Divorced by Mistake, Claimed by the Billionaire He Hates

I slid the dissolution papers across the table the moment Dante Moretti dropped his voice low, sweet-talking the fifty-second girl on the other end of the line.

"Dante. Let's end this."

"Sign it, wait out the thirty-day cooling period, and once it's done, we go our separate ways. No more ties."

He gave a flat mm, took the folder without looking, flipped straight to the last page, and scrawled his name with the same lazy authority he used to initial shipping manifests he'd never read.

Then he stood, reached for his overcoat draped across the arm of the leather chair, and kept talking to the girl on the phone.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm coming to you right now, okay?"

The call ended. He was already at the door of the study, one hand on the brass knob, when something made him glance back at me.

"Oh, right, Vera. What was that thing you just had me sign?"

He'd already signed it. And only now did it occur to him to ask.

I tugged at the corner of my mouth. The smile that formed was pure acid.

"The dis—"

Before I could finish, he waved me off, impatient.

"Listen, if you want to buy another property just go ahead and buy it. You don't need to bring me a contract every time. I've got someone to deal with here. I've been home with you for days and the girl's already throwing fits."

It hit me then. He hadn't heard a single word. He thought it was just another real-estate agreement.

And really, why wouldn't he.

In the past, whenever we fought our worst, my favorite retaliation was to burn through his money on entire rows of villas. The housing market had been bleeding out for years, but I'd still pour tens of millions of cleaned cash into dying developments, just to punish him, just to vent the pain and fury I couldn't hold inside anymore.

Back then, I still had expectations of him. That thin, stubborn thread of love kept me from accepting that he had already turned away from me, and so I shattered, again and again, and fell into despair, again and again.

But when exactly had he started to change.

I remembered the first time we met. It was at a bar in the old neighborhood.

I'd gone to pick up a friend and happened to catch him drunk, barely standing, about to go down hard. I steadied him out of simple decency.

He lifted his head and looked at me. Just that one look, and he decided I was his.

The name Dante Moretti was never unfamiliar in our world. Blood heir of the Moretti Family, born with the sharp, reckless face of a man who thought rules were suggestions. The women around him rotated every three days. Half the city's daughters had bruised their hearts on him at one point or another.

I didn't want to be one of them. I didn't want anything to do with a man like that, so I refused him from the start.

But he didn't give up. If anything, he sank deeper, clinging to me with a stubbornness that bordered on obsession, his eyes unable to settle on anyone else.

Valentine's Day, he filled an entire piazza with flowers. To make me smile, he lit fireworks over the harbor that burned until dawn. And every single time I was low, he appeared, right on time.

Under that kind of relentless pursuit, my heart, which had never once stirred for anyone, cracked open, piece by piece.

After we were together, he really did pull back.

No more drifting from woman to woman. He reported his schedule without being asked, told me everywhere he went.

Everyone said he'd straightened out for me. They said there was nothing more precious than a wild man who finally came home.

I believed it.

So when he went down on one knee, eyes rimmed red, and asked me to be his wife, I said yes almost without hesitation.

But the marriage wasn't even a year old before he started tangling with other women again.

We fought countless times.

I stood in the wreckage of the living room, screaming, hysterical, like someone who'd lost her mind completely. And he just pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose, face heavy with exhaustion.

In the end, he even made an offer so absurd it made my chest go hollow.

"Vera, I love you. But staying faithful to one person for a lifetime… it gets stale."

"We each have our fun. We don't catch feelings for anyone on the outside. And when we've had enough, we come back to the family. Okay?"

I refused.

He carried on exactly as he pleased.