The Substitute Bride's Twins: chasing his ex wife back
Everyone called her the replaceable spare.
Forced to marry the ruthless billionaire Sebastian King in her spoiled younger sister Clara's place, Seraphina Voss endured the ultimate humiliation on her wedding night — when her drunk husband passionately whispered another woman's name while claiming her body.
Betrayed by her own family, disowned in public, and branded a scheming gold-digger, Seraphina was forced to live as an invisible ghost in her husband’s mansion for one month.
When the contract ended, she walked away with nothing… only to discover she was carrying his twins.
Five years later, the neglected daughter returns as Seraphina Monroe — the untouchable CEO of Verve Luxury Fragrances, a global empire built from the ashes of her pain.
Cold, powerful, and breathtakingly successful, she no longer needs love or forgiveness.
Yet Sebastian King, the man who once destroyed her, now finds himself obsessed with the woman he threw away.
Will the arrogant billionaire finally grovel at the feet of the wife he once called worthless, or will Seraphina make him pay for every tear she shed?
Baca
Chapter: CHAPTER 24: LIAM AND MAYAThe ambulance arrived in six minutes.Jin had flagged it down from the car park entrance with the focused, slightly frantic energy of a man operating well outside his area of expertise and compensating with volume. He had also, without being asked, retrieved Seraphina's bag from her locker, called the hospital ahead, and stood beside the ambulance bay talking very fast to a paramedic while Seraphina sat on the kerb in her lab coat and breathed in the careful, deliberate pattern the prenatal book had described and which was, she was discovering, considerably more useful in theory than in practice."You need to get in the ambulance," Jin said, appearing beside her."I know," she said."You're very calm," he said, with the expression of someone who found this alarming rather than reassuring."I've been calm through worse," she said, and stood up, and got in the ambulance.The paramedic was a woman in her thirties with efficient hands and the particular brand of warm, no-nonsense competen
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-07-09
Chapter: CHAPTER 23: NIGHT SHIFTSeven months later.The botanical lab ran three shifts.Day shift was the most populated — the senior researchers, the department heads, the people with PhDs framed on walls and parking spaces with their names on them. Evening shift was quieter, the junior staff and the technicians, the ones still building toward something.Night shift was Seraphina's.She had chosen it deliberately. Night shift paid a fifteen percent premium, which was the difference between an apartment with heating and one without, and it ran from ten in the evening until six in the morning, which meant her days were free for the library and the textbooks and the careful, self-directed education she was constructing one chapter at a time in the small apartment three bus stops from the lab.She was eight months pregnant.Nobody at the lab had asked her about it directly. This was the particular courtesy of the night shift — people who worked in the dark hours tended to have their reasons and tended to respect that o
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-07-09
Chapter: CHAPTER 22: SERAPHINA MONROEThe train station was forty minutes from the clinic on foot.Seraphina knew this because she had walked it, in the thin early morning rain, in the ivory dress that had dried overnight into something stiff and slightly misshapen, with the folded papers tucked into her waistband and the dead phone in her pocket and the women's shelter two blocks behind her where she had slept for four hours on a narrow cot and woken before anyone else was awake.She had not taken anything from the shelter that wasn't offered. A dry set of clothes — plain, slightly too large, donated by someone who no longer needed them — and a small bag to carry them in, and a cup of tea pressed on her by a woman at the front desk who had the quiet, practiced compassion of someone who had seen every version of this particular kind of morning and had learned that tea was rarely the wrong response."Is there someone we can call?" the woman had asked. The same question as the doctor. The same answer."No. There's no one."
