Substitute Bride to the Crippled Billionaire - Chapter 34: Onset of Symptoms

“I WILL MAKE THEM ALL REGRET THE DAY THEY MET ME! I WILL MAKE THEM WISH THEY WERE NEVER BORN! AND I WILL MAKE THEM HATE THE DAY THEY THOUGHT OF BETRAYING ME!”“You will, Sweetie. And I'll help you with that...”Those were the last words Avery spoke and heard before passing out in her bloody red wedding gown, on the same day she was supposed to marry her boyfriend from senior high school.~~Avery McCallum, the sole heiress and president of the McCallum Group of Companies, had her whole family wiped out on her wedding day. Framed for her grandfather's murder and stripped of her position, Avery vows to take revenge on those who wronged her. But her powerless state seems to mock her determination.Enter Archibald Donovan. She used to hate the devilishly hot and narcissistic chairman of the A² Corp who also happened to be her older brother's best friend, but when consumed with the need to take revenge, she begged him to marry her in return for fulfilling a long list of conditions. Archie agrees, and a month later, Avery re-emerges as Ava Donovan, a rising actress and the wife of the most powerful man in the country.With her newfound status, Avery systematically destroys her adversaries, uncovering dark secrets and hidden agendas along the way. But as she navigates the treacherous landscape of her new life, she must confront the truth about her family's past and at the end of it all, come back to him.She owed him after all...EXCERPTArchie's eyes darkened when he saw her stumbling out of the wine cellar, a bottle of wine in one hand and her night robe, in the other. She was literally half naked.“Hey...” her greeting came out in a slur, and that was all he needed to know she was drunk. Very drunk, at that.“Why?” he asked simply, knowing she would interpret his question as she usually did.“I...I visited them today. The flowers on their stones were already wilted and...and...it broke me. I wanted to be happy and at the same time, I wanted to cry,” Avery replied, inhaling short wisps of air before she continued, “Then I found the cellar.”“Did it work?”She shook her head slowly in reply, lifting her head up in time to see a mischievous smirk curl on his lips.“Don't be sad, Baby girl. I happen to know a way to make you cry and keep you excited at the same time,” he said.“Really?”“Wanna try it, Mama?”Avery nodded, slowly but firmly as he closed the distance between them.As he promised, she did cry...in pleasure.

Experiencing a suffocating marriage with the man whom she was arranged to marry made Joanna want to leave him. But it was a failure as she died as the wife of the man who abandoned her and her son before they divorced.On the verge of her death, she made a wish to not encounter him again if there was a next life. She wished for the end of their fate only in this lifetime. She wanted to forget everything about him.However, when she opened her eyes again, she found herself in the room of the mansion of the man she just married. She was awakened by a dream that seemed to be a nightmare of her past life.She didn’t remember completely everything that had occurred in her past life and the dream was fragmented. But deep inside her heart, she only felt one thing. She was adamant about leaving him, to be far away from him.Therefore, she left his mansion just before she met him in person in the present lifetime.However, what she didn’t expect was that the so-called husband pursued her, not allowing her to leave him.Would Joanna be successful in leaving the man in this lifetime? Would fate play the same tragedy as her past life?---As he pulled his finger away from her soft, warm lips, he said, “It is good you stopped winding up, Joanna. Otherwise, I would have used the other method to make you stop blabbering over the same, boring topic endlessly.”When he noticed the stubborn woman was about to prove herself to be stubborn, the man leaned forward in a swift movement, facing the woman’s stupefied face which was an inch away from his.“Continue to blabbering, don’t blame me if I apply my other method right now,” the man murmured above her breath, trailing his gaze from her quivering eyes to her lips before moving it back to her now widened eyes.

Thirty years ago, a meteor fell and the divine ruins appeared! Some deities emerged from it, feeding on humans. Since that day, humans have become food for the deities, except for me!Because I feed on the deities.

In a land ruled by vile monsters, where death is common and life is cruel, one outcast endeavors to have it all. When misfortune drags the odd goblin Stryg from his forest home and into the ruthless city of Hollow Shade, he must try and adapt to a world that only sees him as a dimwit savage.Stryg finds himself embroiled in a school of magic, where an aristocrat's smile is filled with deceit and the simplest of remarks may lead to death threats. Yet nothing will stop him from aspiring to his beliefs of glory: power, honor, and food with salt.But as Stryg navigates through the muddled grey waters of the Ebon Realm, he will learn that some monsters lurk everywhere.