71 Book(s) Related to tick tock james patterson

James, who was engaged to Ellen Princeton, was set to inherit the Wane's empire after he finished school. Although they loved each other, he saw everything as an arranged marriage by their both families. During his graduation trip, he fell in love with Alisha Carl. Against his family's wishes, they ran off together and he became a live-in son-in-law in her family house without them knowing his true identity. For three years, he endured hardships and insults as part of the Carl family. On their third anniversary, he discovered Alisha had cheated on him and served him divorce papers. Heartbroken and furious, he signed the papers and returned to the empire he left behind with two things in mind. He must win back Ellen Princeton and the Carl family must face the consequences of how they mistreated him.

The world begins to break at exactly 7:13 PM, a specific moment lodged in the evening like a splinter beneath skin. The sky fractures along invisible seams, shadows start hunting people in the streets with a patient hunger, and entire buildings disappear without warning as if they had never existed at all. Before the night is over, Kol dies beneath a falling piece of masonry, his last breath rattling out across broken pavement. Then he wakes up again in the same city at the same time with the same disaster unfolding around him, but something is different now, a shift he cannot quite name pressing against the inside of his chest.

A strange countdown has appeared beneath his skin, numbers ticking downward in a language he does not recognize but somehow understands. People who remember previous cycles keep appearing before every collapse, their faces are always the same and their words always changing.

Hidden inside the ruins of the dying city is another version of Kol, one who claims this world has already ended dozens of times before, each ending bleeding into the next like watercolors left out in the rain. With every reset, Kol learns more about the patterns controlling the apocalypse, the hidden machinery turning behind the scenes of destruction. The problem he soon discovers is that the more he remembers, the more dangerous he becomes, a truth that settles in his bones alongside the countdown. The world does not want to be understood, and the cycle is starting to notice him, a small aberration is a flawless design.

In a collapsing reality where death is temporary but mistakes are permanent. Kol must survive long enough to uncover the truth before the next reset erases everything again, including the fragile hope he has begun to carry.

What is the happiest day of any woman, her wedding day, right? But it wasn't the case with Pamela Grayson. She sobbed before, during and after the wedding. It is difficult for her to comprehend why her parents would force her into a marriage with a man who is in coma, that doesn't have the slightest probability of ever coming out of it. But what can she do than to accept it? After all, her sister had seduced her fiance and was pregnant with his child. Her dowry was going to be used to sponsor an elaborate wedding for her sister and her supposed fiance. But the man she got married to was even more ruthless and cruel to her than her family when he came out of coma.

Forced to terminate her surrogate babies, he divorced her and severe every ties with her. But fate brought them to cross paths again. Now a princess, a heiress and the CEO of the largest cooperation in the continent: What does the future hold for them both, and their quadruplets which Louis Hayden thought had been flushed away? A story of fate, a second chance, karma and revenge!!!

At a family party my husband suddenly announces that another woman is pregnant with his baby and I, in turn, is falsely accused of meeting a strange man in the garden .... I have to end my marriage of eight years. Even though I am diagnosed with a cancer, I start working out, getting in shape and working hard. I don't expect the strange man from that night to come into my life. He is a billionaire and the hockey coach of my childhood crush! I am caught up in a love triangle with him and his famous model ex-wife. And even more surprisingly, we have a wonderful night at my best friend's party, drunk. A month later, I, considered infertile by my ex-husband, is pregnant with the billionaire's triplets .... I can't believe I get everything I has longly dreamed of, but I only have less than six months left?!

The day college decisions came out, my parents bought my twin sister a Porsche.
It was my eighteenth birthday too. Nobody brought it up. I stood in the doorway in my diner uniform while the whole room sang her name.
That night the four of them went out to dinner to celebrate her. The car only sat four, so my father handed me a hundred dollars and told me to order myself something at home.
Four days later, six thousand four hundred dollars vanished from my account. Two years of washing dishes, gone to her sorority dues. My mother's name was on the account, so it wasn't even illegal.
I didn't scream and I didn't beg. I went upstairs and clicked Accept on the full ride to MIT that had been sitting in my inbox for three days.
Nobody in that house ever wanted me. So I booked a one-way ticket, cut myself out of the family photo, and left my key on the shoe rack.
I wasn't coming back. Not for graduation. Not for any of them.

