A Million Dollar Bluff

A Million Dollar Bluff

Gavin

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The air was thick with the smell of barbecue, but my stomach was churning with dread. My upscale Austin life was supposed to merge with my fiancé Ryan's small-town roots this Thanksgiving weekend, finalizing our wedding plans. But then Ryan's family started a poker game, and my father, a notorious soft touch after a few bourbons, lost everything. Every cent of the $200,000 wedding fund I' d given him for safekeeping was gone, wiped out in one night. Ryan, instead of comforting me, put on a masterclass of manipulation, shaming my father and threatening to call off the wedding, using "tradition" as an excuse. His whole family watched, smug and complicit, as if I was the problem, not their pathetic, greedy scheme. The humiliation was suffocating, crushing not just me, but my parents too, turning a celebratory weekend into a public shaming. How could the man I was about to marry betray me so completely, letting his family fleece mine, then blaming us? But as my mother begged me to leave, a cold resolve settled in my gut, hardening into steel: I wasn't leaving until I' d taken back what was mine. I walked to the table, pulled out a chair, and calmly declared, "I want to play."

Introduction

The air was thick with the smell of barbecue, but my stomach was churning with dread.

My upscale Austin life was supposed to merge with my fiancé Ryan's small-town roots this Thanksgiving weekend, finalizing our wedding plans.

But then Ryan's family started a poker game, and my father, a notorious soft touch after a few bourbons, lost everything.

Every cent of the $200,000 wedding fund I' d given him for safekeeping was gone, wiped out in one night.

Ryan, instead of comforting me, put on a masterclass of manipulation, shaming my father and threatening to call off the wedding, using "tradition" as an excuse.

His whole family watched, smug and complicit, as if I was the problem, not their pathetic, greedy scheme.

The humiliation was suffocating, crushing not just me, but my parents too, turning a celebratory weekend into a public shaming.

How could the man I was about to marry betray me so completely, letting his family fleece mine, then blaming us?

But as my mother begged me to leave, a cold resolve settled in my gut, hardening into steel: I wasn't leaving until I' d taken back what was mine.

I walked to the table, pulled out a chair, and calmly declared, "I want to play."

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Contract With The Devil: Love In Shackles

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I watched my husband sign the papers that would end our marriage while he was busy texting the woman he actually loved. He didn't even glance at the header. He just scribbled the sharp, jagged signature that had signed death warrants for half of New York, tossed the file onto the passenger seat, and tapped his screen again. "Done," he said, his voice devoid of emotion. That was Dante Moretti. The Underboss. A man who could smell a lie from a mile away but couldn't see that his wife had just handed him an annulment decree disguised beneath a stack of mundane logistics reports. For three years, I scrubbed his blood out of his shirts. I saved his family's alliance when his ex, Sofia, ran off with a civilian. In return, he treated me like furniture. He left me in the rain to save Sofia from a broken nail. He left me alone on my birthday to drink champagne on a yacht with her. He even handed me a glass of whiskey—her favorite drink—forgetting that I despised the taste. I was merely a placeholder. A ghost in my own home. So, I stopped waiting. I burned our wedding portrait in the fireplace, left my platinum ring in the ashes, and boarded a one-way flight to San Francisco. I thought I was finally free. I thought I had escaped the cage. But I underestimated Dante. When he finally opened that file weeks later and realized he had signed away his wife without looking, the Reaper didn't accept defeat. He burned down the world to find me, obsessed with reclaiming the woman he had already thrown away.

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