He Faked Amnesia To Break Our Vows

I was sealing our wedding invitations with crimson wax when I heard my fiancé through the slightly ajar study door.

Ethan wasn't reciting the poetry he’d written for me over the last seven years. He was outlining the logistics of his betrayal.

"If I fake amnesia after the 'accident' tonight, I can delay the wedding without the family stopping the merger," Ethan laughed, ice clinking in his glass.

"And Ava? The Canary?" his friend asked.

"Ava is property. You maintain property; you don't have fun with it. While she plays nurse, I get a medical exemption to sleep with Chloe."

My world shattered. I fled into the rainy night, blinded by tears, until headlights turned my world upside down.

I woke up in the wreckage, my arm shattered, tasting blood. Ethan arrived moments later.

But he didn't run to me.

He stepped right over my bleeding body to comfort Chloe, who had a minor scratch on her forehead.

"I've got you, baby," he cooed to his mistress, looking at me with nothing but cold annoyance. "Don't worry about her. She's tough."

He left me in the street.

By the next morning, the narrative was set: The tragic Don had lost his memory of his fiancée, but miraculously remembered his 'true love,' Chloe. He evicted me from our penthouse while I was still in surgery.

He thought he had won. He thought the Canary would just die in the cold.

He forgot one thing. I knew where he hid the bodies—literally.

I walked into his staged public proposal, slammed my ring on the table, and left a note under it.

*I remember everything. And so do you.*

Then I boarded a plane with his secret incriminating journal in my bag. The empire was about to burn.

Chapter 1

Ava Miller POV

I was sealing the envelope for our wedding invitation with hot wax when I heard my fiancé outlining the logistics of his betrayal.

The wax was crimson. Blood red. It dripped onto the heavy cream paper, pooling into the crest of the Reed family. A lion holding a rose. I pressed the brass seal down, my movements practiced and perfect.

That was what I was. Practiced. Perfect. The future Mrs. Ethan Reed.

For seven years, I had been the envy of every socialite in New York. Ethan wasn't just the heir to a business empire that operated in the city's grayest shadows; he was a poet. A tortured soul. Or at least, that was the man he showed me.

I looked at the stack of invitations. Five hundred guests. The Plaza Hotel. It was the fairytale ending to a romance that started in the library of Columbia University.

He used to slide poems across the table to me. Sonnets about my eyes. Haikus about my laugh. He told me I was the only pure thing in his dark world. He told me he needed me to breathe.

I believed him.

I was the canary in his golden cage. I sang