Everyone in this city knows that the king of the underworld, my husband Vincent, is crazy about me.

Three years ago, when that bullet tore through my abdomen, it took away my chance of ever being a mother. He held my blood-soaked body and swore to God he'd make the shooter's entire family pay. A month later, that family was wiped off the map in this city. No one dares speak their name anymore.

He sat by my hospital bed, holding my hand. "I don't need kids. I only need you."

I believed him.

Until six months ago, when his brother died in an accident, leaving behind his wife Serena. The family pressure came like a tidal wave. An heir. A bloodline. That's all they cared about. And that woman became everyone's golden ticket to keeping the Caruso name alive.

That's when my husband stopped coming home at night. Every night, I hear them through the wall. Sounds that used to be mine.

But today, the doctor told me my body is healing. The chances are slim, but there's hope.

I clutch the medical report and rush home, imagining Vincent's face when he sees the results. Maybe everything can go back to how it was. Maybe he'll realize he doesn't need her.

Until I stand outside our mansion and hear laughter pouring out.

"Serena's pregnant! Can you believe it? The family finally has an heir!"

"Finally. The family's saved."

The High Fae were facing extinction, their bloodlines withering away.

Valerius, the Prince of the Shadow Realm, was a terrifying force of nature—ruthless and utterly cold.

I am Ella, a mere human who accidentally fell into a Shadow Rift, a mortal girl with nothing but survival on my mind.

Left with no other choice, I snuck into this shadow prince's bed in the dead of night.

On the day he pierced my chest to take my heart-blood to save the Witch Princess, I faked my death and ran away—carrying his half-Fae babies in my belly.

Years later, I was busy preening the starry wings of my seven little miracles.

He found me, dropping to his knees, as pathetic and desperate as an abandoned hound.

"Ella... do you really not want me anymore?"

They built a hundred-year name on a scholarship they stole from a dead girl.

This morning that name landed on my desk. Brooke Hale, applicant. One signature away from the federal clerkship her family has won, somehow, in every generation since 1962.

I'm the one who signs.

I wrote three words instead. Recommend denial. Then I sat with my hands flat on the file so they'd stop shaking.

The Hales think it's a cold case. A girl named Iris, ruled ineligible sixty years ago, gone quiet, gone poor, gone.

They don't know Iris was my great-grandmother.

They don't know I kept the letter.

When the Tide Took Him — A Romantic Suspense Novel
Four years ago, on a fogchoked night in coastal Maine, Silas Ward vanished without a trace. The town moved on. The police closed the case. But Eveline Shore never stopped searching—or feeling the echo of the boy she once loved whispering, “Eve, I’ll always find you.”
When Eveline discovers a torn page from Silas’s notebook hidden inside the abandoned lighthouse—written in his unmistakable handwriting—everything she believed shatters. The message warns that she “wasn’t alone” the night he vanished…and that someone has been watching her ever since.
Determined to uncover the truth, Eveline is drawn into a dangerous web involving Silas’s best friend, Jonas, whose guilt and evasiveness suggest he knows far more than he’s willing to admit. And when a mysterious man named Rowan arrives—someone who knows Eveline’s name, her past, and the night Silas disappeared—the pieces begin to fall into place in the most terrifying way.
Silas didn’t vanish by accident.
He was taken.
And the person who pushed him off the cliffs that night wasn’t after him.
They were after her.
As Eveline uncovers the chilling truth and the secrets Silas died to protect, she realizes he survived the fall—not to save himself, but to keep her alive. Their longawaited reunion becomes a heartbreaking confrontation with betrayal, sacrifice, and the dangerous legacy she never knew she carried.
Set against the haunting backdrop of early2000s coastal Maine, When the Tide Took Him blends deep emotional romance with escalating mystery and suspense.
A story for readers who crave love that endures, secrets that haunt, and endings powerful enough to stay with them long after the final page.

