Chapter 1

The heavy steel door of the "behavioral correction facility" clanged shut behind Ethan.

Five years.

His face was a ruin, a tapestry of scars, one hundred cuts to mark a lesson. His body ached with a permanent, deep-seated pain.

The family driver, silent and expressionless, opened the car door.

Eleanor, his mother, sat in the back, her gaze fixed on the window, away from him.

The ride to the New England mansion was cold, filled only with the hum of the engine.

Home. If it could still be called that.

Eleanor finally spoke as they pulled into the long driveway.

"Jake is still traumatized by what you did, Ethan. Five years, and he still suffers."

Ethan said nothing. The scandal. Jake' s leaked sex tape with that public figure. Jake' s claim that Ethan orchestrated it all.

The lie that had cost him everything.

Olivia, his wife of three years when they took him, stood in the grand foyer.

She didn't look at his face for more than a second.

She held out a sheaf of papers.

"Divorce," she said, her voice flat. "Eleanor thinks it's best. For Jake. I've been looking after him."

She added, "He needs stability. We're thinking of marriage."

Ethan looked from Olivia to Eleanor, a hollow laugh almost escaping him.

Olivia finally met his gaze, her eyes flicking over his scarred face.

"Now you know a fraction of what Jake went through," she said, a cruel twist to her lips. "His ten self-inflicted scratches were nothing compared to this."

Ethan' s voice was a raw whisper, his throat still damaged.

"These one hundred cuts," he said, gesturing to his face. "They were on your orders, Olivia. And yours, Mother."

He remembered the facility director reading the instructions. "To teach him a lesson."

Eleanor' s face remained impassive.

Olivia flinched, just for a moment.

"You deserved a lesson," Eleanor said, her voice like ice. "You almost destroyed Jake."

Ethan felt a coldness spread through him, deeper than the chill of the facility.

He had hoped for... he didn't know what. Not this.

He was a shell, broken and disfigured, and they still saw a monster.

The betrayal was a physical weight, crushing the air from his lungs.

He was truly alone.