Trapped by the Billionaire Again

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The car crash wiped Harrison Prescott's memory completely clean, erasing every trace of how he forced me into a suffocating marriage.

His family caught wind of the situation. They moved with terrifying speed, shoving a finalized divorce agreement into my hands.

In less than 12 hours, I stood in a completely different city, holding a pristine divorce decree in one hand and an 80 million dollar check in the other.

I was free.

After being suffocated by Harrison's relentless possession for so long, the sudden liberty left me dizzy.

Then, I went out for groceries one afternoon. A heavy hand clamped over my mouth.

I opened my eyes to the dim, oppressive familiarity of a basement.

A man's chillingly crisp voice drifted through the dark space. "Be my good girl, and I can give you everything you've ever wanted."

Perfect. We were doing this all over again.

Chapter 1

I found out about Harrison's amnesia exactly a week after the wreck.

The doctors fought for hours just to drag him back from the brink of death.

His mother, Eleanor, delivered the news to me. Tears streamed from her left eye while the right one practically shot daggers. "If he hadn't been tearing up the highway looking for you, my son wouldn't be lying in a hospital bed!"

She spat out the timeline. Harrison had been in the middle of a therapy session. He got the alert that I had fled. He snapped.

He ditched the session, hopped in his car, and chased my trail so blindly that he steered straight into the path of an oncoming semi-truck.

Thank God he drove a tank of a luxury SUV. The truck driver managed a desperate swerve at the last second. Otherwise, Harrison wouldn't just be missing his memories. He'd be dead.

Realization washed over me. Oh. So that was it.

I had spent the entire week waiting for the other shoe to drop, genuinely assuming the GPS tracker he slipped on me had just malfunctioned. He left me sitting on a beach in the Caribbean for seven whole days.

I was Harrison's captive wife.

I never understood the fatal attraction. I possessed absolutely zero traits that should have triggered his obsession. I was a standard corporate wage slave. He was the CEO of Prescott.

When his sleazy cousin cornered a female intern at the company gala, I shattered a Merlot bottle across his skull, fully expecting to be fired by the CEO.

The next morning, an envelope hit my inbox. I wasn't fired. I was transferred out of my crumbling satellite branch straight into Prescott's gleaming headquarters.

They tripled my salary. I practically mooed like a corporate ox and started plowing through my workload.

Harrison took a strange, immediate liking to me. He smiled whenever I entered a room. He fast-tracked my promotions. He fired middle managers who gave me grief.

He even stepped in and completely annihilated my toxic ex-boyfriend.

Harrison validated my work and threw a safety net over every single one of my corporate mistakes. I once bought him a pair of cheap, generic cufflinks. He wore them to million-dollar boardrooms for ten years straight.

I thanked my lucky stars. I literally bowed to the sky three times every day after work, deeply grateful for such a good boss.

I would have bled for Prescott until retirement.

Then came the company retreat. I drank way too much champagne. The room spun.

Harrison's solid arm wrapped around my waist, guiding me out to his waiting town car. He pressed my head against his shoulder. "Go to sleep, Penny," he murmured, the low rumble of his chest against my cheek. "I'll take you home."

I was a lightweight. I should have passed out until the next morning.

But a sudden bump in the road jostled me awake. I fluttered my eyes open.

Harrison hovered over me in the dark leather backseat.

His mouth was slanted over mine, stealing the breath right out of my lungs.

The mentor illusion shattered. He stopped pretending. He confessed everything.

Billionaire pursuits were never subtle. They were suffocating avalanches.

Private jets. Yachts. Diamond chokers. Pieces of art that belonged in museums.

If I could imagine it, Harrison bought it.

Was this billionaire's suffocating affection a dream come true, or the beginning of an inescapable nightmare?

Chapter 2

But I was an honest pragmatist; if I didn't like someone, I simply didn't like them.

If this were some elaborate romance scam setup, I would have gladly conned him right back for every dime.

Unfortunately, it wasn't.

It made my stomach twist to admit it. Beneath the suffocating avalanche of his wealth lay his actual, beating heart. Playing games with genuine affection was bad karma.

So, I rejected Harrison's advances for the final time.

That was when something inside him completely snapped.

He owned a sprawling lakehouse in upstate New York. Deep inside the property was a windowless, soundproof room.

Whenever I tried to run, he dragged me straight into the dark to consume me in pure, angry sex.

Afterward, he would loom over me. His chest would heave, the flush of climax still burning high on his cheekbones. "Be my woman, and I can give you everything you've ever wanted," he would demand, forcing the ring onto my finger.

He threatened to break my legs if I ever fought him again. He swore he would chain me to his side until the end of time.

He said it constantly. He never actually laid a violent hand on me.

Every time he hauled me back from an escape attempt, he would stare at my completely deadpan expression. The utter lack of fear in my eyes drove him insane.

He would get so incredibly frustrated that the corners of his eyes would turn a deep, feverish red, tears of sheer desperation welling in his dark gaze.

