Too Late To Beg: The Unwanted Wife Is An Heiress

I gave up my twenty-billion-dollar inheritance to become a nobody, just so my husband Ignatz could shine without being overshadowed.

But after five years of silence and sacrifice, he held my hands across his desk and begged me to go to prison.

"I need you to say you were driving the car," he pleaded.

His mistress, Everleigh, had committed a hit-and-run. To save her career, he wanted his pregnant wife to take the fall.

When I told him I was carrying his child, he didn't celebrate. He just looked annoyed and asked me to protect "us"—by which he meant her.

The stress and the secret abuse from his mother caused me to miscarry alone in a freezing apartment.

While I was bleeding out, losing the only thing that mattered, Ignatz was on a live broadcast, proposing to Everleigh with a diamond the size of a quail egg.

He didn't know that Everleigh had a hysterectomy years ago and could never give him the family he claimed to want.

He didn't know he had just killed his only real child to protect a liar.

I didn't cry. I simply placed the ultrasound photo and my diary on the cake table at his engagement party.

Then I accepted a job in Florence and vanished.

Five years later, when he finally found me and slashed his own wrist to prove his regret, I looked at him with dead eyes.

"You're at the wrong house, Ignatz," I said, closing the door. "There is nothing here for you to fix."

Chapter 1

Genevieve POV

Ignatz held my hands across the expanse of his mahogany desk. His grip was tight enough to bruise, but his eyes were wide, pleading, and desperate.

"I need you to say you were driving the car, Genevieve."

The words hung in the air between us, heavy and suffocating, sucking the oxygen right out of the room. I stared at him, my mind struggling to process the request. It felt like a physical blow.

My hand moved instinctively to my lower abdomen, where a life had been quietly growing for three months. A life he barely acknowledged, and now, perhaps, never would.

"You want me to take the blame for a hit-and-run?" I whispered, my voice trembling.

"It was a minor accident," Ignatz said quickly, leaning closer. His cologne, a scent of sandalwood and ambition that I used to associate with safety, now smelled cloying. It smelled like betrayal.

"No one was seriously hurt," he pressed on. "But if the press finds out it was Everleigh, her career is over. She is just starting to shine, Gen. You know how fragile her reputation is."

I pulled my hands away, the sudden loss of contact making me shiver. The coldness of the sterile office seeped into my bones.

"What about my reputation?" I asked, my voice gaining a fraction of strength. "What about me?"

"You are not in the public eye," he countered. His tone softened, slipping into that manipulative sweetness I had