My Fairytale Shattered: His Cruel Betrayal

My Fairytale Shattered: His Cruel Betrayal

Serena Light

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For nine years, my marriage to tech titan Julian Gallegos was a fairytale. He was the powerful mogul who adored me, and I was the brilliant architect who was his world. Our love was the kind people whispered about. Then, a car crash stole it all. He woke up with the last nine years of his memory erased. He didn't remember me, our life, or our love. The man I loved was gone, replaced by a monster who saw me as his enemy. Under the influence of his manipulative childhood friend, Helena, he had my brother killed over a petty debt. He didn't stop there. At my brother's funeral, he ordered his men to break both of my legs. His final act of cruelty was stealing my voice-having my vocal cords surgically transplanted into Helena, leaving me mute and shattered. The man who once promised to protect me had become my tormentor. He had taken everything from me. My all-consuming love for him finally curdled into pure, absolute hate. He thought he had destroyed me. But he was wrong. I faked my own death, leaked the evidence that would burn his entire empire to the ground, and vanished. The man I married was already dead. It was time to make the monster wearing his face pay for everything.

Chapter 1

For nine years, my marriage to tech titan Julian Gallegos was a fairytale. He was the powerful mogul who adored me, and I was the brilliant architect who was his world. Our love was the kind people whispered about.

Then, a car crash stole it all. He woke up with the last nine years of his memory erased. He didn't remember me, our life, or our love.

The man I loved was gone, replaced by a monster who saw me as his enemy. Under the influence of his manipulative childhood friend, Helena, he had my brother killed over a petty debt.

He didn't stop there. At my brother's funeral, he ordered his men to break both of my legs. His final act of cruelty was stealing my voice-having my vocal cords surgically transplanted into Helena, leaving me mute and shattered.

The man who once promised to protect me had become my tormentor. He had taken everything from me. My all-consuming love for him finally curdled into pure, absolute hate.

He thought he had destroyed me. But he was wrong. I faked my own death, leaked the evidence that would burn his entire empire to the ground, and vanished. The man I married was already dead. It was time to make the monster wearing his face pay for everything.

Chapter 1

Khloe Rojas POV:

The first thing I heard when I came to was the frantic beep of a heart monitor and the sterile, cloying scent of antiseptic. My head throbbed with a pain so deep it felt like my skull had been split open and crudely glued back together. But none of that mattered. All I could think about was the screech of tires, the impossible crunch of metal, and the last thing I saw before the world went black: Julian, my husband, throwing his body over mine as our car spun into oblivion.

A nurse with kind eyes and a tired face appeared at my bedside. "You're awake. You're at Capital General Hospital. You have a severe concussion and a few broken ribs, but you're going to be okay."

Her words were supposed to be comforting, but they were just noise. "My husband," I rasped, my throat raw. "Julian Gallegos. Was he in the car with me? Is he... is he alive?"

The nurse' s expression softened with a pity that made my stomach clench. "He's alive," she said gently. "He's in the ICU. He took the brunt of the impact. It's a miracle you both survived."

Relief washed over me so intensely it felt like a second impact, leaving me weak and breathless. Julian was alive. Nothing else mattered. The world knew Julian Gallegos as a tech titan, a ruthless CEO who built an empire from scratch. They saw the charismatic genius on the covers of magazines. But I knew the man who hummed off-key while he made pancakes on Sunday mornings, the man who held me when my nightmares got too loud, the man who loved me with a ferocity that was both my anchor and my storm.

For nine years, our love had been the stuff of legends, a fairytale whispered about in envious social circles. He was the powerful mogul, and I was the brilliant architect he adored.

The doctors kept me for observation, but every waking moment was a battle to get to him. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, they cleared me to see him. My ribs screamed in protest with every step, but I barely felt it. I practically ran down the hallway to the ICU, my heart pounding a frantic rhythm against my bruised chest.

I pushed open the door to his room. He was sitting up in bed, a bandage wrapped around his head, his handsome face pale and drawn. But his eyes were open. They were the same deep, stormy grey eyes I had fallen in love with.

"Julian," I breathed, tears blurring my vision. "Oh, thank God."

I rushed to his side, my hand reaching for his. But he flinched away as if my touch was acid.

His eyes, those beautiful eyes that had always looked at me with so much love, were now filled with a cold, terrifying confusion. He stared at me, his gaze sweeping over my face without a flicker of recognition.

"Who are you?" he asked, his voice flat and devoid of emotion.

The words hit me like a physical blow. I stumbled back, my hand flying to my mouth. "What? Julian, it's me. It's Khloe. Your wife."

A cruel, humorless smile twisted his lips. It was a terrifying caricature of the smile I loved. "My wife? That's funny. I don't remember having a wife." He leaned forward slightly, his eyes narrowing into slits of ice. "But I do remember you, Khloe Rojas. I remember you're the reason my family fell apart."

The air left my lungs. He was talking about something that happened a decade ago, a family tragedy he had wrongly blamed me for before we ever fell in love, a misunderstanding we had cleared up and moved past nine years ago. His memory... it hadn't just been damaged. It had rewound. It had erased me. It had erased us.

