Reborn to Love Mr. Right Episode 1

📖 The Story Continues

Reborn to Love Mr. Right – Episode 01

The ballroom glittered with champagne glasses and camera flashes, but Arianna Taylor felt colder with every turn of her wheelchair. Pain throbbed beneath her ribs, a deep and punishing ache left by the accident the doctors said had damaged more than her spine. She had called Derek all morning because the bleeding inside her body was getting worse, yet he had never answered. Now she understood why. At the center of the celebration, Derek Davis stood beside Ivy with one arm around her waist and a diamond ring sparkling on her finger.

For a moment, Arianna could only stare. The man she had trusted with her heart, her inheritance, and her future looked perfectly at ease beneath the admiring gaze of the crowd. Nothing in his expression suggested that his girlfriend was waiting for life-saving surgery. He looked like a prince receiving the reward he had always deserved, while Ivy leaned against him with the smug confidence of a chosen bride. Arianna’s hands tightened around the wheels of her chair as disbelief gave way to dread.

“Derek,” she called, forcing her weakened voice above the music. “Why didn’t you pick up my calls?” The room quieted in ripples as heads turned toward her. Once, people had rushed to greet Arianna Taylor wherever she went, but the woman before them now wore an old coat over a hospital gown, her face pale and hollow from months of pain. Their curiosity sharpened into disgust before anyone bothered to ask who she was.

Ivy’s nose wrinkled as if Arianna had carried the smell of the street into the elegant room. “What is that homeless woman doing here?” she asked loudly. Guests whispered that the stranger seemed to know Derek, and several phones lifted to record the spectacle. Derek’s confident smile faltered when he saw Arianna, but only for an instant. The alarm in his eyes was quickly hidden behind an expression of embarrassed concern.

“Arianna, what are you doing here?” he asked, as though she were the one who had violated an agreement. She swallowed the humiliation burning in her throat and reminded herself that pride could not save her life. The surgeon had given her almost no time, and every account she once controlled now belonged to Derek. “Please,” she said. “I need money for my medicine. The accident caused internal bleeding, and I need surgery. I can’t wait any longer.”

Ivy glanced from Arianna to Derek, then laid a possessive hand over his chest. “You’re asking my fiancé for money like some beggar? Who gave you the audacity?” Her voice carried easily through the silent room. A few guests laughed, reassured by her certainty that Arianna must be an intruder. The word fiancé struck harder than the pain in Arianna’s body, because Derek did not correct it.

Arianna looked at the ring on Ivy’s hand and recognized the rare diamond immediately. She had paid for it months ago after Derek claimed he needed it for an important business investment. Even now, some desperate corner of her heart searched his face for an explanation. “I thought we were getting married,” she whispered. “I gave you all my money, Derek. How can you stand there and pretend you don’t know me?”

The tenderness Derek had once performed vanished from his eyes. “I deserved every penny you ever gave me,” he said, lowering his voice without lowering it enough. “Consider it payment for putting up with a stupid woman like you.” His cruelty drew a few startled looks, but fear of challenging him kept the guests silent. He stepped closer to Arianna and told her to leave before people started asking questions.

Memories crowded her mind with merciless clarity: Derek grieving beside her at her father’s funeral, Derek promising to protect Taylor Industries, Derek guiding her hand to signatures she had barely read because she trusted him. At the time, his concern had felt like love. Now she saw the patience of a thief waiting for every lock to open. “You asked me to sign my father’s company over to you,” she said, her voice shaking. “You promised we would run it together.”

Derek gave a quiet, humorless laugh. “How could anyone be that naive?” He looked her over slowly, taking in the wheelchair, the worn clothes, and the body the accident had left frail. “Look at yourself. You’re disgusting. You don’t deserve someone like me.” Turning toward Ivy, he softened his expression and added, “She does.”

The final illusion inside Arianna shattered. She had defended Derek whenever her father questioned his intentions, insisting that poverty did not make a man unworthy. She had confused greed with ambition and obedience with devotion. Worse, she had pushed away everyone who tried to warn her. The shame of her blindness hurt almost as much as the betrayal itself.

“I don’t deserve you?” Arianna repeated, and something fierce surfaced beneath her grief. “Your father was my family’s driver, Derek.” A shocked murmur moved through the room. Derek’s face went rigid, but she no longer cared what his anger might cost her. “I paid for your prep school, your college, your clothes—everything that taught you how to stand here and pretend you were born into this world.”

Ivy’s hand slipped from Derek’s chest. Guests who had spent the evening flattering him began exchanging uncertain looks. Arianna pointed toward Ivy’s ring with a trembling finger and told them she had paid for that too. The story Derek had built around himself now looked fragile, its polished surface splitting under the weight of a few simple facts. Several phones tilted away from Arianna and toward him.

“She’s lying,” Derek said, but his composure had begun to crack. He glanced toward the exits and then at the growing number of cameras. Everything he valued—his reputation, Ivy’s admiration, and the social power he had stolen—was threatened by the woman he had believed too broken to resist him. “She hasn’t been well since the accident,” he added. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

Arianna tried to push herself closer, determined to make him answer for every promise. The movement sent a blade of pain through her abdomen, and warmth spread beneath the bandage under her gown. She gripped the armrest until her knuckles whitened. Even with death pressing against her lungs, she refused to let Derek erase her truth. “Tell them whose company you took,” she demanded. “Tell Ivy whose money bought the life you gave her.”

Derek bent toward her, his smile gone. “You should have stayed out of sight,” he muttered. His voice held no trace of the boy she had once loved, only the resentment of a man furious that his victim could still speak. Arianna saw his foot shift, but her failing body reacted too slowly. The blow struck with brutal force and knocked her sideways from the wheelchair.

Her shoulder hit the floor first, followed by her head. Gasps rose around her, yet no one moved close enough to help. The lights above blurred into white streaks as pain exploded through her body. Blood seeped through the thin fabric at her waist, darkening it while Derek stood over her. Arianna tried to draw breath, but the air would not come.

From the floor, she watched Ivy clutch Derek’s arm, not in horror but impatience. The couple she had financed looked down at her as if she were an inconvenience that should have disappeared months ago. The truth was finally undeniable: the accident had not merely taken her ability to walk. It had delivered her entire life into the hands of two people who had been waiting to strip it bare.

Arianna thought of her father and the warnings she had dismissed as prejudice. She remembered another man too—Hayden Scott, the billionaire heir her father had once hoped she would marry. Hayden had never demanded her money or asked her to make herself smaller, yet she had rejected him with needless cruelty for Derek’s sake. Regret filled the space where hope had lived, bitter and far too late.

The ballroom faded as Arianna’s eyes closed, but voices still reached her through the darkness. Derek was telling everyone not to worry, already constructing another lie over her broken body. Then she heard footsteps approaching with urgent purpose, followed by a man’s horrified voice calling her name. Someone had finally come for her—but Arianna no longer knew whether she would live long enough to see who it was.