All Chapters of THE CONTRACT BRIDE’S REVENGE : Chapter 1 - Chapter 8

Olivia’s POV My legs were shaking on the tiled floor. Not because of the loud bang coming from the speakers but because my whole body stopped working the moment I stepped inside the registry. “I, Elena Brook , take you, Adrian Cross, to be my lawful married husband. For better or worse, in poverty and in riches…I couldn't wait to hear the rest. I had heard those words during my brother’s wedding. Those vows, promises, those happy moments, the butterflies that usually fly in everyone’s belly. I had imagined myself saying those words one day. Now hearing them spoken to someone else entirely…it felt like a stab in my chest. And the only thing I knew was no one else but my beloved Man, My fiance was getting married but the bride isn’t me. I could hear my ears ringing. My chest tightened painfully like I was wrapped in someone’s hand and I was being squeezed. I raised my head up to look at them again. Adrian leaned forward and kissed her, not a polite kiss, not even a short kiss. Th

JADEN’S POVThe city always looked different from the top floor. Very clean and quiet. Like all the filth and desperation below couldn’t quite reach the glass walls of my office.I stood beside the window with one hand tucked into my pocket while the other lazily swirled the whiskey in my glass, my attention fixed on the massive screen mounted across the room.The wedding clip replayed again, again and again. Adrian Cross smiled for the cameras like a man who had just conquered the world.Beside him stood Elena Langford, glowing beneath the flashes of expensive cameras and media attention, every inch the perfect rich man’s bride.The internet was obsessed already. Business blogs called it the union of the year. Investors called it strategic.The public called it romantic. I called it predictable.A humorless smile tugged briefly at my lips before disappearing just as quickly.Adrian had always been ambitious, but the problem with ambitious men was that they eventually confused greed

OLIVIA’S POVI didn’t sleep that night.Not even close.I sat in that hospital chair with my phone face up on my lap, staring at the messages like they were going to disappear if I looked away long enough. The words kept replaying in my head over and over again. He knew my father’s name. He knew the hospital. He knew the room number. He knew things that nobody should have known unless they had been watching me for a while.That thought alone made my skin crawl.I looked up at my father. He was asleep, chest rising and falling slowly beneath the thin hospital blanket. He looked so small in that bed. So fragile. This was not the same man who used to pull me onto his back and run through the yard just to hear me laugh. This was not the man who stayed up all night whenever I had a fever, pressing a cold cloth to my forehead and singing off-key until I fell asleep.He looked like he was fading.And I was sitting here with nothing. No money. No plan. Just an anonymous number on my screen an

OLIVIA’S POVI should have gone home to rest.That was what Shay had been texting me all morning. Go home. Sleep. You can’t pour from an empty cup. All the things people say when they don’t know what else to offer.But I couldn’t go home. I couldn’t sit in that quiet apartment with Adrian’s ghost still living in every corner of it. So I went back to the only place that made sense.The hospital.I smelled the familiar cold of the hallway before I even reached the ward. That sharp bitter scent that had started feeling more like home than anywhere else lately. I turned the corner toward my father’s room and stopped.The door was wide open.Three nurses moved quickly inside. A doctor I hadn’t seen before was already at my father’s bedside, speaking in low urgent tones while someone adjusted the monitor. The steady beeping I had grown used to was faster now. Uneven.“Excuse me” I stepped forward.A nurse turned and held her hand up firmly. “Please wait outside.”“That’s my father”“Miss,