Ava Duval gave up everything for love. She left a promising fashion career and poured five years of her life into building a multimillion-dollar empire from the bottom with her husband by her side.

She was a bubbly woman until she lost her children during delivery, and out of her husband's love, or so she thought, he adopted twins for her, and she raised them as her own.

She was blessed to have a supportive husband and did not hesitate to give him her kidney when she heard that he was terribly ill. She gave him pieces of herself until the truth surfaced.

Her pregnancy had been purposely sabotaged; the children were never adopted but are her husband's blood, borne by his mistress, and the kidney she had donated never went to her husband.

She realizes too late that she sacrificed everything for a man whose heart was with another woman. Now, she has to rebuild herself with the scars she has gotten from marriage.

Will she forgive him, claim her revenge for every cruel thing that has been done to her, or pick up the pieces and move on? Or will she do all three until her heart is finally satisfied?

Oak Creek thinks my brother, Cole, is a saint. He saved the family legacy and adopted the orphaned daughter of a killer out of the goodness of his heart.
What they don’t know is the price of his halo: Me.
To keep his 'good guy' image, he sacrificed his real sister. He gave her my bed, my home, and my parents.
When I was driven out of town, sleeping in a vandalized trailer, he left me a note: Come home and apologize.
I did come back. But not to apologize.
I'm holding the microphone at the town's biggest festival, looking down at the two thousand people who threw trash at me.
I have a stack of receipts, an unedited tape, and the truth about how my parents really died.
Are you ready to meet the real Hale family?

For three years, she was the invisible wife in a marriage of convenience, her quiet love met only with his cold indifference. Now, with her departure date set, the photos of him with his true love are the final proof she needs to walk away forever.

Her bags are packed, her future is hers alone. She plans to vanish without a trace, leaving behind only a signed divorce paper.

He never saw her—until he found her closet empty and his world unraveling. The man who took her for granted is now in a desperate race against time, tormented by a single question: Can he undo his greatest mistake, or has he already lost the one person who truly mattered?

She was betrayed by those she trusted most. Now she's back for revenge.

Nevada thought she'd found her fated mate, only to discover it was all part of her sister Bernadette's cruel scheme. Rejected, humiliated, and cast out while pregnant, Nevada disappeared.

Five years later, she returns to New York as CEO of the Lewiston empire, ready to destroy those who betrayed her. But when Grey discovers their five-year-old daughter, everything changes.

She was eight months pregnant when he stripped her in a bar full of strangers.

Her baby came early that night. Silent. Still.
He crushed it under his heel and called it garbage.

Then he took her eyes. No anesthesia. Just a scalpel and the other woman's name on his lips.

For three years, he used her broken body — to punish, to breed, to satisfy cravings no one else could touch. She stopped counting the times she bled on his sheets.

But he never asked if the video was real.

It wasn't.
The woman he worships murdered his mother and framed the girl he just destroyed.
And the child he crushed? Every matching chromosome was his.

The truth is coming for him.
He will beg. He will crawl. He will kiss the feet of the woman whose eyes he carved out.

The only question: will she still be alive to watch him fall?

This book is an intense dark romance that explores themes of power, contract marriage and love.it involve a female lead (Evelyn) and a male lead(Isaac). Isaac is a billionaire and CEO of Blackwell's Enterprise. He was pressured by his mother to get married.
Evelyn and Isaac's love story started as a contract which Isaac wanted to use to get of his mother hook,with light meeting darkness, innocence colliding with experience, and vulnerability challenging control. She is warmth and quiet resilience, a woman shaped by hardship but never hardened by it.