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-07-09
Chapter: CHAPTER 21: TAKE YOUR THINGS AND LEAVEClara arrived at ten in the morning.Sebastian heard the car from his study — the particular sound of an arrival that expected to be welcomed, unhurried and confident, the kind of sound that assumed the door would open before it was knocked on.He didn't go down immediately.He sat behind his desk and finished the paragraph he was reading — or tried to finish it, read the same three lines four times, gave up — and then stood and straightened his jacket and walked downstairs with the measured pace of a man who had decided in advance how this conversation would go.Clara was in the entrance hall when he reached the bottom of the staircase. She was wearing a cream cashmere coat and her hair was done and she was overseeing the unloading of what appeared to be a significant quantity of luggage from the back of a silver car parked at the entrance, directing the movement of cases with the brisk, proprietary air of someone arranging furniture in a room they have already decided belongs to the
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-07-09
Chapter: CHAPTER 20: BACK AT THE MANSIONThe gala ended at midnight.Sebastian stayed until the last board member left, until the last hand was shaken and the last glass was emptied and the last careful, public version of himself had fulfilled every obligation the evening required.Then he went home.The King estate was quiet when he arrived. The staff had retreated for the night. The grand entrance hall was lit by the low, automatic lighting that came on after eleven, casting everything in a dim, amber glow that made the space look smaller than it was and somehow less certain of itself.He walked through it without stopping.He didn't go to the east wing.He told himself he had no reason to go to the east wing. The contract was still in effect for another thirty days. She was still on the estate. She had walked out of the gala without permission and without informing anyone of her whereabouts, which was a violation of the terms she had signed, but pursuing that violation tonight, in the rain, in the dark, felt like a conces
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-07-08
Chapter: CHAPTER 19: THE TWINSThe word sat in the room between them.Pregnant.Seraphina looked at the doctor. At the tablet in his hand. At the careful, composed expression of a man waiting for a response he couldn't predict."Run it again," she said."We ran it twice," he said. "Standard procedure when the result is—" he paused, choosing his word carefully, "—significant.""Run it a third time."He looked at her for a moment. Then he nodded and stepped out.She sat on the paper-covered examination table in the wet ivory dress and looked at the wall opposite and did not think anything at all for approximately ninety seconds because some information requires a brief, complete suspension of thought before the mind is willing to approach it.Then she thought: four weeks.Four weeks ago she had been dragged from her room and dressed in her sister's wedding gown and driven to a house she had never been to and handed to a man who hadn't known her name.Four weeks ago.The math was simple and it was brutal and it left a
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-07-08
Chapter: Chapitre 5 : QU’EST-CE QUI A CHANGÉ ?Le silence s’étira si longtemps sur la ligne que Jayda se demanda si l’appel avait été coupé, si Lucas lui avait raccroché au nez, si elle venait de se ridiculiser en pensant qu’elle pouvait simplement revenir dans un monde qu’elle avait abandonné trois ans plus tôt.Puis Lucas expira lentement, le son crépitant dans le haut-parleur comme de la friture.« Tu veux reprendre la course », répéta-t-il d’une voix plate, comme s’il testait les mots pour voir s’ils avaient du sens. « Après trois ans, après être partie, après avoir épousé ce milliardaire et avoir complètement disparu du circuit, tu veux juste revenir comme si de rien n’était ? »Jayda déglutit avec difficulté contre la boule dans sa gorge.« Oui. »« Pourquoi maintenant ? » La question fut tranchante, directe, coupant court à toute excuse qu’elle aurait pu préparer. « Qu’est-ce qui a changé ? »Elle pensa à l’hôpital, à la voix prudente du médecin lui annonçant sa sentence de mort, à Antonio lui tendant les papiers du divorce
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-06-30
Chapter: Chapitre 4 : JE TE LE PROMETS.Jayda plia une chemise de façon mécanique, la rangeant dans la valise tandis que Margaret sanglotait doucement dans l’embrasure de la porte. La maison semblait trop grande autour d’elles, trop vide malgré tous les meubles coûteux, toutes les œuvres d’art aux murs, toutes ces choses censées signaler la réussite mais qui lui rappelaient seulement à quel point tout était devenu creux.« Madame, vous ne pouvez pas partir comme ça », tenta à nouveau Margaret, la voix brisée. « Attendez au moins quelques jours, reposez-vous avant de prendre une décision aussi importante. »« J’ai déjà pris ma décision. » Jayda sortit son casque de course du haut du placard ; la surface noire et lisse lui renvoya son reflet déformé. « J’aurais dû la prendre il y a longtemps. »Elle fit ses bagages rapidement après cela, ne prenant que ce qu’elle pouvait emporter dans une seule valise, plus le casque qu’elle glissa soigneusement sous son bras. Tout le reste — les vêtements de marque qu’Antonio lui avait achet
