Reborn to Dodge the Bad Marriage novel Chapter 14

Chapter 14 Taking Back What’s Hers

Victor had never intended to send anything at all. “Well…”

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Nora’s eyes curved and she smiled sweetly. “Dad feels he wronged my mother and shortchanged me all these years, so he isn’t keeping any of my engagement money. He’s giving me 10 million dollars in cash, five percent of the company, and a small firm of my own to run.

“And Yvette feels guilty about being the other woman, so she’s signing her salon over to me to make up for it. It clears a million dollars a year.”

She finished and looked up at the pair of them, beaming. “Dad, Yvette, that’s right, isn’t it?”

The first time around, they had every asset the family owned earmarked for Mandy. When Nora married Adrian, they took an engagement settlement of over 500 million dollars and sent her off without a single cent, and the Pierces never let her forget it.

Later, when Adrian was beating her and keeping her locked in the house, she got out and ran to them for help.

What they told her was this. “The Pierces are that rich. Plenty of women would line up for that marriage and take the beatings that came with it. So he knocked you around. That’s your good fortune, not your problem.”

Then her own father drove her back to that house himself and handed her over at the door.

I’m taking back every last thing that belongs to me, and when I settle with this family, I’m not going easy on any of them.

With that many relatives watching, neither of them could play the deadbeat father or the wicked stepmother, so they agreed through their teeth. “That’s right. Nora’s wedding gift is generous. We’d never shortchange her.”

Saying it cost the two of them actual physical pain.

The new firm was a media company doing well enough that it would clear tens of millions a year at the low end.

Yvette’s salon was small, though she had put very little into it and the returns came back handsomely.

All of it had been set aside for Mandy, and Nora had walked off with the lot in the space of a few sentences, which felt like having something cut out of them.

Yvette was closer to losing her mind over it, because she had not only handed the money over but done it under the banner of guilt about being the other woman, which bought her nothing

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Chapter 14 Taking Back What’s Hers

but humiliation.

I basically just called myself a homewrecker.

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Nora asked with a smile, “Uncle, would you keep the gift ledger for me? When there’s an occasion in someone’s family later, the Westons and I will want to return it properly.”

Victor and Yvette had bottomless appetites. In her last life the relatives handed her around a million dollars in wedding money and the two of them swallowed every cent.

This time, they’re not touching a dollar of it.

Once the relatives heard that the Westons would be the ones returning the favor, they gritted their teeth, added a little more, and had the new amounts written into the ledger.

With a family that rich on the other end, 10 thousand dollars given tonight might come back as 100 thousand dollars later, so nobody stood to lose anything.

More to the point, this was how favors worked. Keep it moving in both directions and the family ties held, and asking Nora for something down the road became a great deal easier.

Yvette watched them circle Nora one after another, the same people who had been flattering her two days ago, and it very nearly finished her.

She pulled Mandy aside. “The company and the salon were meant to be your wedding gift. Nora just walked off with all of it. God, I’m so pissed!”

Mandy talked her down. “Don’t waste the anger. That company gets shut down soon. It never takes off, and it ends up several million dollars in debt.”

Yvette blinked at her. “Really?”

Mandy nodded. “Really.”

Mandy had run that media company herself in her last life. She handed it straight to a general manager, the authorities shut it down over pornography charges, and the manager cleared out the accounts and disappeared, which left her several million dollars in debt with collectors at her door every day.

Her kept man talked her into gambling her way out of it, the stakes climbed, the hole got too deep to fill, and she ended up stealing Weston company secrets to sell.

That company was one of the places her whole life went wrong.

That helped a little, though the loss still stung. “My salon clears a million dollars a year and I don’t lift a finger for it.”

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Chapter 14 Taking Back What’s Hers

Finished

Mandy gave a quiet laugh and handed her a solution. “That part’s easy. Everything in that salon is unlicensed. A few clients wreck their faces, and Nora ends up buried in lawsuits and payouts.”

The salon had closed for good the first time around anyway, and it caused her no end of trouble on the way down.

Yvette felt enormously better after hearing that. “She took two disasters off my hands. I’ll call it charity.”

The two of them settled in happily to wait for Nora to take the company and the salon and drown in debt over both.

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