MY HUSBAND THREW CASH AT MY FEET—UNTIL ONE PHONE CALL FROZE HIS BILLION-DOLLAR EMPIRE

“Nerve gas!” Aris shouted, grabbing two heavy oxygen masks from a medical supply cabinet.

He threw one to me. I clamped it over Ellie’s small face, holding her tight as the yellow smoke rapidly filled the concrete room. Aris strapped the other mask onto his own face, pointing toward a heavy grate in the floor.

“The drainage tunnel!” Aris muffled through the plastic. “It leads out to the subway lines!”

Aris grabbed a crowbar and pried the iron grate up. We climbed down the rusted ladder into the damp, foul-smelling darkness of the service tunnels just as the clinic above us filled completely with the lethal gas.

We ran for a mile in the dark until we emerged onto an abandoned subway maintenance platform.

Ellie was crying softly, terrified by the dark. I held her tight, my mind spinning into a terrifying abyss of realization.

Silas hadn't just hired a man to marry me. He had harvested our dead brother’s DNA and used me as a biological incubator to birth a pure-blooded Kingsley heir that he could control.

“Aris, why would Silas go through all this?” I panted, wiping the grime from my face. “If he already controls the company, why does he need Julian’s child?”

“Because Silas doesn't control the core trust,” Aris explained, catching his breath. “Your father’s will stipulated that the majority shares remain locked until Julian’s bloodline produced an heir. Silas has been draining the periphery accounts, but the fifty billion dollars in the master trust is locked behind Ellie’s biometric signature.”

Suddenly, the burner phone Aris kept in his pocket began to ring.

Aris frowned. “Nobody has this number.”

I grabbed the phone from him and answered it. “Who is this?”

“You always were a fighter, Mara,” a voice echoed through the static. It was smooth, cultured, and terrifyingly familiar.

It was Grant.

“You’re a dead man, Grant,” I hissed.

“I’m looking at the security feed of the subway platform right now, darling,” Grant said calmly. “You’re trapped. And if you think you can hide, you should check the morning news. The judge just signed an emergency order. You’re officially a wanted fugitive for kidnapping.”

“A judge can't sign an order without a hearing!”

“He can when the petitioner proves the mother is suffering from paranoid schizophrenia,” Grant chuckled. “Check the bottom of Ellie’s stroller. Do you know what Vanessa has been slipping into your morning coffee for the last three years?”

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