Hypocrisy

My best friend's brother and I have been dating for half a year, and she has no clue. My best friend drags me out on Christmas for a singles' night out. Unexpectedly, we see her brother, Chris Lambert, holding hands and kissing a girl under the fireworks. "Damn, Chris finally got the school belle!" She looks thrilled and pulls me forward to say hi. Chris awkwardly rubs his nose and introduces me to his girlfriend, "This is my sister, and the one beside her is… sort of like my sister too." I smile silently. We have held hands and kissed, yet now, I am just sort of like his sister.

A car accident leaves me unconscious for a full three years. When I wake up, my family bursts into tears of joy. They care for me with the utmost attention. But from their behavior, I sense something is wrong. There are women's clothes in the house that don't fit me. My mother's shopping cart is filled with mysterious baby items. My father's friends send congratulatory messages about a new child, and my husband is always working overtime. When my husband once again leaves me alone under the pretext that there is something urgent at the company, I secretly follow him. Inside a warmly decorated house, my parents and husband sit around a table. A woman who looks almost exactly like me is holding a baby just a few months old, gently coaxing the child to call my husband "Daddy".

While we were scuba diving, my boyfriend, Raphael Carlisle, ripped off my oxygen mask and put it on his childhood friend, Lucia Fairchild, whose mask had started leaking. I was left thrashing helplessly in the freezing water. Just as I thought it was over, Raphael's younger brother, Gabriel Carlisle, swam over, breathed life into me, and brought me back to the surface. After he saved me, he presented me with the purple diamond ring he designed himself and proposed, "For as long as I live, I'll never let you face danger again." I believed that he was my one true love, so I married him, leaving my job behind to focus on starting a family. On the day Lucia was given a critical condition notice, I ended up in a car accident. As I lay half-conscious on the hospital bed, I overheard Gabriel talking with Raphael. "Get a doctor to induce labor right away! Lucia's illness can only be treated with a stem cell transplant from umbilical cord blood. The only reason I got Phoebe pregnant was for this very day." "But she's carrying our bloodline! How could you have someone hit her with a car?" Raphael yelled. Gabriel replied, "Lucy matters more to me! As for Phoebe, I can spoil her rotten once she wakes up." At that moment, I realized the love I held on to was nothing but a lie. If that was the case, I'd just leave.

I had just become an adult when my neighbor, Connor Grayson, started flirting with me. We kept our relationship a secret year after year. After a wild night of intimacy, Connor whispered into my ear that he loved me over and over again. The next morning, I could barely stand as I got out of bed. Then I saw Connor bring another woman home. "Selena, this is my fiancée. We're getting married." I thought Connor would let me go. I didn't want to ruin anyone's relationship. However, he wouldn't leave me alone despite my shameful predicament. "Yes, I'm getting married, but did I say you could go? It took a lot of effort to make you fall for me."

A rich kid offers to pay anyone who'll be his companion to a ball ten thousand dollars. My roommate stops me from responding. "He's just a rich guy fishing for fun—he's using money to play around with women! Are you going to offer yourself to him for money? We can't be gold diggers!" My mother is sick, though. She needs my scholarship money to save her life. To my devastation, my roommate latches onto a school board member and takes away my scholarship. She even mocks me. "With your looks, you could've sold yourself for money. Here's a hundred bucks to compensate you." That's not all—an AI face-swapped picture of me are posted online. Countless people harass me because of them. My mother doesn't want to drag me down, so she takes her life. I break down and choose to jump off a building. When I open my eyes again, I'm taken back to the first day of the semester. The rich kid is looking for a female companion. I immediately say, "I'm the companion you've been looking for, sir!"

After my family went bankrupt, my fiancé, Thaddeus Blackwood, firmly broke off our engagement and chose Vivienne Winters instead. It was Sterling Knight who helped me clear my debts and arranged my father's funeral, rescuing me from financial ruin. For the next three years, he remained steadfastly by my side. Just when I believed I had found my salvation, I overheard a conversation between Sterling and his friend the day before our wedding. "Do you really plan to marry Arabella Frost? Aren't you afraid she'll eventually discover that you orchestrated her father's death and her family's bankruptcy?" "Vivienne has already married Thaddeus," Sterling replied. "I might as well marry her. And if she finds out, so what? I paid off her debts and gave her father a proper burial. I've done right by her." Only then did I realize that Sterling had deceived me too. From beginning to end, I was the only one truly invested in this relationship.

I'm five months pregnant. One day, I leave the house to do some grocery shopping. As I wait at a red light, I see a woman kiss my husband. I follow them in shock, snapping to my senses when I hear the screeching of a car's brakes. I get into an accident and end up comatose, losing my child in the process. Not only does my husband not care for me, but he even has his lover move in with him proudly. The moment I wake up, they panic.

When my father's business collapsed, he racked up an astronomical debt to the Andor family. And when they finally came knocking, he did what no loving parent should ever do—he collateralized me, his only daughter, handing me over to Cassian before vanishing off the face of the earth. For ten long years, I stayed by Cassian Andor's side. He treated me with a tenderness so indulgent it bordered on worship. There was nothing I asked for that he would not give; there was no whim of mine he would not entertain. Everyone in our world knew me as his princess. I grew up believing with certainty that once I came of age, he would sweep me into his arms, march me down the aisle, and make me his wife. But reality—cold, brutal, and as dazzlingly cruel as the world we lived in—had other plans. Instead of the ring I had dreamed of, Cassian gifted a breathtaking pink diamond—the very symbol of eternal devotion—to his assistant, Heidi Torres. As if that wasn't betrayal enough, he threw a lavish celebration in her honor, a veritable explosion of flowers. He knew I was deathly allergic to pollen. Yet he still left me stranded there, drowning in a sea of blossoms. Eventually, I collapsed in a violent asthma attack, gasping and clawing for air, teetering on the edge of consciousness. And Cassian? He merely tightened his hold around Heidi in his arms and cast me a cold glance. "Your allergies have been fine for ages," he said with a sneer. "Why the sudden drama today? Don't tell me you're faking it." At that moment, as I lay there humiliated and struggling to breathe, I realized there were exactly seven days left until my twentieth birthday since when I could register a marriage.

My Alpha mate has canceled our carefully planned honeymoon trips fourteen times for his Omega secretary. The first time, because of the secretary's phone call about "lost territorial maps," he didn't hesitate to abandon me at a strange Nordic airport. The second time, because of the secretary's plea for help, he drove back alone to the pack's core territory, leaving me alone in the dangerous hunting grounds. For four years, I carefully planned fourteen honeymoon trips, but each time my mate would abandon me to choose to accompany his Omega secretary. Finally, I stopped insisting and decided to give up this mating relationship that was never firmly chosen. But when I joined the Alpha Council's secret research project and decided to leave forever, he cried and searched the whole world for me.

One week before the wedding, I accidentally came across a copy of my girlfriend's abortion procedure report. She always insisted she was uninterested in being intimate, yet behind my back, she had secretly aborted another man's baby. Instead of questioning her, I quietly put the report back where I found it. For the next week, I went along with the wedding planning, picking out the outfits and rings. But on the day of the wedding, the bride, waiting endlessly for the groom who never came, lost her mind.