Not Her: The Shadow Bride's Great Escape

I was the invisible daughter of a low-level mobster until Ethan Cole, the city’s most terrifying Don, plucked me from the streets.

He claimed it was love at first sight. He married me, draped me in vintage diamonds, and treated me like a fragile porcelain doll.

I thought I was living a fairytale until I found the secret room in his library.

It was filled with photos of a dead woman named Olivia. A woman who had my hair, my eyes, and my face.

I wasn't his soulmate. I was a replacement part for a broken machine.

When I became pregnant, Ethan didn't hug me. He placed a possessive hand on my stomach and whispered, "The heir."

He didn't see me. He only saw an incubator for a ghost's legacy.

My father tried to warn me and died for it. I realized that once I gave Ethan this child, I would be trapped in his gilded cage forever, a broodmare for a man in love with a corpse.

So, I did the unthinkable.

I walked into a clinic and paid cash to remove the one thing he valued more than his empire.

I went home, collapsed on the marble floor in a pool of blood, and looked up at the monster who thought he owned me.

"I lost it," I screamed, tearing at his lapels. "I lost our baby!"

I watched his heart break, knowing I had just declared war.

Chapter 1

Ava POV

Gravel chewed into the skin of my palms before I even registered the screech of tires.

My bicycle lay in a mangled skeleton of metal a few feet away, its front wheel spinning lazily in the unnerving morning silence.

Pain radiated up my arms, but fear was the colder sensation seizing my chest, because the black sedan that had clipped me didn't look like an accident.

It looked like a predator that had finally decided to stop stalking its prey and strike.

The driver's door opened.

A man stepped out.

He didn't rush. He moved with a terrifying lack of urgency.

He adjusted the cuffs of his suit jacket-a dark charcoal fabric that probably cost more than my father's entire house-with precise, deliberate motions.

He was tall, violently handsome, and carried an air of authority that made the atmosphere around him feel heavy, as if he consumed all the oxygen in the street.

I knew who he was instantly.

Everyone in our world knew the face of the man who held the leash to the city's throat.

Ethan Cole.

The Don.

My father was a low-level associate, a man who paid his dues and kept his head down, terrified of the very organization he served.

I was the daughter he kept hidden, the clean thing in a dirty world.

Ethan walked toward me, his movements fluid and predatory.

He crouched down, his eyes scanning my face with an intensity that made me want to shrink back into the asphalt.

"Are you hurt, Ava?"

He knew my