That usually got me to stop running for a while.

Honestly, I thought he looked incredibly sexy when he was about to cry.

In the beginning, the cat-and-mouse game held a certain twisted thrill. Eventually, it just got exhausting.

I couldn't truly escape. He couldn't bring himself to actually hurt me.

Besides, the estate was massive. There were so many gorgeous rooms we hadn't even broken in yet. Fucking in that claustrophobic dark room every single time was a complete waste of square footage.

So, on a perfectly bright Tuesday morning, I finally married Harrison.

Most days, he played the ruthless dictator flawlessly.

Like any man consumed by toxic obsession, he wanted me surgically attached to his hip. He needed to track my pulse and location every second of the day.

But beneath the dominant facade lay a bottomless pit of insecurity.

He knew exactly how he had secured our marriage. He knew the extortion it took. Because of that crushing guilt, he never dared to officially lock me away like some kept trophy wife.

Paranoia ate him alive. If I was out of his sight, he spiraled into a panic.

Eventually, torn apart by his possessive nature and crippling self-doubt, Harrison caved. He slipped GPS trackers into my phone and the linings of my designer handbags while I slept.

If I stayed out in the city past twenty-four hours, it took him less than sixty minutes to materialize out of thin air and haul me back.

Once I figured out his little system, I basically treated the unhinged billionaire like my own personal, unpaid Uber driver. When I got tired of shopping or walking around, I would just check into a hotel and fall fast asleep.

I knew the drill. I would always wake up tucked into our massive king-sized bed, dressed in my silk pajamas.

It was ridiculously convenient.

The only price I paid was waking up with fresh, dark bruises blooming across my collarbones where Harrison had devoured me in my sleep.

But this time, I completely miscalculated.

I only meant to take a 24-hour trip to the Caribbean island, but a full 72 hours passed without a single incoming call.

I sat on the white sand, letting the ocean breeze whip my hair around. I kept refreshing my phone, convinced the tracker had short-circuited.

I literally wondered if a satellite had crashed out of orbit. It never once crossed my mind that Harrison had been in a near-fatal wreck.

It worked out beautifully, though. He wiped his memory clean. I was thoroughly erased.

When his corporate team informed him he had a wife, he didn't even blink.

"Divorce her," he had commanded, waving a dismissive hand. "I don't remember the woman anyway."

Fate took one effortless swipe and blessed every single one of us.

Harrison was back to being the untouchable, ice-cold billionaire CEO who had zero interest in women.

His mother finally had the green light to pair him off with a proper blue-blooded heiress, but would the unhinged monster inside him truly stay asleep forever?

Chapter 3

And me? I was finally free.

And exactly eighty million dollars richer.

Right before I left, Eleanor cornered me with one final, venomous warning. "Harrison's obsession with you was nothing but a psychological sickness. Now that his mind is resetting, don't you dare delude yourself into thinking he'll ever look for you again."

I had heard whispers about Harrison's mental state before. Paranoia and severe attachment disorders triggered by some deep-seated childhood trauma.

It definitely explained the relentless obsession.

Makes perfect sense. No sane, healthy man kidnaps a woman and locks her away just to force a ring on her finger.

Three years of marriage felt like a bizarre, suffocating fever dream.

Now I was awake. The lakehouse, the yachts, the diamonds, that claustrophobic dark room all gone.

The only thing left was the surreal weight of the eighty-million-dollar severance check in my bag.

Eleanor told me to get as far away as humanly possible. I am a woman of my word.

I opened Google Maps, measured the maximum continental distance from Prescott headquarters, booked a one-way flight, and didn't look back.

I settled down in a new, quiet city. I bought a modest townhouse and filled it with completely unremarkable, mass-produced furniture.

Then, I picked up a part-time shift at a local artisanal caf just to pass the time. It felt exactly like my life before Harrison ever existed.

The shop owner's grandson, Nolan, was a college senior who helped out behind the counter on his days off. He was a total finance bro at heart.

The small TV mounted behind the espresso machine constantly ran Bloomberg and billionaire gossip segments. That was where I saw Harrison again.

He had just been discharged from the hospital. The paparazzi swarmed him, flashes bouncing off his slightly pale face. He didn't give them a single glance.

Cold. Aloof. Completely untouchable.

One reporter shoved a microphone past security, holding up a grainy, zoomed-in paparazzi photo of me. "Mr. Prescott! Rumors say you had a secret wife. Is this woman your spouse?"

Harrison's dark eyes briefly flicked to the photo. His expression remained utterly dead. "Excuse me," his crisp voice cut through the noise. "I have absolutely no memory of her."

Watching the broadcast, Nolan leaned against the counter and whistled. "Professor Prescott has to be in his thirties by now. How is he still single?"

"Professor?"

"Yeah," Nolan said, wiping down the steam wand. "He used to be a guest lecturer at my university. Half the campus was in love with him."

