After Rebirth, I Refused the Cruel Alpha and Married the Dead Alpha King

At eight months pregnant, I was locked inside the sweltering glass sunroom of my own estate. My husband's "sweet" adopted sister, Sophie, stood in the cool air on the other side, sipping ice water as she watched the midday sun bake me alive. When I shattered the glass to escape, my husband—a ruthless syndicate boss—finally returned. Sophie immediately dropped to the floor, faking tears and claiming I had gone mad and attacked her. Without a word of concern for my bleeding feet or my frantic pleas for a doctor, Dominic dragged me down to a windowless basement cell. "She needs to sweat this fever out of her." He turned the heat up to a scorching roar and locked the heavy iron door. In that dark, roasting oven, I cramped and bled out on the concrete floor. I lost my baby, and my body was so traumatized I could never carry a child again. Lying in a pool of my own blood, the truth finally pierced through my blind gratitude. Dominic had staged the accident that brought us together just to infiltrate my family. He never loved me; he only wanted to steal my empire and replace me with his mistress once he thought my protective older brother was dead. With the last of my strength, I dipped my fingers into my blood and wrote "Vengeance" on the steel wall. Just then, an explosion shook the foundation, and the door was blown off its hinges. My brother, very much alive, stepped through the smoke.

I spent three years secretly healing my paralyzed Alpha husband, finally helping him walk again. But when a bridge snapped and plunged me and my fake sister into a toxic, silver-laced lake, he swam right past me. He pulled her to safety and left me sinking in the burning water. When the patrol finally dragged my half-dead body to the shore, he didn't even ask about my severe burns. Instead, he looked at me with cool irritation and called me a petulant child. "Selena is a weak Beta. She cannot handle the silver water. You are my mate, you should be stronger." He even used his power to steal my career endorsements and gave them to her as compensation. I looked at the man whose crippled legs I had massaged every night with my hidden power. He didn't know I was the one who saved his life, and he clearly didn't care if I lost mine. My three years of quiet devotion were nothing but a pathetic joke to him. With a dead heart, I walked into his office and threw the official rejection scroll onto his desk. "I, Serena, reject you, Hunter, as my mate." Ignoring his sudden, agonizing panic as our bond shattered, I booked a one-way ticket to Europe. This time, I was going to live for myself.

He married her as a contract, a duty, a cold transaction that lasted three years. She loved him so much that she sold herself to him—just to save her mother's life. He called her a “commodity,” said she was “tainted,” pinned her down in the back of his car while whispering another woman's name—Britt. Then she finally gave up. She placed the divorce papers in front of him and said quietly, “Francisco, let's end this.” For the first time, he panicked. The man who never really looked at her began spending entire nights outside her hospital room, his hands trembling as he reached for her—then pulled back. He searched for her like a madman, begging with bloodshot eyes: “Evelyn… just give me one more chance…” But she gently removed his hand, her voice softer than the wind: “Francisco, you lost my heart a long time ago.”

For six years, I guarded my fiancé's empty grave through blizzards and thunderstorms, surviving multiple suicide attempts because the guilt of his fatal car crash was eating me alive. Until an anonymous message led me to a luxury penthouse, where I found him perfectly healthy, his arms wrapped around his former secretary's pregnant belly. He had faked his own death to escape his mafia blood oath, keep the dirty money, and dump me. When I confronted him, he violently shoved me into a stone fireplace, leaving me bleeding out on the marble floor. "If anything happens to my new family, I will enact a Vendetta on you that will make the last six years look like a joke." To protect his pristine facade, he threatened to cancel my dying adoptive mother's heart transplant unless I publicly confessed to being a delusional stalker. I complied, but his mistress still snuck into the ICU, verbally abused my mother, and bribed the organ broker to back out. My mother flatlined right in front of me. I didn't understand how the man I had mourned for over two thousand days could watch me freeze in the snow for a box of dirt, only to coldly orchestrate the murder of my only family. Holding my mother's ashes, I scheduled a video exposing his dirty money, and jumped off the cross-river bridge. But I didn't die. When I opened my eyes, the city's most lethal Mafia Don was standing by my bed, offering me a gun and a throne built from their ashes.

Alida caught her boyfriend in bed with another woman, only to discover a frat house contract on his nightstand. Her love and submission had been nothing but a fifty-thousand-dollar bet. She extorted the check from him to pay for her dying father's surgery, then went to a club to drink away the brutal betrayal. But her malicious stepsister secretly drugged her drink, planning to sell her to an underground thug to pay off a debt. Burning from the chemical mix and running on pure terror, Alida escaped into a VIP hallway and crashed straight into a wall of solid muscle. Desperate and out of her mind, she slapped the fifty-thousand-dollar check against the handsome stranger's chest. "I'm buying you for the night." She had no idea the man she just bought was Jax Vaughn, the ruthless, untouchable billionaire tyrant of Wall Street. The next morning, Alida fled the penthouse, leaving behind a single crumpled hundred-dollar bill and a humiliating note. "Service fee. Average skills. Like an uncivilized beast." Seven years later, Alida returned to New York, holding the hand of her genius seven-year-old son who possessed the exact same pitch-black eyes as the billionaire. She thought her past was buried forever, safely hidden away from the monster she had insulted. But her father's mounting medical bills forced her to accept a high-paying executive interview at Vaughn Enterprises. In the middle of the grand lobby, she stepped right into a familiar, terrifying chest. Jax Vaughn's iron grip locked onto her wrist, recognizing her scent instantly, his eyes burning with seven years of obsessive, murderous rage. "You."

For three years, Alyson endured a suffocating marriage, while her biological family treated her like a stray dog compared to her sister, Chelsea. She thought her husband Kenton would at least show her basic human decency. But during a horrific car crash in a freezing storm, Kenton used his own body to shield Chelsea. Meanwhile, a massive, out-of-control truck slammed into Alyson, throwing her broken body into a muddy ditch. With shattered ribs and blood blurring her vision, she reached out a trembling hand to him for help. Kenton just stared at her coldly through the rain. "Stop faking it. It's just a scrape." Without another glance, he wrapped his arm around the completely uninjured Chelsea and drove away, leaving Alyson to bleed out in the mud. Hours later, after being saved from the brink of death by a mysterious stranger, her phone rang. It was Kenton, furiously demanding she bring Chelsea's anxiety medication to the hospital. He didn't even care to ask where she was, let alone realize she was severely injured. Alyson couldn't understand how the man she loved could be so blindly cruel, or why her own parents constantly orchestrated her destruction. The pathetic hope she had clung to for three years finally shattered into dust. She dragged her battered body back to their penthouse, hiding a divorce settlement inside a stack of tedious charity documents. When Kenton arrogantly signed his name without reading a single line, Alyson turned her back on the toxic family for good.