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-06-30
Chapter: Chapitre 3 : TU FAIS UNE ERREUR.Jayda signa les papiers du divorce à l’aube.Elle était assise à la table de la cuisine, un stylo à la main, les documents étalés devant elle comme autant d’accusations qu’elle ne pouvait pas réfuter. La maison était silencieuse, à l’exception du tic-tac de l’horloge comtoise dans le couloir, qui semblait plus fort qu’il n’aurait dû l’être. Sa main ne tremblait pas lorsqu’elle posa le stylo sur le papier : elle avait épuisé toutes ses larmes la veille, pleuré jusqu’à ce que ses yeux brûlent, jusqu’à ce que sa gorge soit à vif, jusqu’à ce qu’il ne reste plus en elle qu’un vide douloureux qui refusait de disparaître, peu importe combien de fois elle se répétait que c’était pour le mieux.Sa signature paraissait étrange sur la page, son nom réduit à de l’encre sur un document légal qui effacerait quatre années de sa vie comme si elles n’avaient jamais compté.Elle la fixa longuement avant de rassembler les papiers, les tapotant contre la table pour en aligner les bords avec une précision
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-06-30
Chapter: Chapitre 2 : TU COUCHES AVEC ELLE ?Jayda recula d’un pas comme si ses mots l’avaient giflée en plein visage.La distance entre eux s’agrandit — pas seulement les quelques mètres de parquet poli, mais quelque chose de bien plus profond, quelque chose qui semblait définitif et irréversible.« Pourquoi ? » demanda-t-elle.Le mot eut à peine la force de franchir ses lèvres.Antonio soupira lentement, comme un homme déjà épuisé par une conversation qu’il avait répétée trop de fois dans sa tête.« Parce que je suis fatigué, dit-il d’une voix plate. Ce mariage me prend du temps que je n’ai pas, du temps que je devrais utiliser pour construire davantage, pour gagner plus d’argent. »Jayda le fixa.Pendant un instant, elle se demanda si elle avait mal entendu, si le choc de tout cela — l’hôpital, le diagnostic, les papiers du divorce… — avait fini par briser sa capacité à comprendre la réalité.« L’argent ? » répéta-t-elle.Sa voix était désormais calme, dangereusement calme.« Tu fais tout ça à cause de l’argent ? » demanda-t-
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-06-30
Chapter: Chapitre 1 : Y A-T-IL… UN TRAITEMENT ?« Il ne vous reste que cinq mois à vivre, Madame Moretti. »Les mots tombèrent doucement, prononcés avec cette douceur réservée aux annonces les plus dévastatrices, mais ils brisèrent la pièce tout de même, car il n’existait aucun coussin assez épais pour amortir une vérité pareille.Jayda resta parfaitement immobile au bord du lit d’hôpital, les mains sagement croisées sur ses genoux, le dos droit comme si sa posture seule pouvait la maintenir en un seul morceau tandis que les murs blancs se refermaient sur elle et que l’air devenait trop rare pour respirer.Pendant un instant, elle se demanda si elle avait mal entendu ou si c’était le cauchemar de quelqu’un d’autre qui s’infiltrait dans sa réalité, parce que cinq mois ne pouvaient pas lui être destinés, ne pouvaient pas être le temps qu’il lui restait d’une vie qu’elle avait à peine commencé à vivre.En face d’elle, le médecin continuait de parler — poumons, ganglions lymphatiques, progression agressive, tous les symptômes du cancer
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-06-30
Chapter: 201He looked at the helmet.Then at her.She was holding it the way she held things she meant, with the specific quality of someone who had decided and was not performing the deciding but simply enacting it, the way she held the wheel when the race was real and the corner was coming and everything that mattered was the quality of the attention she brought to the next three seconds.He reached out and took it.It was heavier than he had expected.He didn't know why that surprised him. He had watched her race for years, had watched the helmet go on and come off across the ceremonial distances he had always kept, had understood it abstractly as a thing with weight and purpose. But holding it was different from watching it held. It was the specific difference he had been learning across the year, between knowing something and understanding it in his body, and he stood in the Silverstone paddock holding her helmet with both hands and un
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-06-29
Chapter: 200They walked to the far end of the paddock.Not by agreement, not with a destination discussed, just the natural movement of two people who needed to be somewhere quieter than where they had been and who both understood that quieter was what the conversation required. The paddock thinned at the far end, the team garages giving way to the service corridor where the noise became background rather than immediate, and they stopped there without discussing the stopping and stood with the Silverstone afternoon on one side and the conversation on the other.She spoke first."The diagnosis," she said. "When it came. I was alone in that office and I drove home alone and I sat with it alone because I didn't have — " she stopped, finding the specific word rather than the approximate one. "I didn't have anyone I trusted with the full version of myself anymore. That was what your distance had produced. By the time the worst thing that had ever happened to me h
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-06-29
