Chapter 2

I stood in the shadows of the hallway, my body frozen, my mind racing. The voice from the study continued, each word a hammer blow against my fragile state. It was Liam, talking to his friend, and I was the unseen audience to my own destruction.

"You're sick, man," his friend's voice crackled faintly through the phone, just loud enough for me to hear. "Their ashes? That's crossing a line."

"A line?" Liam scoffed, his voice dripping with venom. "They crossed the line first. Her parents, David and Eleanor Miller, the great philanthropists. They thought they owned the world, that they could buy and sell people like me. They came to my father, to my company, with an offer I couldn't refuse. A merger that would save my family's business, but with one condition: I had to marry Ava."

He paced the room, his footsteps heavy on the hardwood floor. I could picture him, his face contorted with a rage I had never seen.

"They wanted to secure their precious daughter's future with a man they deemed suitable, and they were willing to use corporate blackmail to do it. They looked at me like I was just another asset to be acquired. They didn't care that I loved someone else. They didn't care about me at all."

He stopped pacing. "They thought they could control me. They trapped me. This car crash... it was a gift. It set me free. And now, I'm going to return the favor. I'm going to give their beloved daughter a memento of them she'll never forget."

I leaned against the wall, the cold plaster seeping through my thin nightgown. He was twisting the narrative, painting himself as the victim. My parents had been worried about me, especially after they saw how Mark treated me behind closed doors. They saw something good in Liam, the boy I grew up with, and they wanted to ensure my happiness and security. They thought a business alliance would solidify a bond they believed was already there. They were wrong. So terribly wrong. But their intentions were born of love, not malice.

Liam' s actions, however, were born of pure, distilled hatred.

"But Ava didn't do anything," his friend insisted, his voice pleading. "This is between you and her parents. Why drag her into it like this? It's ghoulish."

"She's one of them!" Liam spat. "She lived in that house, enjoyed their money, benefited from their power. She's a Miller. She's tainted by them. And Chloe agrees. Chloe understands. She said Ava needs to be taught a lesson, that she needs to be brought down from her pedestal."

Chloe. The name hung in the air, a poisonous cloud. Chloe Hayes. The woman Liam had been obsessed with for years. The woman who always seemed to be lurking in the background, a faint smile on her lips. I realized now that smile wasn't innocent; it was predatory. She was the puppeteer, and Liam was her willing marionette.

"This isn't just about revenge anymore," Liam said, his voice lowering again, becoming more intense. "This is about cleansing. It's about taking what's mine. Once I marry her, her parents' company, their fortune, it all becomes part of our new life. Chloe's and mine. Ava is just the key to the door. And I'm going to enjoy breaking the key after the door is unlocked."

A wave of nausea washed over me. I felt a desperate urge to run, to scream, to burst into that room and confront him. But what would that accomplish? He would deny it. He would call me hysterical, overwrought with grief. He would turn everyone against me, just as he and Chloe had planned.

No. My rage had to be cold, silent, and sharp.

I saw it all with horrifying clarity: Liam's feigned comfort, his calculated proposal, and the final, grotesque act of desecration he had planned. He wasn't just trying to hurt me; he was trying to annihilate me, to erase my identity and replace it with his own twisted version of reality.

I pushed myself off the wall, moving with a silence I didn't know I possessed. I crept back to my room, my heart a block of ice in my chest. The grief for my parents was still there, a vast, empty ocean inside me. But now, it was joined by something else. A cold, hard resolve.

He thought I was a fragile, broken doll he could manipulate. He thought he was in control.

He was about to find out how wrong he was. The game wasn't over. It had just begun. And I was changing the rules.