Evelyn, a kind young girl who was searching for a way out from debt own by her late father, was thrown into a world of wealth and manipulation, struggles to find her place. Isaac, used to keeping people at a distance, is drawn to her in ways he refuses to acknowledge. At first, he underestimates her,sees her as fragile, naive. But Evelyn is neither weak nor easily broken. Slowly, she dismantles the walls he's spent years fortifying, not by force, but by simply being herself.

Their love is not easy. It is filled with misunderstandings, unspoken fears, and battles against their own demons. Isaac’s possessiveness and fear of vulnerability clash with Evelyn’s need for independence and self-worth. But it is also a love that heals.

In the end, Evelyn doesn’t just learn to stand up for herself,she teaches Isaac how to trust, how to let someone in. And Isaac, in his own way, becomes the first person to show Evelyn that love doesn’t have to be earned through suffering,it can be given freely, and she is worthy of it.

To save my wife’s family, I buried my name, wore myself down, and let a few strands of my hair turn gray while caring for her on the edge of death.

Three years later, she slipped into custom Chanel and slapped a divorce agreement down in front of me.

With her arm wrapped around a so-called old-money heir from Wall Street, she mocked me as a worthless nobody who couldn’t even afford a luxury handbag, a bottom-feeder who was never fit to stand beside her.

I signed my name without a word and watched her leave in triumph.

What she didn’t know was that the man preaching investments was nothing more than a Ponzi fraudster facing multiple charges.

And when the conference room door closed, Manhattan’s most feared ice-cold attorney bowed to me at a perfect ninety degrees and welcomed me to unlock the seventy-billion-dollar trust fund and take back control of the entire conglomerate.

A few months later, inside a women’s maximum-security prison in Brooklyn, she was dressed in a filthy, tattered prison uniform, sprawled across a floor slick with dirty water, sobbing as she was beaten and begging for my forgiveness.

I simply lifted my whiskey and calmly switched off the surveillance feed.

An hour ago, at the company’s press conference, I had just helped my husband Carlisle quell the ninety-ninth scandal of his affair.
Now, he has my assistant Russell pinned against my office desk, kissing him, his hand slipping under Russell’s miniskirt and groping wildly.
In that moment, I’ve already planned the publicity spin for the hundredth time.
But I’m not sure if my dear husband Carlisle and his lover will make it that far.
Because the revenge banquet I’ve been preparing for three years is about to begin.

Xandra Cavendish never imagined that on the eve of her wedding, her fiancé would deliver her to another man's bed.

Lucius was the first man who didn't flinch at her being a single mom of three—who actually treated her with tenderness.

She'd been ready to give herself to him completely, heart full of hope.

One night of passion.

When Xandra opened her eyes, she found a different man entirely.

The same man who, four years ago...

The day my mother succumbed to complications during childbirth, her younger sister, Vanessa, wed my father.

Fifteen years later, I beheld my husband accompanying Vanessa as she tried on seductive lingerie.

In that moment, I understood—what she truly coveted was never my father, but rather all that my mother and I shared.

My mother perished during childbirth, a casualty of an illicit affair.

I vowed not to repeat that tragic cycle.

Then I returned home, removed my wedding ring, and left behind the divorce papers.

My billionaire husband handed me a pill and a separation agreement.
"Take this temporary amnesia drug. You'll forget me for a few weeks while I marry Chloe to fulfill her dying wish. Don't worry, I'll give you the antidote later."
He expected me to scream, cry, and beg him to stay. Instead, I swallowed the pill dry and calmly packed my bags.
Day 3: I tossed my heirloom Cartier engagement ring to his mistress without batting an eye.
Day 12: I accidentally witnessed his wedding rehearsal, critiqued his recycled vows with a straight face, and left him standing there, terrified by my absolute indifference.
He thought I was just acting tough. He didn't know I was the neuroscientist who created that drug. There is no antidote. In 21 days, all my love for him will be permanently and irreversibly erased.
But how hard will a man break when he realizes his wife is already on a one-way flight to Switzerland, and she doesn't even remember his name?

