Tan Ran forcibly blocked every single one of Xu Nam’s contact channels on my phone. Once he was done, he glanced over at me and dropped his cold declaration:

“You—from now on, you are not allowed to contact any other man besides me.”

I opened my mouth to shoot back: And what if my family calls? But before the thought could even fully take shape, I remembered I was an orphan. So, I obediently kept my mouth shut. Sometimes in life, silence is the ultimate tragic mood.

I sat there listening to his ultimate possessive-CEO pitch, quietly roasting him in my head. Classic second-male-lead energy! Every word out of his mouth sounded like it had been dipped in a vat of slick, over-the-top alpha-boss energy.

Oh right, I almost forgot to mention: I’m a transmigrator. To be specific, I got dropped straight into a trashy romance novel titled The Dominant CEO’s Contract Child Bride. It was one of those ridiculously long, absurd web novels that could send your brain into orbit if you took it seriously.

Back in my past life, I’d gritted my teeth and powered through all three thousand chapters just to leave an eight-hundred-word scathing review, dragging everything from the author’s prose to the characters’ non-existent IQs. Naturally, the second I hit send, my hand slipped, spilling coffee straight into an electrical outlet. And just like that, I won a one-way ticket to another world.

I guess I must have racked up some pretty bad karma, because even after transmigrating, I was still stuck as a background extra. Worse, I was an orphan who’d been dumped at a fire station the minute I was born. Looks like “utterly alone” is just my eternal destiny.

It wasn’t until I landed a job as Tan Ran’s executive secretary that I realized what kind of world I was living in. Tan Ran was the textbook devotion-blind second lead: willing to burn his entire fortune to ashes for the female lead, only to lose her in the end to the male lead—who, of course, was blessed with an absurd amount of main-character halo.

Because of that, ever since my very first day on the job, I’d been secretly hoarding cash. You know, just in case Tan Ran went bankrupt for love one day and I needed a safety net to start a street-food cart. What baffled me the most was that the female lead hadn’t even shown her face yet, but I’d somehow managed to end up married to the second lead. I honestly couldn’t tell if the original author had abandoned the story halfway through or if the plot was just aggressively going off the rails on its own.

Ever since the incident with Xu Nam, Tan Ran started forcing me to work overtime every single day under a ridiculously poetic excuse: “Nipping any potential dates you might have right in the bud.”

I was ready to unleash a whole tirade on him, but then he casually added, “Triple pay for overtime.”

Instantly, I flashed my most professional, five-star customer-service smile. “CEO Tan, I was born to serve this company. Working overtime is my absolute privilege!”

The female lead was bound to show up sooner or later anyway, and how could a background extra like me ever stand a chance against her main-character halo? The only thing that could give me a true sense of security was a heavy bank balance. The larger Tan Ran’s fortune grew, the bigger my divorce settlement would be. I wasn’t slaving away over work; I was diligently funding my future retirement plan!

Lately, though, the acquisition deal for the eastern land parcel had us running in circles until we were completely wiped out. How exhausted were we? Let’s just say that one night, right in the middle of a kiss, I completely passed out.

In that moment, the way Tan Ran looked at me was no different than if he were staring at a financial report showing a twelve-figure loss. In the middle of the night, he bolted upright and demanded to see a doctor because he was convinced he’d lost his male charm, proceeding to denounce me as a cold-hearted, unfeeling woman. I was so mad I almost laughed, launching into a furious rant at him for piling so much work on me that I was completely running on empty.

After getting chewed out, Tan Ran curled up at the edge of the bed. A long moment passed before he finally asked in a small, quiet voice:

“Can’t you… call me husband? We’ve been married for so long and you’ve never said it once.”

I blinked and shot back, “Well, you’ve never called me wife either.”

His eyes instantly lit up. “Wife,” he called out, his tone laced with a sudden, shy warmth.

It felt as though a soft, fluffy tail had lightly brushed across my heart, sending a sudden flush of heat to my ears. But my throat felt completely locked up, leaving me stuttering without a single coherent word coming out.

He let out a sigh, waving a hand with grand generosity. “One ‘husband’ gets you ten grand.”

My throat instantly cleared up. I popped up like a coiled spring, threw myself onto him, and wrapped my arms around his neck, sweeter than honey: “Husband~!”

A notification flashed on my phone, confirming the transfer. I clutched my phone, so moved I could practically weep tears of joy. Who said marriage was the burial ground of love? This was clearly the gold mine of my life!

Maybe because I’d chewed him out all night, Tan Ran’s conscience finally decided to kick in, and my workload dropped noticeably. On a rare, lazy morning while I was enjoying a quiet coffee in the building lobby, an uninvited guest showed up: Xu Nam. This scum was like a stubborn strain of bacteria—still clinging to life even after being hit with heavy-duty disinfectant.

He slid into the seat across from me, his expression dark and gloomy. “Luong Vi To, I never thought you’d be this kind of person. Getting married to someone else while you’re still dating me.”

I took a slow, deliberate sip of my coffee and looked him dead in the eye. “When you crawled into bed with Tong Uyen Dinh, did you remember you had a girlfriend then?”

His face instantly froze. Looks like his brain had finally managed to boot up and realize that cheating was a scumbag move. He immediately launched into his cliché defense: “Actually, I’m not really like that. I was hurt so deeply in the past, so I just wanted to use this to test if you’d get jealous…”

I cut him off on the spot. “Am I a war correspondent? Do I look like I need to investigate the dark past that turned you into a total trash fire? Or would you prefer I write a twenty-thousand-word thesis on ‘The Psychological Process of a Human Being Losing All Sense of Shame’?”

Just as I was about to land the final blow, a deep, low voice echoed from behind me: “Wife.”

A single word, but it sent a cold shiver straight down my spine. Tan Ran strolled over, his gaze locked onto me, a chilling, lethal aura radiating from between his brows that nearly turned Xu Nam into a shivering wreck. CEO Tan looked at him like he was staring at a piece of literal garbage, his voice dripping with ice: “Looks like you really don’t need those two legs of yours anymore.”

Xu Nam turned deathly pale and bolted on the spot, running so fast he nearly knocked over a waiter’s latte. The second he vanished, Tan Ran turned to me with eyes full of dramatic, tragic accusation: “Wife, were you planning to leave me for him?”

Knowing this was a clear warning sign of impending mandatory overtime, I immediately swore on the spot: “I swear, as long as you don’t ask for a divorce, I will never stray a single step from your side.”