All Chapters of Marrying the Tyrant: You Will Regret Killing Me, Ex-Husband!: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Lily’s POV.The air vanished from the room.My lungs seized, a bitter, metallic taste flooding my mouth as my gaze ripped from Frank’s unbothered face to the man stepping out of the bathroom.Richard. My stepfather.He stood there in a plush white hotel robe, damp silver-streaked hair clinging to his forehead, holding a glass of scotch. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t gasp. He just looked at me with the same cold eyes he’d used to bleed my mother’s estate dry after she died."Lily," Richard said, his voice smooth, devoid of a single ounce of shame. "You shouldn't be here.""Shouldn't be here?"The words ripped from my throat, raw and bleeding. My hands shook so violently the phone slipped from my fingers, clattering against the hardwood floor. The screen stayed lit, looping the footage of the two of them in my sacred cabin. My mother’s cabin."You..." I choked, pointing a trembling finger between my husband and the man who was supposed to be my guardian. "In my mother’s cabin? On my weddi

Lily’s POV.Two years after.Seven hundred and thirty days of hiding in the shadows, shedding my old skin, and letting Diego Rookwood mold me into a weapon.The broken girl who had wept in a wedding dress in a hotel room was dead. The girl who had driven off a bridge was a ghost.Tonight, the ghost was coming back to haunt the living."You’re shaking, Lily."Diego’s low, gravelly baritone broke through the suffocating silence of the Maybach’s backseat.I glanced down at my lap. My fingers, tipped with blood-red nails, were clutching my satin clutch so tightly my knuckles were white. My heart was a frantic, trapped bird slinging itself against my ribs."I'm not shaking," I lied, my voice dropping to a whisper.Through the tinted windows, the exterior of the luxury venue loomed. Brilliant, blinding spotlights sliced through the night sky. A sea of paparazzi pressed against the velvet ropes, their lenses gleaming like predators’ eyes.Tonight was the second-anniversary gala celebrating F

Lily’s POV.THREE MONTHS AGO.The elevator ride to the top floor felt like leaving one world for another. A world where the air was, for once, clean.Here I was, back in the city where my ex-fiancé and stepfather had stripped me of every dignity I’d had and every inheritance I was owed.I hated New York with everything in me. And now I was back to take it apart.I looked around Diego’s penthouse. My new cage, or my new fortress. I hadn’t decided which yet.Two years of hoodies and hiding. Two years of dressing like a woman with nothing left to lose.Now this.Diego stepped out behind me, and the room’s whole atmosphere shifted with him in it.He didn’t move the way Frank had — loud, heavy-footed, taking up space to make everyone else feel small. Frank had needed me terrified to feel like anything at all.Diego was different. Massive, but quiet about it. He didn’t need volume. His silence pulled a room toward him just as easily as it could crush one.He reached past me to shut the ele

Lily’s POV.The paparazzi outside The Crimson Gallery were blinding. It was less a red carpet and more of a firing line.Every camera flash reminded me exactly what was at stake. One wrong look, one stiff step, and the world would know Lily Rookwood was a fraud. Everything would be gone. I couldn't risk that.But the glass doors opened, warmth hit us, and I didn’t flinch.Diego’s hand settled at the small of my back. It felt like lead pressing through the thin fabric of my dress, his touch grounding me in reality and keeping me upright.“Steady,” he murmured against my ear as we walked in. “He’s already looking at you.”I didn’t have to ask who. I could feel Frank’s attention from across the room before I even saw him.Since the gala, his obsession had curdled into something worse. He knew I was alive. He knew I was with his half-brother. The resentment coming off him was almost a physical thing.“Don’t look away,” Diego said, his thumb tracing a slow circle against my spine. “Let hi

Lily’s POV.The private tea house smelled of cedar and bitter matcha, quiet in a way that felt more like a tomb than the sanctuary it was meant to be.I smoothed the front of my trench coat, working to steady my breathing.I’d left my phone at the penthouse. Between that and what had happened the night before, I wasn’t ready to face Diego yet. He tracked my location as part of the contract, for my safety, but this morning, safety felt like a leash.I wanted to prove I wasn’t just a dependent piece on his chessboard. I wanted to move faster than Frank could recover from, and be done with this marriage before last night could happen again.Director Cho sat across from me on a low tatami mat, his eyes holding nothing but a mild amusement as I laid everything on the table.I slid my mother’s old financial files across the wood. I made my voice carry more confidence than I felt.“With these, you have enough to expose Richard’s laundering through his front companies,” I said. “Align your boa