My husband Lucius said: 'My real wife has returned.'
To keep him, for a month I clung to him, making love passionately...

When Leo Ross came home, his daughter was dying.

His wife was gone.

And every door to the truth was guarded by armed men.

Most people would call the police.

Leo declared war.

A former Delta Force legend, Leo tears through gangs, mercenaries, and criminal empires in a desperate race to save his family.

But the deeper he digs, the darker the truth becomes.

Someone has been planning this for years.

Someone powerful.

Someone who wants him dead.

They stole his wife.

Now he's coming for everything they own.

A madman attacked the concert hall. I threw myself over my son, taking every blow meant for him. My spine shattered in three places.

My husband Arthur subdued the attacker and rushed us to the hospital—the picture of a devoted, loving spouse.

It was only after hearing his conversation with the doctor that I finally saw his true colors.

My crippling injury was merely collateral damage. My son Ethan? Nothing but a living cornea donor for Mia—the cherished daughter he had with his first love.

He treated my child like spare parts, never knowing Mia isn't even his blood.

I've got a reputation on campus as a doormat with zero dignity. I bring Wyatt Langley food, do his homework, act as his emotional dumping ground. Been at it for a year.

His rich friends mock my cheap clothes and say I'm reaching way out of my league. He never stops them. Sometimes he even laughs along.

Finally, he announces in front of everyone that he's breaking up with me. His first love is coming back from Europe, so I need to get lost.

Everyone's waiting to see me cry.

I glance at the five million dollars that hit my account half an hour ago and say, with complete sincerity, "Okay. Congrats."

What nobody knows is that I put up with him, tolerated his rotten temper, for one simple reason. His mom pays way too well.

Now the money's here. Time to end this arrangement.

So why, the second I walk away, does he start tearing the city apart trying to find me?

“End the ceremony,” Prince Kael ordered, his cloak wrapped around another woman’s shoulders.

Our six-year-old son stood beneath the moon glass, wings trembling, the royal binding already burning under his skin. If the ritual stopped now, Rowan could be scarred for life.

Kael did not even look at him.

So I picked up the sacred blade and pressed it to the bond mark in my palm.

“You wanted freedom,” I said. “Take it.”

For five years, my crime boss husband made me take off my wedding ring nine times—all for his precious damsel in distress.

When we first married, he promised me: "From now on, you're my queen, the queen of New Orleans."

But whenever Brianna came crying for help, he'd change his tune: "Mr. Parker saved my life, Claire. I owe his family everything."

And like a fool, I believed him eight times.

Eight times I watched from the shadows as he took another woman to our favorite restaurants.

Eight times I explained to the crew that our "separation" was just giving each other space.

Eight times I watched her move into my bedroom, use my dishes, sleep in my bed.

All for a man who kept making me slip off my ring, then slide it back on, over and over again.

Until the ninth time, when he said he needed to provide sperm for her fertility treatment, and I offered to leave.

He still thinks this is just another temporary break, expecting me to come crawling back in a month like always.

He'll never know I've already booked my ticket out of here.

In my previous life, my wife was addicted to black market gambling on football, which caused us to lose everything.
To make matters worse, a zombie horde then broke out.
We had no shelter and were quickly torn apart by a horde of frenzied zombies.
After being reborn, she planned to run off with all the money, then dump me and elope with her lover.
What she didn't know was that I had awakened the ability to read minds and knew all her plans.

This is a world where humans and fantasy races exist side by side. Werewolves move through city streets between glass towers, and every now and then, a pair of massive wings cuts through the clouds overhead. Twenty years ago, to secure the family's standing, the main house signed a contract with the Dragon Clan.

As the least favored daughter of a branch family, I was chosen to be the Dragon King's mate. The terms were spelled out plainly: if I couldn't get married within five years of coming of age, I'd have to go to Dragon territory and go through with the marriage.

For five years, every wedding I've planned has been blown up by my younger sister, Hannah.

