Betrayed Bride, Ruthless Tycoon, Real Love

Kattie Eaton

Romance | Completed

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Tonight was my engagement party, the beginning of the perfect life my fiancé, Mark, had promised me. The ballroom glittered, filled with white roses and the smiling faces of our friends and family. But just before my grand entrance, I overheard him talking to his sister, Isabella. "She's so ridiculously naive," he laughed. "Swallowed every lie. This sham of an engagement secured it all. Her family's company is ours now." I threw the door open, only to find them locked in a passionate, desperate kiss. He just smirked at me, his eyes cold. "The act is over," he said. "Did you really think I could ever love someone as pathetic as you?" When I ran to my father for help, he called me hysterical and sided with Mark, the man who had just destroyed my life. A text message confirmed the nightmare: Mark had frozen all my accounts. He'd taken everything. My only hope was a desperate one: Julian Thorne. A ruthless corporate predator and Mark's biggest rival. I went to him to beg for help. He looked at me with cold, calculating eyes and revealed a shocking secret. My family's company had already belonged to him for weeks. Then he made his offer. He would give me my revenge. In return, I had to sign a marriage contract and become his wife.

Betrayal Revenge CEO Contract marriage Romance

Chapter 10

01-06 21:38

Chapter 1

Tonight was my engagement party, the beginning of the perfect life my fiancé, Mark, had promised me. The ballroom glittered, filled with white roses and the smiling faces of our friends and family.

But just before my grand entrance, I overheard him talking to his sister, Isabella.

"She's so ridiculously naive," he laughed. "Swallowed every lie. This sham of an engagement secured it all. Her family's company is ours now."

I threw the door open, only to find them locked in a passionate, desperate kiss.

He just smirked at me, his eyes cold.

"The act is over," he said. "Did you really think I could ever love someone as pathetic as you?"

When I ran to my father for help, he called me hysterical and sided with Mark, the man who had just destroyed my life. A text message confirmed the nightmare: Mark had frozen all my accounts. He'd taken everything.

My only hope was a desperate one: Julian Thorne. A ruthless corporate predator and Mark's biggest rival.

I went to him to beg for help. He looked at me with cold, calculating eyes and revealed a shocking secret. My family's company had already belonged to him for weeks.

Then he made his offer. He would give me my revenge. In return, I had to sign a marriage contract and become his wife.

Chapter 1

The champagne flute felt impossibly cold in my hand, a stark contrast to the warmth blooming in my chest. Tonight was supposed to be the beginning of forever. Our engagement party.

The grand ballroom of The Veridia Hotel was a sea of glittering chandeliers and smiling faces. The air was thick with the scent of expensive perfume and white roses, my favorite. Every detail was perfect, a testament to the perfect life Mark had promised me.

I paused just outside the arched doorway to the main hall, taking a moment to smooth down the silk of my gown. It was a custom piece, the color of a summer sky at dusk, and it had cost a fortune. Mark had insisted. "Nothing is too good for my future wife," he'd murmured, his lips brushing my temple. The memory sent another wave of affection through me. How had I gotten so lucky?

A low murmur of voices drifted from a small, private study to my left, the door slightly ajar. I recognized the smooth, confident cadence of my fiancé, Mark Sterling, and the lighter, sharper tones of his sister, Isabella. I smiled, thinking to catch them for a quick moment before making my grand entrance.

I took a step closer, my hand reaching for the heavy oak door, when Mark's words stopped me cold.

"She's so ridiculously naive, isn't she? Swallowed every lie, hook, line, and sinker." His voice was laced with a cruel amusement I had never heard before. It was a chilling, ugly sound.

My heart stuttered. *He can't be talking about me.* It had to be a joke, some business rival he was discussing.

Isabella laughed, a sound like shattering glass. "Honestly, Mark, I'm almost impressed. The devoted fiancé act? The endless talk about your 'perfect Clara'? You deserve an award. Did you see her face when you gave her that ridiculous heirloom ring? She looked like she was going to cry."

