Chapter 1

They told me it was a contract marriage, a deal to save a life. My mother' s.

In reality, it was my own slow death sentence.

I became the scapegoat for a rich girl' s broken heart, a prop in a play orchestrated by her manipulative mother. My wife, Chloe Davis, was supposed to marry her high school sweetheart, Liam White. But he dumped her.

So they hired me. For three years, I was her husband on paper, the man she blamed for ruining her life. The man she tortured.

And it all came to a head the day my mother died. The one person I did it all for. The reason I endured everything.

Now, I stood alone in the cold, damp cemetery, the smell of wet earth filling my lungs. Rain slicked the polished wood of my mother' s casket. It was a simple ceremony, just me and a few distant relatives who barely knew her.

Chloe, my wife, wasn' t here.

Of course she wasn' t.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. It wasn' t her. It was her assistant.

"Mr. Miller, Ms. Davis is wondering when you' ll be home. She has guests and wants you to prepare snacks."

The voice was crisp, professional, and utterly devoid of emotion. I stared at the fresh pile of dirt beside the empty grave.

"Tell her I' m busy."

"Busy with what, sir? Ms. Davis was very specific."

"I' m at a funeral," I said, my own voice sounding hollow and distant.

There was a pause on the other end. I could hear the faint sound of music and laughter in the background. A party. Chloe was throwing a party.

"Whose funeral?" the assistant asked, a hint of annoyance in her tone.

"My mother' s."

Another pause, longer this time. I heard her relay the message to Chloe in a hushed tone. I couldn' t make out Chloe' s response, but the assistant' s voice was apologetic when she came back on the line.

"My sincerest apologies, Mr. Miller. Ms. Davis was unaware. She says to... take your time."

Take my time. As if this was some minor inconvenience, a dentist appointment I had forgotten to mention. The call ended. I slid the phone back into my pocket, my hand trembling. The betrayal was a familiar ache, but today it felt sharper, deeper.

After the funeral, I went straight to the Davis mansion. Not to the main house where Chloe lived, but to the smaller villa where her mother, Mrs. Davis, resided.

I found her in the garden, calmly pruning roses. She looked up as I approached, her expression a careful mix of sympathy and authority.

"Ethan," she said softly. "I heard about your mother. I' m so sorry."

"I want to end the contract," I said, cutting straight to the point. There was nothing left to hold me here.

She snipped a dead rose from its stem before turning her full attention to me. "The contract is for three years, Ethan. You know this. And besides, your mother..."

She trailed off, her eyes holding a warning.

"My mother is dead, Mrs. Davis. The deal is over."

"The hospital said it was organ failure," she said, her voice smooth as silk. "A tragedy, but a natural one. The best doctors in the country couldn' t save her."

I knew she was lying. The hospital hadn' t told me that. The official cause of death was a power failure. The life support machine keeping my mother alive had shut down. A power failure caused by a drunk driver crashing into the hospital' s main power grid.

That drunk driver was my wife, Chloe.

"The contract is fulfilled," Mrs. Davis continued, ignoring the thunderous look on my face. She pulled a check from the pocket of her apron. "This is the final payment. One million dollars. For your services, and for your silence."

My eyes fell on the check. A million dollars. More money than I had ever seen. It wasn' t a payment. It was a gag order. It was blood money.

I remembered the day I signed the contract. I was a struggling artist, drowning in my mother' s medical bills. She needed a new heart, an operation that cost a fortune. Mrs. Davis had appeared like a savior.

"Marry my daughter," she had said. "Pretend to be the man who rescued her from a bad investment that her father forced on her. In return, I will cover all of your mother' s medical expenses for three years. The best care, the best doctors, anything she needs."

It sounded too good to be true. It was.

Chloe believed the lie. She believed I was some opportunistic monster who had manipulated her family to get my hands on their wealth, trapping her in a marriage and ruining her chance to be with Liam. Her hatred was instant and absolute.

The first thing she did was cut off my finances.

"You want to be a part of this family?" she' d sneered, tossing a five-dollar bill on the floor. "This is your daily allowance. Learn to live on it."

For three years, that was my life. Five dollars a day. I ate the cheapest bread, wore the same worn-out clothes, and endured the constant humiliation. She paraded a new boyfriend in front of me almost every week, men she would shower with expensive gifts while I counted pennies for a meal.

The day my mother died was the culmination of her cruelty. My mother' s condition had worsened, and she was on a ventilator. I begged Chloe for money, just enough to talk to the chief surgeon about expediting her transplant.

She was with her new flavor of the week, Jake Stone. He was Liam' s cousin, a slimy, manipulative man who seemed to enjoy my suffering even more than Chloe did.

Chloe had laughed in my face.

"You want money? Okay," she said, her eyes glinting with malice. "Kneel. Kneel and beg me like the dog you are, and maybe I' ll consider it."

So I knelt. On the cold marble floor of our mansion, in front of her and Jake, I knelt and begged for my mother' s life.

She let me stay there for an hour, laughing and taking pictures with Jake, before she finally tossed a set of car keys at me.

"Go wait in the car. I' ll drive to the hospital and talk to the doctor myself."

A flicker of hope ignited in me. Maybe she wasn' t completely heartless. I waited for two hours. She never came.

Later that night, I got the call from the hospital. There had been an accident. A drunk driver had crashed into the power grid. The backup generators had failed. My mother was gone.

The next morning, Chloe came home, reeking of alcohol. She looked annoyed when she saw my tear-streaked face.

"What' s with the long face?" she demanded.

"My mother... she' s dead."

Chloe' s expression didn' t change. She reached into her purse and pulled out a black, unlimited credit card. She threw it at my chest.

"Then this should solve your problem," she said, her voice cold and sharp. "If you' d found a way to get her better care sooner, maybe she' d still be alive. This is your fault, Ethan. Not mine."

Her words shattered the last piece of my broken spirit.

I didn' t pick up the card. I left it lying on the floor. I walked out, arranged my mother' s funeral, and said goodbye to the only person who had ever truly loved me.

But just before the funeral, I received a letter. It was from my mother. Her handwriting was weak, shaky. She told me the truth.

Jake Stone had visited her in the hospital. He' d told her everything. He told her about the five dollars a day, about the kneeling, about the constant parade of men. He told her I was trapped, that the only thing keeping me in this personal hell was her.

So she made a choice. She bribed a nurse to mess with her ventilator settings right before the power went out. She took her own life to set me free.

Now, standing in front of Mrs. Davis, holding the million-dollar check, I understood. This was the price of their secret. The price of my mother' s life.

My phone buzzed again. It was Chloe. I let it go to voicemail.

Her voice, slurred and angry, filled the silence of the garden a moment later.

"Ethan, where the hell are you? I told you to get snacks! Jake is hungry! Did your mother' s funeral take all day? Get your ass back here now!"

She didn' t know. She had no idea my mother was dead. I had chosen not to tell her, to let her believe her lie.

I looked at Mrs. Davis, a bitter smile touching my lips for the first time in years.

The debt was paid. I was free.