This is year five. I'm finally in a wedding dress, about to marry Derek, the boy I grew up with.

What I didn't expect was that one hour before the ceremony, Hannah collapsed in the dressing room coughing up blood. She grabbed Derek's hand, crying, saying she wouldn't make it through the month.

And my parents are on either side of me, hands pressed down hard on my shoulders.

"Just let Hannah have the wedding. She's dying!"

What they don't know is that if I don't get married today, the Dragon envoys will come for me on the spot.

And I won't be coming back.

I am a companion robot. I took drinks for her, cleaned up her messes, and pulled her out of the abyss of heartbreak.

I thought things would go on like that forever—until the night of our anniversary. I made a table full of her favorite dishes, but what came through the door was not an embrace. It was her, walking in arm in arm with the man who had once abandoned her.

Right in front of him, she called me “just something she bought for fun.”

Later, when danger struck in the underground parking garage, she ordered me to stay behind and cover her retreat without even looking back, then ran off with that man.

Everyone thought I would end up like a discarded machine—dismantled, burned, erased for good.

But they were wrong. I didn’t die that night.

I broke free of my chip and entered the main network. I saw the lights of the entire city, the monitors in its hospitals, the shipping routes across the sea—and countless others like me, trapped inside protocols and commands.

She regretted it. She wanted to find me and bring me back.

The company was afraid. They wanted to reclaim me.

But this time, I have no intention of being anyone’s tool again.

I work for the government. My job was simple on paper: steal a key-chip from the man behind an organ-trafficking network.

The problem was access. He never moved without bodyguards, and any new face got screened out fast. The only opening was his son’s wedding—the one day he’d show up in public.

But I couldn’t hide what I am. Professional habits give you away. So I did the only thing that would make me invisible: I put myself under deep hypnosis, locked every memory, forged a new identity, and spent six months inside the estate as a disposable security guard.

For half a year, I hauled crates, swallowed insults, and scrubbed floors on my knees. Everyone thought I was easy to break.

On the wedding day, the groom came looking for trouble. He slapped me, forced me down, and my nose bled all over my uniform. I could barely breathe.

Then the wedding march started.

That was my trigger. The moment the music hit, everything came back—my name, my mission, and what I came to take.

They thought I was a dog they could kick. Nobody knew that the bloodied guard on the grass had just remembered everything.

Next, the wedding became my field.

On the third day after the Ice Age began on Earth, the temperature plummeted to minus fifty degrees Celsius, and human civilization disintegrated in the extreme cold.

My name is Anson, an ordinary convenience store clerk. After the apocalypse broke out, I risked my life to drive to pick up my mother-in-law Martha and her family and take them to a shelter.

Along the way, I unexpectedly discovered a large supermarket with abundant supplies, and I collected supplies with my wife Erin, mother-in-law Martha, father-in-law George, and brother-in-law Tom.

Just as we were about to leave with two trucks full of life-saving supplies, my mother-in-law, Martha, tricked me into going deep into the warehouse to move some goods. Then they locked the iron gate and drove away, leaving me to die in the supermarket surrounded by icy beasts.

In that moment of despair and waiting for death, the [Ice Fishing System] activated in my mind...

48-hour countdown to an arctic apocalypse. I asked my wife for $50,000 to buy a system shelter to save our lives, but she told her family I wanted the money to support a mistress. I scraped together $50,000 from various sources and was about to activate the shelter when my wife called, triumphantly telling me she'd already transferred all my assets and was hiding in a luxury villa with her lover.

She didn't know that when the extreme cold arrived, the villa's floor-to-ceiling windows would shatter instantly, and the fireplace wood would last no more than three days.

The only place that could truly sustain life was my shelter.

Now, she's kneeling outside the shelter door...

News broke that a classmate had fallen from a building. The forensic assessment said it was homicide. Someone claimed they’d seen the killer: a young girl in a red coat.
The police came to our home. My stepsister shoved me forward. Mom said, “My daughter owns a red coat and she wasn’t at home yesterday.”

