Introduction

It was my eighteenth birthday, a day that should have been filled with joy, but the silence in the grand dining room was heavy with the ghost of my foster parents, gone too soon.

Across from me sat Ethan, my foster uncle and the only family I had left, his serious gray eyes holding a warmth I foolishly mistook for something more, until I finally confessed my love for him.

His reaction was swift and brutal; he called me disgusting, shameful, and a burden, his words shattering my heart as he left me to drown in humiliation and pain, only to reappear two years later with a beautiful fiancée.

I clung to him, desperate, until one horrifying moment on a plummeting private jet when he ripped the parachute from my back, offering my life to save Tiffany' s, leaving me to fall into the abyss.

Against all odds, I survived, pulling his broken body from the wreckage myself, only to wake and hear him praise Tiffany for saving his life, erasing my sacrifice and leaving me utterly broken, a quiet, chilling resolve settling in my soul.