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A Million Dollar Bluff

A Million Dollar Bluff

Gavin

5.0
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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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The Unwilling Wife

The Unwilling Wife

Short stories

5.0

The organ music swelled, painting my white wedding dress in shades of blood red. I was marrying Julian Thorne, a man who despised me, believing the lies that had ruined my reputation. This wasn't a marriage; it was a sentence, orchestrated perfectly by my stepsister, Sophia, who had always wanted Julian for herself. Everyone saw Eleanor Vance, the brilliant architect, as the luckiest woman alive, but my heart was a cold stone. As the word "I do" escaped my lips-a whispered surrender-a blinding white light engulfed me. I woke up in my old bedroom, the floral wallpaper still on the walls. My phone read October 12, 2014-ten years ago, the day of my first wedding, the one that never happened. Relief surged through me; I wasn't Julian Thorne's wife. But then dread set in as Sophia's text buzzed on my smaller, older phone: "Julian's family is coming for dinner tonight, you have to make a good impression!" It was all starting tonight, the very dinner where Sophia would introduce me to the Thornes, setting off the chain of events that would lead to my forced marriage. The contempt in Julian's eyes was already there, seeing me as a social climber, exactly the image Sophia had carefully crafted. I was trapped again, a ghost in my own life, burdened by a future I knew was coming: the Thorne family's imminent financial ruin, and my own career sacrificed to support them. But this time, I wasn't the naive girl to be manipulated. I knew all their secrets, and I would not spend another ten years as Eleanor Thorne. I would fight.

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