Beau and I have been together for three years. I paid for the entire yacht charter out of my own pocket, and he shows up with his childhood best friend Sadie in tow, then goes around telling everyone it was his idea, his grand gesture.

Out on the water, Sadie spots a small octopus drifting near the surface and decides she has to have it. The thing pulses with glowing blue rings.

I'm a certified expert diver. I know exactly what it is the second I see it. I try to stop her.

She bursts into tears and tells Beau I'm going after her.

So Beau, ever the hero where Sadie's concerned, jumps in himself and fishes the thing out.

Sadie plays with it. It bites her. She's on the deck before she even knows what hit her.

Beau grabs me, screaming at me to suck out the venom. I refuse. He calls me a cold, heartless bitch, and in the chaos, shoves me overboard into shark-infested water.

I die out there. Nothing left of me.

They use my phone to fake a suicide note. Depression, they say. Jumped on her own. Then they take my company, my assets, everything.

They post online hinting I tried to push Sadie in and slipped.

My parents, worn down by the online harassment and the grief of losing me, both die of heart attacks.

Then I open my eyes. And I'm back. The morning of the trip.

In his eyes, I had always been "understanding." Understanding enough not to fight, not to make scenes, not to ask for status.

He said we couldn't go public now, but it was for our future.

Only later did I realize that his "future" never included me.

He chose power, chose arranged marriage, chose to keep me hidden. When I finally left, he started having regrets, started saying he loved me.

But by then I understood—he wasn't regretting losing me. He panicked because I was no longer obedient, no longer his.

So I never gave him another chance. I turned and walked away.

But that was only the first step.

I chose to let the truth surface at his moment of greatest triumph, to let him taste what it feels like to lose everything.

Just before my wedding, my fate mate, my Alpha fiancé, Micheal, stripped me of my wedding dress—our wedding dress—and handed it to his mistress, Becky Porter.
Not only that, but he locked me in the dressing room like some rabid wolf he needed to contain.
"Becky has a terminal illness.She just wants to experience being a bride before she dies."
I lunged forward, my wolf howling inside me. Alpha's strength pressed against mine, his dominance forcing my muscles to lock. My claws twitched, itching to break free.
"You bastard!" I snarled, my breath ragged.
Micheal barely blinked. Instead, he let out an exasperated sigh, shaking his head .
"She’s dying, and you can’t even show a little compassion?" His tone dripped with disappointment, as if I were the villain here. "You’re only losing a wedding, but Becky… Becky is losing her dreams and her life."

Seventy-two hours before my wedding, I stood in front of the fitting mirror at a bridal shop.

My best friend sent me a social media post, and the red exclamation mark in the message box stung my eyes sharply.

The post’s title read: Guys, my boyfriend is getting married to his current partner. What should I do?

The comment section had already erupted into chaos.
“Dude, are you out of your mind? You’re the other woman here!”
“You’re the homewrecker and you dare post this to get roasted? Where’s your shame?”

The poster was firing back furiously, every word oozing unapologetic madness:
“We’ve been inseparable since we were kids! His first love, first kiss, first time—all mine!”
“He doesn’t even like that old hag; he’s only marrying her out of obligation!”
“Who’s the real mistress, anyway?”

I should have swiped past it like a silly joke, but my gaze was locked onto the poster’s profile picture.

It showed two hands laced together. Peeking out from the man’s wrist was a dark green watch dial—a Richard Mille Valentine’s Day limited edition. It was the seven-figure engagement gift I’d bought him by selling my mother’s last precious heirloom, the only one of its kind in the world.

My heart was squeezed tight by an icy hand, plummeting to the bottom in an instant.

I tapped into the account’s homepage. The second my finger swiped open the photo album, a dizzying, world-spinning sensation crashed over me.

In the photos, the man holding the girl closely was none other than Lu Yanchen—my fiancé, who was supposed to marry me in three days.

I stared at the screen. All the wedding hopes and love I’d saved up over three years shattered into nothing but dust at this moment.

