Chapter 1

Three years ago, I was the lost heiress to the Sterling fortune. They found me in a dark, underground clinic that ran twisted medical experiments. David Sterling, the family' s handsome son, saved me. He spent millions on my recovery.

He said he fell in love with me the moment he saw me. We married. We had a son. Our life felt perfect.

We named our son Anna. It meant peace.

At Anna' s first birthday party, everything shattered.

In front of all our guests, David held our son. He smiled, but his eyes were cold. Then he pulled a scalpel from his pocket.

I screamed. "David, what are you doing?"

He didn't look at me. He made a clean, precise cut on our baby' s chest.

I tried to run to him, to stop him. "No! Stop! Please!"

David turned and kicked me hard in the stomach. The pain exploded from my C-section scar. I collapsed on the floor, gasping.

"If you hadn't manipulated my parents into abandoning Sarah, she wouldn't have tried to kill herself," he roared, his face a mask of pure hate. "And our child wouldn't have been born with a heart condition!"

I stared at him, confused and bleeding. Sarah Miller was the woman who pretended to be the Sterling heiress before they found me.

"A mother' s debt is paid by her child!" he shouted over Anna' s weak cries. "Blame him for having a wicked mother like you!"

He reached into our son' s chest and pulled out his tiny, beating heart.

The world went silent. All I could see was the heart in his hand. All I could feel was a hollowness so vast it swallowed me whole. He turned and walked away, carrying the heart to another room where Sarah' s daughter was waiting for her transplant.

My son' s blood was special. The experiments they did on me in that clinic made it uniquely compatible. That was it. That was the reason. Our profound love, our marriage, our child-it was all a long, cruel plan to save Sarah' s child. It was all for revenge.

My heart was gone, ripped out just like my son's. I lay in a pool of my own blood and despair. My hand trembled as I reached for my ankle. I found the small, hidden button on the bracelet David gave me as a wedding gift. I pressed it once.

A signal shot out into the world. A desperate cry for help.