understand. If I was so worthless to him, why did he still have my birthday tattooed in dark ink on his wrist? Why did he look at me with such raw, painful vulnerability in the shadows?
I stared at my pale reflection in the mirror and made a silent vow.
I am not that pathetic seventeen-year-old anymore, and I will prove to him that I am completely, entirely over him.
8.6
Marrying Theron Draix in a few days was a life long dream come true.
For seventeen years, I'd loved him, revolving my life around him, and in just three days, we should be married.
"Let's break up. I won't be attending the wedding," he said.
My life shattered in that instant.
Finding out he was in love with my adopted sister was worse. They had played me and controlled my emotions.
At the end, Mireya had killed me.
If I was given a second chance, I would never love Theron and never trust Mireya.
7.6
My father raised seven brilliant orphans to be my potential husbands. For years, I only had eyes for one of them, the cold and distant Damien Paul, believing his distance was a wall I just had to break through.
That belief shattered last night when I found him in the garden, kissing his foster sister, Eve—the fragile girl my family took in at his request, the one I had treated like my own sister.
But the true horror came when I overheard the other six Fellows talking in the library.
They weren't competing for me. They were working together, orchestrating "accidents" and mocking my "stupid, blind" devotion to keep me away from Damien.
Their loyalty wasn't to me, the heiress who held their futures in her hands. It was to Eve.
I wasn't a woman to be won. I was a foolish burden to be managed. The seven men I grew up with, the men who owed my family everything, were a cult, and she was their queen.
This morning, I walked into my father's study to make a decision that would burn their world to the ground. He smiled, asking if I'd finally won Damien over.
"No, Dad," I said, my voice firm. "I'm marrying Hunter Beach."
9.7
Charity woke up in a hellish, acid-rain-soaked slum, trapped inside a bloated body covered in festering, toxic sores. She was the exiled Grand Princess of the Empire.
But the real nightmare wasn't her ruined body. It was the fact that the original owner had used her royal authority to force genetic marriage contracts onto four top-tier, powerful men.
Now, she was bound to them, and they absolutely loathed her.
Hjalmar, chained to a bed in her filthy room, smiled like a feral beast and promised to rip her head off the second his chains snapped.
Braden, a ruthless military officer, saved her from a mutated rat only to look at her with pure disgust.
"If you want to die, go die somewhere else. Don't dirty my patrol sector."
Even the locals mocked her fallen status, and a wealthy heiress publicly framed her for stealing a hundred-thousand-coin energy core just to see her rot in a dark cell.
She was universally despised, physically repulsive, and a lethal biological toxin gave her exactly 59 days left to live. How was she supposed to survive this absolute hell when her starting affection with her partners was at negative 100?
Then, a mechanical voice echoed in her skull, activating a survival system. To purge the poison, she had to harvest emotional energy by making these four men fall for her. Charity accepted the mandate, unlocked a top-tier culinary skill, and grabbed a rusted meat cleaver to start her counterattack.
8.4
Juliette was an agriculture major desperately trying to get top-tier CRISPR potato data from Adrian Castillo, the untouchable physics genius and wealthy heir.
But to get it, she was dragged to a high-end shooting club, where Adrian suddenly lost all his legendary motor skills, shooting zeroes and acting like a helpless nerd.
His clumsy act made Juliette a target. Blair, a wealthy heiress, cornered her, mocking her mud-stained cargo pants and calling her a pathetic dirt-girl.
"If you lose, you leave this club and never speak to Adrian again."
Blair challenged her to a professional air pistol match. The crowd of elites laughed, waiting for the farm girl to humiliate herself.
Even worse, Adrian just stood behind her, pretending to be terrified of Blair and whispering that his sinuses would swell shut if Juliette didn't save him.
The mockery and judgment felt suffocating. Everyone thought she was just a desperate fangirl who didn't even know how to hold a gun.
But they didn't know the dark trauma she had buried years ago. And she didn't understand why Adrian, a man who could supposedly shoot a coin at eight hundred meters in a sandstorm, was deliberately playing weak to push her to the firing line. What was his sick endgame?
To secure her experimental fertilizer, Juliette finally stopped hiding.
She picked up the competition pistol, locked her perfect stance, and fired ten flawless shots.
108.5. Total, undeniable annihilation.