Contos e Romances com Goddess e Family Emotions

The day before my wedding, I received a message from an unknown number asking me to meet in a hotel room. "I hear you're marrying the Prince's heir tomorrow. "I'll give you nine million dollars. All you have to do is give me the access crest and tell me his whereabouts." I said yes, and I went there that same night. But when I opened the door, I found my fiancé Adrian glaring at me, his triumphant vampire childhood sweetheart beside him. "Adrian, I told you a long time ago. Humans cannot be trusted. "She only pretends to love you. She was after your money all along." My fiancé glared at me, clamped a hand around my wrist, and gritted his teeth. "Why?" But I suddenly laughed. "Because I wanted to see how many more times the two of you were going to test me." When my mother was dying, I asked him for a loan. The sum was nothing to him, and he asked me whether money was the reason I was with him. I worked myself into the ground scraping together money for her treatment, and the strain cost me the baby. Then he decided I had only used the pregnancy to force him into marriage and had never wanted his child. After that the tests kept coming. I explained. I cried. I tried to prove myself. He never actually believed me. "That was the ninth time you and Seraphina tested my love for you. "I'm tired. Let's end this."

Lately, my world seemed to have taken a strange turn. I was clearly just an ordinary-looking girl. Yet everyone said I was so beautiful they could not take their eyes off me. I was even scouted by a talent agent, debuted as the lead, and became a national sweetheart. I went out to buy a lottery ticket. Out of the blue, I won thirty million dollars. I had money, power, and status. All the things I never dared to dream of before were within easy reach. However, I noticed something strange. My friends were forgetting me day by day.

The moment Alexander Hall slid the diamond onto my ring finger, I almost let myself believe I was about to become Mrs. Hall. We had been together for five years. He knew perfectly well that I was a gold digger through and through, that I loved anything shiny and expensive. But he also remembered my chronic stomach problems. He had once put the keys to a Manhattan apartment in my hand and told me that from then on, that was where I would be safe. Just a week earlier, he had measured my ring size himself and teased me, telling me to guess what the diamond was worth. I laughed and told him he knew me too well, but in private, I carefully circled the date on my calendar. At 18, I'd been beaten black and blue by my stepfather over a box of sanitary pads. That was when I stopped pretending money didn't matter. I loved money. I loved beautiful clothes that fit like a dream. But more than anything, I loved being able to buy what I wanted without having to answer to anyone. In New York's high society, I had a reputation for knowing exactly how to keep Alexander happy. They also said I was the one woman he couldn't bring himself to let go. The ring sat snugly on my finger. He waited until every eye in the room was on us, then spoke slowly, his voice perfectly flat. "This is a thank-you, Irene. We're done." The ballroom doors opened, and in walked Lydia Grant, dressed in a flowing cream-colored gown. Alexander presented her to the guests as his fiancée. Lydia gave me a timid glance, as though she were the one who'd just had five years of her life stolen. Then she actually had the nerve to come over and offer me comfort. Everyone there was waiting for me to fall apart. Plenty of them had settled in for the show, expecting me to make a scene over the apartment, the jewelry, or an engagement that had never been real. Instead, I slid the diamond off my finger and placed it gently in Alexander's palm. As for the money he'd given me to walk away? I wasn't returning a penny. "Save the ring for the woman who wants to marry you." I smiled. "But the money? That's mine." For the first time, Alexander's mask of composure slipped. Even now, he couldn't seem to wrap his head around it. How could a woman who loved money as much as I did walk away from a diamond worth a fortune?

from her. Again. The heavy iron gates of the Bellini estate were locked tight. Without Luca's permission, she couldn't take a single step outside. "Last month you snuck into underground bars twice. You ditched your bodyguards on your motorcycle, and then you got caught up in a shootout at the docks." Luca stood in front of her, his disappointment impossible to miss. "Isabella, when are you going to settle down ?" "Then how am I any different from a prisoner you keep locked up on your estate?" "If you didn't keep risking your life, I wouldn't have to rein you in at every turn. You're my wife. As Mrs. Bellini, you represent this family. You're not some ordinary woman who can come and go as she pleases." "I just want to be myself. I don't want to spend my whole life locked in the safe little cage you built for me." "You can be Mrs. Bellini, or someone else can." After that, she gave up allthing. She stopped going out alone with a gun, and she stopped talking back to the Bellini elders in public. That lasted until the night of a grand banquet for both families. A woman she had never seen before was wearing the emerald necklace Isabella's late mother had left behind, and she viciously mocked the dead woman in front of everyone. Isabella raised her hand and slapped the woman across the face. Her father, Antonio Moretti, say the woman's name in a low, heavy voice. "Viola.She's my daughter too." Luca walked over to Isabella and took the gun off her hip himself. "I should have kept my wife in line." Five years of dating, three years of marriage. She had filed down every sharp edge for him. She get one offhand remark: "I should have kept her in line." Isabella turned and ran out of the glittering banquet hall. Ten minutes later, she was ambushed at the street corner. She reached for her hip on instinct. But her fingers found only an empty holster. When she opened her eyes again, she had been reborn.Back to the time before she married Luca.

On their wedding day, my father, Cassian Varen, swore by the River Styx, "I will cherish my wife and ensure that her bloodline flourishes under my protection." Yet my mother, Thea Theron, miscarried five times in a row. And I was the unlucky soul who had tried to be born all five times. In the Asphodel Meadows, I lay in my swaddling clothes and wailed. My cries rang through the Underworld for seven days and seven nights. At last, Hades, Lord of the Underworld, couldn't take it anymore. He rubbed his brow and told the goddess Hecate, "Make sure she's born safely on her sixth try." So Hecate created a soul-link between my mother and me. I thought I'd finally make it this time! But when I opened my eyes, my father was carrying another baby toward my mother. "Darling, meet our first son." Meanwhile, I lay in a wicker basket, about to be carried away and thrown out. Frantic, I screamed in my head. Mom! Another woman had that baby! Your real daughter is right here. Save me! My mother was just starting to smile when her whole body went rigid.

When I was eight months pregnant, I received an anonymous email. The attachment was a security camera recording. In a dimly lit VIP booth at a bar, my husband — a vampire who had lived for three hundred years — was holding a human woman in his arms, kissing her. At the end of the video, the woman smiled and asked him, "Adrian, do you really love me?" Adrian's voice was low. "Of course." "Even though you're human, I'll make you the happiest vampire bride in the world." He had said those exact words to me ten years ago. In that moment, my hand rested on my belly. The baby kicked once. As if reminding me. It was time to wake up.