Goodbye Ex Husband - The Real Heiress Has Returned

Chapter 1

The giant LED billboard above the central expressway illuminated the midnight rain in strokes of brutal white and scarlet. Seraphina gripped her steering wheel so tightly her knuckles shone like polished bone beneath the dashboard light. Traffic moved like molasses around her, but her world had ground to a sickening, absolute halt.

On the screen above, a breaking news flash blared across the city: BILLIONAIRE SEBASTIAN LLOYD RUSHES SECRETARY TO HOSPITAL AFTER LATE-NIGHT COLLAPSE.

The photograph accompanying the banner was painfully sharp. Sebastian, her husband of three years, the man who treated even a casual glance in her direction as a chore, was carrying Vivienne Laurent in his arms. His tailored suit jacket had been discarded, his crisp white shirt was unbuttoned at the collar, and his features were etched with a raw, frantic desperation Seraphina had never once seen him wear for her. He looked terrified. He looked like a man about to lose his entire world.

Down on her passenger seat sat a velvet box and an untouched red velvet cake, meticulously baked by her own hands for their third wedding anniversary. She had spent the whole afternoon on it, sifting the flour twice because the first batch had lumps, testing the frosting three times until the shade of red matched the tie he had worn on their wedding day. She had lit two candles shaped like the number three and set them carefully in the center, imagining his face when he walked through the door and saw them lit.

Just an hour ago, when she had called his personal line begging him to come home for just one evening, his voice had been sheets of thick, impenetrable ice.

“Sebastian, please,” she had said, cupping the phone with both hands like it might warm her. “It’s our anniversary. I made your favorite cake. Can you come home, even for an hour?”

“I lost track of time, Seraphina,” he had answered, and she could hear papers shuffling in the background, the dry click of a pen against a desk. “I have urgent work at the office. Don’t bother me with trivial matters.”

“It’s not trivial to me.”

“Everything is trivial compared to a merger worth four hundred million dollars. Blow out the candles yourself. I’ll be late.”

Then the line had gone dead, and she had sat alone at the dining table listening to the candles hiss and drip wax onto the white tablecloth, watching the numbers slowly melt into shapeless stubs.

Trivial matters.

A harsh, bitter laugh caught in the back of her throat, burning like swallows of battery acid. She remembered six months ago when severe food poisoning had left her writhing in agony on the cold tile of their bathroom floor, vomiting blood and barely able to breathe. She had dialed his number with shaking fingers, smearing blood from her split lip onto the screen.

“Sebastian,” she had gasped into the phone, “something’s wrong, I think I need a hospital, please, I can’t stop—”

“Calm down, Seraphina,” he had said, bored, distant, the sound of a business dinner clinking behind him. “It’s probably something you ate. Take some medicine and sleep it off. I’m in the middle of an important dinner with the Hendricks board. I can’t just leave.”

“Sebastian, I’m bleeding, I—”

“You’re being dramatic. I’ll send someone.”

He hadn’t come home. He hadn’t even called a doctor. He had simply dispatched a junior intern with a box of generic painkillers and a brief text message telling her to stop being so dramatic over a common stomach bug. If she hadn’t managed to crawl to the front door and hail a cab herself, she might have died in that cold, empty house, alone on the marble floor she used to be so proud of.

And yet, for Vivienne Laurent, his highly competent, poised secretary, and the former lover he had never truly forgotten, he would tear through traffic, breach security protocols, and willingly grace the front page of every tabloid in the country.

Her phone buzzed on the middle console. The screen lit up with a notification from an unknown, unlisted number.

Seraphina’s hand trembled as she tapped the icon. It was an image file, a high-resolution photo taken inside a dimly lit hotel suite. Sebastian lay asleep on a plush white mattress, his torso bare and his breathing deep. In the foreground, smiling softly into the camera with an expression of quiet victory, was Vivienne. She was wearing Sebastian’s silk monogrammed robe.

Beneath the photo, a single line of text read:

“He was so exhausted tonight, Seraphina. Thank you for keeping his seat warm and taking care of his house all these years, but I’ll take it from here.”

Seraphina stared at the words until the letters blurred into meaningless shapes. Her thumb hovered over the reply box. She typed nothing. There was nothing left worth saying to a woman who had already declared her own victory.

The air vanished from Seraphina’s lungs in a single, excruciating gasp. Her eyes burned with tears she refused to let fall, but before she could even process the depth of the betrayal, a sudden, violent cramp ripped through her lower abdomen.

It was so sharp, so excruciating, that it folded her double over the steering wheel. She choked on a scream, her hands flying to her stomach as a surge of sickening, burning heat flooded beneath her dress.

Panic, icy and absolute, instantly eclipsed her heartbreak.

Her mind flashed to the small, plastic stick sitting tucked away in the deepest pocket of her designer purse, the one displaying two unmistakable pink lines that she had planned to present to Sebastian alongside his anniversary cake. She had rehearsed the moment in the mirror that morning. Sebastian, we’re going to be parents. She had imagined his eyes softening, just once, just for her.

“No,” she whispered, her voice cracking as sweat broke out across her forehead. “No, please, not now.”

She looked down in the dim light of the cabin, and her blood ran ice-cold. A dark stain was spreading across the fabric of her cream dress.

A driver in the lane beside her rolled down his window and shouted through the rain. “Lady, the light’s green! Move your car!”

She barely heard him. The world fractured completely. Disregarding the blaring horns, the slick asphalt, and the pouring rain, Seraphina slammed her foot down on the accelerator. Her sedan roared forward, swerving through the intersection and tearing through a solid red light toward the nearest hospital, praying against all human hope that the one miracle she had claimed in this miserable marriage would not be ripped away from her tonight.

She gripped the wheel with one hand and pressed the other flat against her stomach, as if the pressure of her own palm could hold everything inside her together. “Stay with me,” she begged the empty car. “Please, just stay with me a little longer. I’ll protect you. I promise I’ll protect you.”