Lydia Hart had never expected to turn out to be a bride. Above all not the wife of a man who was meant to marry her sister. However, when Vivian Hart goes missing on her wedding day, Lydia is compelled to step in. Since the family business is about to collapse, she would have to lose all that her parents have worked their lives to build if she refused the marriage. Lydia then walks down the aisle in a wedding dress belonging to another woman and becomes the wife of Lucian Vale, the ruthless heir to the Vale empire. It is no surprise to Lucian to see her. He knows precisely who Lydia is. He has a reason for agreeing to take the substitute bride. In earlier times the Hart family had something to do with the disappearance of the woman Lucian loved; he has never forgiven them and that is why he now regards Lydia as the ideal means of making the Hart family suffer. Lydia goes into the marriage thinking that she may some day win over her husband if she is patient enough. Lucian's first love reappears. In her own marriage Lydia becomes invisible all at once. The woman sees her husband bestowing tenderness on another woman when he has never done so on her. She puts up with the whispers, the humiliation, and the continual fact that she was not his first choice. Until Lucian makes his last choice and thus destroys whatever hope she had remaining. Lydia walks away. The story does not end with Lucian being left behind. As more light comes to bear on the Hart family's past, Lucian comes to the realization that his plan for revenge was based on the assumption that Lydia had been guilty when in fact she may have been innocent all the time. The man who previously had been eager to get rid of his unwanted wife is now willing to lose all he has in order to win her back. Lydia has now learnt to live without him.

Amara Voss thought she knew her family. At twenty, she wakes in a glass chamber and watches her sister mouth two words: Hello, Test One. By nightfall the city is in ruins, her fiancé is one of the creatures in the street, and she is the only person they won't touch. Then she wakes in her own bed, seven days in the past, with every memory intact. The people who made her are still smiling across the dinner table. This time she knows what they plan to do with her blood.