The Substitute Bride of the Scarred Billionaire Heir

“I woke up naked in a stranger's bed aboard the Seraphina, a luxury yacht drifting across the Atlantic. My head was splitting. My dress was torn on the floor. Bruises bloomed across my skin like proof of a crime I couldn't remember committing. Before I could even scream, the cabin door burst open. My father stood there with my boyfriend behind him, leading a swarm of reporters with flashing cameras. "I have no such daughter. From this day forward, Alaina Romero has nothing to do with the Snyder family." My father disowned me in front of the world. My boyfriend looked at me like I was filth and ended everything without asking a single question. I had been drugged, framed, and destroyed in one night. When I tried to throw myself into the Atlantic, my stepmother stopped me. Not because she cared. She needed me alive long enough to take her precious daughter's place in an arranged marriage. If I refused, she would cut off my dying mother's life support. That was how I became the bride of Dereck Carlisle, the billionaire heir everyone whispered about but no one dared to face. They said he was disfigured. Violent. Half-mad. A monster locked away inside his family's grand estate. He hated me before we even met. His family treated me like a stain on their name. The servants mocked me. His relatives tried to humiliate me. Someone even tried to scald me with boiling tea. I had lost my family, my reputation, my education, and my future. They thought I would break. But then I saw the monster no one else saw clearly. Dereck Carlisle, shaking in the dark, trapped inside the agony of severe PTSD. I didn't run. I threw him the handmade herbal sachet my mother taught me to make, and for the first time in years, his demons went quiet. They locked me in a cage and called me a pawn. Fine. I would survive their cage. Then I would make every last one of them regret underestimating me.”