Chapter: 199The paddock after a win had a specific quality that was different from the paddock after any other result.Not louder, necessarily — the paddock was always loud in the specific layered way of a space where multiple teams were conducting multiple simultaneous debriefs and the logistics of packing and moving an entire operation were already beginning before the podium ceremony had finished. But the quality of the noise was different. It had a different texture. The team moved with the specific efficiency of people who had done something and knew they had done it and were now doing the next thing from inside that knowledge rather than in spite of its absence.She had done the podium.She had stood on the top step with the trophy and the champagne and the anthem and had been present to all of it, fully, in the specific way she had learned across the comeback to be present to the things that deserved it rather than processing them from behind the glass of something else. The Silverstone cr
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-06-28
Chapter: 198The race was at Silverstone.Not because Silverstone held any particular significance to the narrative of the past year, not because it was the circuit she had won at before or the one she had returned to first or the one that carried the weight of anything specific, but because Silverstone was the round on the calendar and the calendar was what it was and she had stopped organizing her life around significance and had started organizing it around the work.She qualified second.The gap to pole was four hundredths of a second, which was close enough that the gap was not really the story. The story was the lap itself, the specific quality of a lap that had been constructed correctly from the first corner rather than recovered from, the lap that Lucas had watched on the timing screen and had said nothing about because Lucas said nothing when nothing was the right response and the lap had been the right response to three weeks of preparation and the kind of focused accumulation that did
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-06-28
Chapter: 197The article appeared on a Tuesday morning.Not in a racing publication, not in the financial press that had covered the legal proceedings with the specific interested attention of an industry watching one of its significant names navigate something public and consequential, but in a general interest magazine that did the kind of long-form interview that required a subject who was willing to sit with a journalist for several hours and say things they could not take back.Antonio had been willing.She found it the way she found most things she wasn't looking for, through the industry network that had always been her primary information source, a message from a contact who sent it without comment, just the link and her name, the specific communication of someone who thought she should see something and trusted her to decide what to do with the seeing.She was at the kitchen table with her coffee.She opened it.---The piece was long.Twelve thousand words, the kind of length that a subj
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-06-28
Chapter: 196Six months later, Riverside Racing looked like what it had always been trying to become.Not the aspirational version, not the expansion strategy laid out in three phases with projected timelines and budget allocations and measurable outcomes — the actual version, the living breathing daily reality of a facility that had been built correctly and was now operating at the level it had been built toward, and the difference between the projected and the actual was the specific satisfaction of someone who had done the work and was now inside the work's result rather than inside the building of it.Phase Two was fully operational.The simulators were upgraded and running at capacity, the training spaces had been expanded to accommodate the larger cohort, the specialist coaches Lucas had recruited across the spring were embedded in the programme with the comfortable efficiency of people who had found the right place for what they knew and were applying what they knew correctly.The scholarsh
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-06-28
Chapter: 64: THAT'S NOT WHAT I ASKED.Matthias's povThe four days before the gathering moved with the particular efficiency of days that had too much in them to allow for anything except forward motion, which suited me, because forward motion was considerably easier than the alternative, which was standing still long enough to think about the herb garden and the petition and the steady hands and the four words written on a notepad page, and what all of it had done to something in my chest that I did not yet have a fully accurate word for.I worked.Ryder and I went through the gathering strategy with the thoroughness it required — which Alphas to engage and in what order, which conversations to initiate and which to allow to come to us, how to position Lyra's presence in the room so that it read as what it was — unambiguous, confident, the Luna of this pack present at her Alpha's side — without making her feel like a piece being moved rather than a person making choices. Ryder was precise and occasionally perceptive in w
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-04-13