"No, Julian, that was... that was a long time ago. We fixed that. We fell in love. We've been married for nine years." I pulled out my phone, my hands shaking so badly I could barely unlock it. I swiped to a picture of our wedding day, of him smiling, his eyes lit with pure joy as he held me in his arms. "Look. This is us."

He glanced at the photo with a look of utter disgust, then his gaze snapped back to me. "I don't know what kind of game you're playing, but it's over. Get out."

"Julian, please," I begged, tears streaming down my face. "You're hurt. You're confused. Let me help you remember."

His expression hardened into something truly menacing. "I said, get out." He reached for his own phone on the bedside table. With a few taps, he turned the screen towards me.

My blood ran cold. It was a live video feed. My younger brother, Leo, was tied to a chair in a dark, damp-looking room. His face was bruised, his eyes wide with terror.

"You know," Julian said, his voice a low, deadly whisper, "your brother still has that nasty gambling habit. A few calls, and his debtors were more than happy to deliver him to me. Now, for the last time, get out of my sight before I decide to let them collect their payment in pieces."

I stared at the screen, at my vulnerable brother, and then back at the stranger wearing my husband's face. This wasn't just amnesia. This was a monster.

"You wouldn't," I whispered, horror choking me.

He didn't answer. He just watched me, his eyes daring me to challenge him. Panic clawed at my throat. I lunged for his phone, a desperate, primal need to save my brother overriding everything else.

His reaction was lightning-fast. He grabbed my wrist, his grip like steel. He twisted my arm behind my back, slamming me against the cold wall of the hospital room. The pain in my ribs exploded, stealing my breath.

"Don't you ever touch me again," he snarled, his face inches from mine. I could feel his hot, angry breath on my skin. He emphasized his point by slamming my body against the wall again. And again. The rhythmic, brutal impacts sent waves of agony through me, each one a punctuation mark on a declaration of hate.

I hung limp in his grasp, the physical pain nothing compared to the shattering of my heart. This man, who had once vowed to protect me from the world, was now the source of my deepest pain.

Just then, the door opened. A woman with perfectly coiffed blonde hair and a saccharine sweet smile walked in. Helena Castro. Julian's childhood friend and a manipulative socialite I had always known was jealous of our marriage.

"Jules, darling," she cooed, her eyes lighting up when she saw him. Then her gaze fell on me, pinned against the wall, and a flicker of triumphant cruelty crossed her face before she masked it with faux concern. "Oh my, what's happening here?"

Julian released me abruptly. I crumpled to the floor, gasping for air. He didn't even glance down. He walked straight to Helena, his entire demeanor softening as he took her hands. "Helena. Thank God you're here. Get this woman out of my room."

He had forgotten nine years of love, nine years of marriage, nine years of a life we built together. But he remembered her. In his broken mind, his past infatuation with this venomous woman was now his present reality.

Helena looked down at me, her smile a mask of pure poison. "Don't worry, Jules. I'll take care of it." She leaned down, her voice a whisper only I could hear. "He's mine now. He always should have been."

As she and a security guard escorted me out, I looked back. Julian was watching Helena with an adoration I hadn't seen in his eyes since... since he had looked at me that way yesterday. Before the crash. Before my world ended.

He started divorce proceedings from his hospital bed. I tried everything to reach him, to make him remember. I brought photo albums, played our wedding video, I even brought his favorite dog, who he now treated like a stranger. Each attempt was met with colder rejection, with Julian's cruelty escalating under Helena's gleeful influence. She fed his paranoia, twisting his nine-year memory gap into a sinister narrative where I was a gold-digging villain who had trapped him.

The final, unforgivable blow came a month later. He used Leo's gambling debts as a weapon. He didn't just threaten; he acted. He sent thugs to "teach him a lesson." I was on the phone with Leo, hearing him beg for his life, when the line went dead.

I found him in a back alley, broken and bleeding. He was barely conscious.

"Klo...," he whispered, his breath shallow. "He said... he said this was for you..."

He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

I didn't cry at the morgue. I stood over my brother's cold, still body, and a strange, terrifying calm settled over me. The all-consuming love I had for Julian Gallegos curdled into something black and hard in my chest. It was hate. Pure, undiluted, and absolute.

He had taken everything from me. My love, my husband, my brother.

That night, I made a call to a number I had been given years ago by a disgruntled former employee of Julian's company, a whistleblower who had been silenced and ruined. "You once told me you had evidence that could destroy Julian Gallegos," I said, my voice steady. "I want it. All of it."

A deal was made.

I stood before Leo' s body one last time, my hand resting on his cold forehead. "I'm sorry, Leo," I whispered. "I'm so sorry I brought that monster into our lives. But I promise you, he will pay. I will burn his entire empire to the ground."

My plan was simple. I would orchestrate my own death. I would leak the evidence of his massive corporate fraud. And then, I would disappear. I would build a new life, a new identity, in a place he could never find me.

Some might call it revenge. I called it justice. The man I married was already dead. The man who wore his face was a monster who deserved to have everything he cherished turn to ash in his hands, just as he had done to me.

I would become a ghost, and a ghost has nothing left to lose.

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