"Why?" I asked lazily, propping my chin on my hand. "Because he didn't take attendance?"

"Because he's gorgeous."

Nolan launched into a speech about how men of Harrison's caliber were basically campus royalty. Refined. Mature. The absolute picture of a perfect gentleman.

He rattled off stories of Harrison politely but ruthlessly rejecting endless confessions from both female and male students alike.

"He is an untouchable god, Penelope. No one can ever break his icy shell."

The glowing descriptions perfectly matched the icy, unbothered billionaire currently on the screen.

It reminded me of what Eleanor screamed at me on my wedding day. "This is all your fault! Our Harrison was never like this before he met you!"

I thought she was completely unhinged at the time. How the hell was I supposed to know what Harrison was like before me?

From the literal second I met him, he was already a ruthless bastard willing to cross every moral line to own me.

He was the kind of unhinged man who would take a vicious slap across the jaw and immediately drag his hot tongue along the stinging skin of my palm.

Now, looking at the TV, it finally clicked. Oh. So this was the real Harrison Prescott.

Mental illness really was a terrifying thing. It took an untouchable, high-society god and shattered his programming entirely.

It made him unravel. It made him sob desperately in the dark. It drove him to do the most despicable, degrading things just to keep me.

Thank God he had amnesia.

The news cycle was dominated by Harrison, but exactly how many days would it take before his expanding empire swallowed my quiet new life?

Chapter 4

Erasing three years of his life did not slow him down at all.

One day he was acquiring a tech firm, the next he was negotiating with foreign tycoons. Prescott was thriving even more than before.

He looked completely natural during press interviews. A host asked if he planned on settling down soon.

He did not blink. He bluntly stated he had zero expectations for love and would likely enter a marriage of convenience for the company.

"But what if you meet the right girl?" the host pressed.

Harrison offered a faint, polite smile. "Even if I did, I would not force anything. I deeply respect my partner's autonomy."

I stared at the screen in dead silence. Right. I just had the tragic luck of meeting the unhinged, psychopathic version of him.

Nolan walked out of the back kitchen. He slid a massive, customized affogato across the counter, piled high with extra espresso and biscotti.

"Wow, big spender today," I noted.

He flashed a triumphant grin. "Obviously. It is to celebrate my new job offer."

"Congratulations. Which company?"

"Prescott."

The espresso caught in my throat. I coughed violently, pounding my chest. "I thought, aren't Prescott's headquarters in Manhattan?"

"They are opening a new regional branch. Didn't you see?"

Nolan grabbed the remote and rewound the broadcast by thirty minutes. Sure enough, there was Harrison, calmly outlining Prescott's aggressive expansion strategy.

The very first city on his map was the exact one I was currently hiding in.

Memories of my own grueling days as a Prescott corporate drone flashed through my mind.

"The headquarters is great," I warned him, "but the branch offices will work you to the bone."

"But the starting salary is insane," Nolan argued.

"You are twenty-two. Why are you in such a rush to sell your soul for a paycheck?"

Nolan threw a soft, lingering glance my way before quickly ducking his head. "Maybe so I have the confidence to actually pursue the girl I like."

It was not my imagination. Nolan definitely had a crush on me.

College guys were terrifyingly easy to read. The immediate blush whenever our eyes met, the nervous twisting of his apron strings, the random phantom basketball shots when he did not know what to do with his hands. He wore his heart on his sleeve.

Unsurprisingly, he confessed his feelings. Just as unsurprisingly, I shot him down with zero hesitation.

Harrison used to take my rejections, pretend they never happened the next morning, and shamelessly whisper, "Persistence is a virtue, Penny."

Nolan did not have that kind of sociopathic thick skin.

The second I said no, his eyes welled up. He choked out a quick "Sorry to bother you," and literally bolted out the front door.

By eleven o'clock that night, he still was not back. His grandmother was pacing a hole into the cafe floor.

I pulled out my phone to call him, only to see a new text light up my lock screen. "Penny, I am at the police precinct. Can you please come bail me out?"

Surprisingly, Nolan had not gone on some heartbroken, illegal bender. He had actually spent the evening trying to do his job.

He was wining and dining a new corporate client. After a few too many rounds of whiskey, the client suggested taking the after-party somewhere fun.

Nolan was drunk. He blindly followed the guy. He did not snap out of his stupor until he was shoved into a private VIP booth and felt someone unzipping his slacks.

"I didn't know the client was into guys! I didn't realize it was that kind of club," Nolan stammered, looking absolutely traumatized. "I panicked. So I called 911."

As a result, the cops raided the booth and hauled him in right alongside the client.

"The client is threatening to ruin my career," Nolan sniffled, wiping his nose. "And my boss is on his way down here right now to handle it."

"Your boss?"

A cold, sickening knot formed in the pit of my stomach. "Nolan, which boss?"

"The one from"

Before he could finish the sentence, Nolan abruptly stood up. With tears still shining in his eyes, he looked right past my shoulder.

Chapter 5