Chapter: 63: I KNOW ABOUT OWSIN.Lyra's pov I knew something was different before he sat down.He came through the herb garden gate in the early evening the way he had been coming for the past two weeks — without announcement, without a reason that needed stating — but the quality of him was different tonight, weighted in the specific way I had learned to read as distinct from his ordinary stillness, the way a sky looked different when it was holding weather rather than simply being sky, and I set down the trowel and waited.He sat beside me on the bench.He didn't speak immediately, which was not unusual, but the silence had an intention in it tonight rather than the easy unhurried quality our silences had developed over the past weeks, and I sat with it and let him find his way to whatever he had come to say, because I had learned that pushing Matthias toward a thing before he was ready to give it was the fastest way to get the less honest version of it."I know about Oswin," he said.The garden went very still ar
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-04-08
Chapter: 62: GO AWAY ALEXEI.Matthias's pov The three weeks passed differently from the weeks before them.I noticed this without deciding to notice it — the way you noticed a change in weather not by looking at the sky but by the feeling of the air on your skin, something shifted at the level of atmosphere rather than event. The days had a quality they hadn't had before, something that moved forward rather than simply passing, and I understood after the first few days that the difference was this: I had stopped managing what I was feeling and had started simply feeling it, and the two experiences occupied the same hours entirely differently.She left a herb cutting on my office windowsill.I found it one morning when I came in early, a sprig of something I identified after a moment as rosemary — for memory, she had told Petra, I remembered that — placed in a small glass of water on the sill where the morning light hit it, and no note, no explanation, just the thing itself, and I stood looking at it for longer t
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-04-04
Chapter: 61: I WILL GO.Lyra's pov He came to the healing house in the late afternoon with a letter in his hand and something in his face that was not quite uncertainty — Matthias did not do uncertainty, not visibly — but the particular quality of careful that he carried when he was about to put something in front of me and genuinely did not know what I would do with it.He held the letter out and I took it and read it.The Council of Northern Territories. A quarterly gathering of neighboring Alphas and their mates. Three weeks from the date of writing. Formal occasion, neutral ground, the Harrow Pack's territory hosting this cycle.I read it twice and looked up at him."I want to take you," he said. "I think it's the right move. But it's your choice and I'm not making it for you."I held the letter and sat with what it contained — the weight of walking into a room full of Alphas and their mates, of being seen publicly as his, of standing in a political arena I didn't fully understand yet with my silence an
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-04-04
Chapter: 60: WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO TELL HER?Matthias's pov The letter arrived with the morning correspondence, unremarkable in its envelope, the Council of Northern Territories seal on the wax — the quarterly gathering of neighboring Alphas and their mates, hosted this cycle at the Harrow Pack's neutral ground, three weeks from the date of writing.I read it twice and set it on the desk and looked at it.I had not attended the previous two gatherings. The first because Elise and the boy had been dead for four months and the idea of walking into a room full of Alphas and their living mates and their ordinary unbroken lives had been something I was not prepared to do and did not do. The second because a year later I was still not prepared and had calculated, correctly, that my absence would be interpreted as grief and therefore forgiven. The third time would not be forgiven. The third time would be interpreted as something else — instability, weakness, an Alpha who had lost his footing and was no longer worth the political inves
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-04-03
Chapter: 59: SILAS.Lyra's pov After he left I sat at the desk and put my hand to my neck and stayed very still.The room had resettled into its ordinary quiet — the lamp burning, the sounds of the mansion in its evening routine, the patrol at the wall — and everything looked exactly as it had looked before he knocked on the door, and nothing was the same, and I sat at the desk and took that in without trying to arrange it into anything manageable yet.The first thing I established, sitting in the quiet with my hand at my neck, was that I was not afraid.I turned that over carefully, the way I turned important things, feeling its edges, checking it for the places where it might be performance or wishful thinking or the careful construction of a woman who had learned to tell herself she was fine so many times that the telling had become indistinguishable from the truth. But it held. It held in the way that true things held when you pressed on them — not giving, not shifting, just there, solid and certain
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-04-03
Masuk
