The Ghost Bride's Game Of Revenge

After surviving five years of hell in a deep-sea simulation, I finally escaped, battered and broken. I fought my way back for one reason: my fiancé, Derek. But when I found him, he sealed me in a cave and left me to die.

"Just three more days, Eva," he pleaded, his hand holding my pregnant former assistant's. "Our wedding is on Saturday."

My own parents, who had adopted her as their new daughter, believed her lies that I was a monster. They watched as Derek broke my ankle and hand, and my father shattered my ribs.

They left me for dead, trapped and alone, after I had spent five years clinging to their memory.

But I didn't die. I was rescued by a mysterious benefactor who gave me a new life and erased my pain. A year later, when a guilt-ridden Derek tracked me down, begging for a second chance, I smiled. It was my turn to play a game.

Chapter 1

Eva POV:

My life, what was left of it, ended the day I found him again. Five years. Five years of hell to get back to a world that didn't want me anymore.

The submersible was gone. One moment, the deep-sea currents were a dance of shadows and light. The next, a violent shudder rocked us, and the abyss swallowed everything. They called it an anomaly. I called it a new beginning. My beginning.

Derek, my fiancé, my rock, must have been broken by my loss. He was. I heard the stories later, whispered in the cold, sterile rooms of my recovery. He tried to end it all. A desperate, jagged cut across his wrist, a crimson promise to follow me into the deep.

He swore to my parents, his eyes wet and red, that he would spend every waking moment, every penny, the next five years of his life, searching. He told them he' d rather die than live without me. His voice, raw with grief, echoed in the empty halls of their home. My parents, shattered by their daughter's presumed death, clung to his words like a lifeline.

"Five years," he choked out, his hand shaking as he gripped my father's arm. "If I don't find her, you'll never see me again."

He meant it. He spent the money. Every last cent of our shared savings, his inheritance, even his research grants went into charting expeditions, hiring experts, buying submersible equipment. He chased every whisper, every phantom signal. He lost weight. His clean-shaven face grew a rough beard, his eyes hollowed out, dark circles perpetually bruised beneath them. He looked like a ghost, haunted by my absence.

My parents watched him, their own hope flickering. After three years, they couldn't take it anymore. They stopped funding the searches, their faces etched with a grief I couldn't imagine. They moved on, adopting a young woman, a former lab assistant of mine, Casey, into our family. A new daughter, a new life, built on my grave.

But Derek