My Husband’s Brother Forced Me

I am the heiress to the Vance fortune.

Five years ago, I walked away from my family and my inheritance to marry Liam Stone in this small city of Riverton.

We were happy, so incredibly happy, for a few short years. Then came the crash.

I was drowning in grief, and his parents had the nerve to suggest I marry their younger son, Evan, who had just returned from studying abroad.

I refused. Flat out.

The warmth drained from their faces instantly. When seduction didn't work, they turned to threats.

"You were a curse on our eldest son!" his mother had shrieked. "Evan begged us to spare you, and you have the audacity to reject him?"

They forced a drugged soup down my throat and threw me into Evan's room.

When I woke up, my brother-in-law was in my bed, my clothes in tatters.

He held up a will, claiming Liam had left a final request in writing: that I, and the business we had built together, were to be handed over to him.

He played the part of the gentle, grieving brother in public, but in private, he was a monster.

I fought him with everything I had, but it was useless. The physical difference was too great. And then, I was pregnant.

They locked me away in the Stone family's cellar, where I endured the most agonizing days of my life.

It was only before I died that I learned the truth. Liam's "accident" wasn't an accident at all. Evan had planned the whole thing.

But I never hated Liam. He was an innocent victim.

I hate the people who killed him.

Now, tracing the handsome, smiling face of my husband in our wedding photo, tears streamed down my cheeks.

"I swear," I whispered to his picture, "I will make them pay."

Evan’s collapse sent the Stone family into a tailspin.

His mother, a storm of fury, kicked open the villa's front door, her bodyguards trailing behind her. She stormed up to the third-floor bedroom.

I was just waking up, completely defenseless, when she slapped me hard across the face.

Her eyes blazed. The heel of her expensive shoe ground into the floor as if trying to drill a hole through it.