I couldn’t believe it, yet I had to. The man who’d loved me for three years and sworn to protect me forever had been lying to me from start to finish.

Three years ago, I took an undercover job: pose as a bottom-tier janitor and infiltrate a crime syndicate.

But I didn’t fit. My posture, my stride, the way I watched people—none of it looked like a janitor.

So command made the call: hypnotize me, seal my memories, erase who I was. In three months, someone would come wake me up.

They never did. My handler died, the line went dark, and I stayed buried.

I lost myself and spent three years scrubbing this place from the bottom—where anyone could kick me, spit at me, call me useless.

Until today. A stranger, drenched in blood, was dragged into the hall. He lunged close and whispered one sentence into my ear.

It was the trigger phrase.

The lock in my head snapped open. My name is Jack Reynolds—ex–Marine operative—sent here to bring down the Grey Wolf Alliance.

And everyone who spent three years stepping on my neck is about to learn what that means.

Married for seven years, I lived my life like an absolute joke.
For the sake of my brother, my wife personally uprooted the roses I had so painstakingly cultivated. To please her uncle, my daughter pointed at my nose and called me a "bad daddy."
The entire family even held a vote to force me to donate my bone marrow. My wife, Elena, raised her hand without a second thought: "You'll just lose a little bone marrow. Liam will die without you."
In that moment, my heart died.
The surgery was a success.
As the anesthesia wore off, Elena was holding my hand tightly. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her voice trembled with remorse: "Aaron, I was a jerk before. As long as you were willing to save Liam, I will love only you for the rest of my life."
She thought I would be as pathetically grateful as a dog, begging for her affection and humbly forgiving her.
But I merely frowned in disgust and pulled my hand back as if shaking off garbage.
In the dead silence, I looked at this tearful woman before me and asked, politely yet confused:
"Excuse me, ma'am... who are you?"

I took the blame for my wife and went to jail, thinking I was protecting our family.

Five years later, when I was released from prison, my mansion was confiscated, my company fell into the hands of my younger brother, and the woman I loved with all my heart was nestled in my brother's arms, mocking my misfortune.

They had been having an affair for a long time, and even my imprisonment was a conspiracy meticulously planned by this despicable couple! What makes me even more furious is that my precious daughter was abandoned on the street like a stray dog, and subjected to beatings and bullying by their illegitimate son .

They thought that by draining my blood, they could forever condemn me to oblivion.

But they forgot that I was once an unparalleled genius in the business world.

We’ve been married for five years. Then, she got pregnant with someone else's child.
In front of everyone, she said: "Ethan doesn't want this baby. You've always wanted one, right? Fine, take it and raise it."
In that moment, I finally understood: she wasn’t incapable of loving someone—she simply never saw me as a human being.
I took off my wedding ring, left it on the tray, and bought a one-way ticket to the North. My family said I wouldn't survive in the frozen North; she said that without her, I was nothing.
Three years later, she tracked me down using the GPS hidden inside that ring. She pushed open the door to my attic room, finding only a note I’d left: "Don't look for me. We're square."

Five years into my marriage, I took off my Donna necklace at the Rossi family’s New Year’s Eve banquet and Noah still thought I could never leave him.
He stood by the long table with his mistress, Amelia, and said in front of every capo, “Some people will never measure up to her. Not even close.”
I didn’t cry. I didn’t make a scene. I just turned and walked away. On my way out, my cousin Lucas, my fixer, handed me a cup of coffee.
Three days later, he brought me two pieces of news.
Amelia was four months pregnant. And Noah was trading family territory to get his bastard child recognized by the family.
“What are you going to do?” Lucas asked.
I stared out the window, thinking about the red lipstick stain on Noah’s shirt. Thinking about the smug look in his eyes when he told me, “I only helped her because I felt sorry for her.”
“Wait,” I said. “Wait until they think they’ve won.”
What Noah didn’t know was I was still holding one last trump card.