The blood drained from my face, leaving my skin clammy. The heirloom ring on my finger suddenly felt like a lead weight.

I pressed my back against the cool, textured wallpaper of the corridor, my breath catching in my throat. The scent of roses from the ballroom now seemed cloying, suffocating.

"It was all worth it," Mark said, his voice dropping lower. "The final papers are signed. Her father's company, all its assets, everything her family built... it's ours now. The merger is complete. And this sham of an engagement secured it all."

The champagne flute slipped from my numb fingers, shattering on the marble floor. The sound was deafening in the sudden silence of my world. The warmth in my chest had turned to a shard of ice, piercing me through.

*No. No, this isn't happening.*

Rage, white-hot and blinding, surged through me, overriding the shock. I shoved the study door open with a force that made it slam against the wall. "What did you just say?"

The scene inside was a thousand times worse than the words I'd overheard. Mark wasn't just standing with his sister. He had Isabella pressed against a large mahogany desk, his hands tangled in her hair, their mouths locked in a passionate, desperate kiss that had nothing to do with sibling affection.

They sprang apart, but it was too late. The image was burned into my mind. The sight of them, the truth of them, was a physical blow.

Mark recovered first. He straightened his tie, his expression shifting from momentary shock to a cold, reptilian smirk. There was no remorse in his eyes, no shame. Only a chilling finality.

"The act is over," he said, his voice flat and devoid of the warmth I had cherished for two years. He looked at me, his gaze sweeping over my carefully chosen gown, my tear-filled eyes, my trembling hands, as if I were something distasteful he'd found on the bottom of his shoe. "Did you really think I could ever love someone as pathetic as you, Clara?"

Each word was a hammer blow, shattering the beautiful illusion of my life into a million pieces. Pathetic. Naive. A tool to be used and discarded. The man I loved, the man I was going to marry, didn't exist. He had never existed.

I couldn't breathe. I couldn't think. My body moved on pure instinct, a primal need to escape. I turned and fled. I ran from the study, past the blurred, questioning faces at the ballroom entrance, past the glittering lights and the mocking scent of roses. I pushed through the heavy glass doors of the hotel and out into the night.

Veridia was weeping with me. A torrential downpour had begun, the rain cold and merciless, plastering my silk gown to my skin in seconds. The carefully styled curls in my hair collapsed, sending streams of water and mascara down my face. I didn't care. I just ran, blindly, my bare feet slapping against the slick pavement, the sound lost in the roar of the storm and the frantic, broken sobs tearing from my throat.

Tears and rain blinded me. I stumbled off the curb and directly into the path of a sleek, black car that materialized out of the deluge. Tires screeched against the wet asphalt, the sound a raw scream of metal and rubber. The car stopped, its formidable chrome grille inches from my body.

I was frozen, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. My entire body trembled, not from the cold, but from the utter devastation that had hollowed me out.

The back window, tinted to an impenetrable black, slid down with a silent, electric hum. A man sat in the leather-scented interior, bathed in the soft glow of a dashboard light. His face was all sharp angles and shadows, his jaw tight, his eyes a piercing, glacial blue. It was Julian Thorne. The Julian Thorne. A man known in Veridia as a corporate titan, a ruthless predator who devoured companies whole. His reputation was as dark and imposing as the storm raging around us.

He looked at me, huddled and dripping on the street like a drowned rat. His expression was one of pure, unadulterated disdain.

"Get out of my way," he said, his voice a low, chilling rumble that cut through the noise of the rain.

I flinched, ready to stumble back, to disappear. But then his eyes, those cold, calculating eyes, flickered down. They snagged on the antique silver locket resting against my collarbone, a final gift from my late mother. For a split second, the disdain in his gaze was replaced by something else. A flicker of intense, unreadable emotion that was gone as quickly as it appeared.

Then the mask was back in place. The window began to slide up, sealing him away in his world of power and wealth, leaving me alone in mine of ruin and rain.