Chapter 1

Everyone said Olivia Hayes was a saint. She had given up everything for me-her family, her home, her engagement. When she went abroad seven years ago, the Hayes family, my adoptive parents, had just found me, their old friends' orphaned daughter. They took me in, and to solidify ties, they arranged for me to be engaged to their son, Daniel Hayes. Olivia, they said, had graciously stepped aside.

For seven years, I tried to make him love me. Daniel was my childhood crush, a quiet, distant boy who grew into a man who seemed to have no interest in worldly things. He was always polite, always correct, but his eyes were always empty when he looked at me.

One night, I saw the truth. He was drunk, stumbling through the dark hallway. I followed him to his room, a place he never let me enter. The door was ajar. Inside, the room was bare, except for the walls. They were covered in photos of Olivia. And Daniel, my fiancé, was holding a silk scarf, pressing it to his face.

"Olivia," he whispered, his voice thick and broken. "I'd do anything to be with you. Even if it means being your brother-in-law."

That was the moment my seven years of devotion turned to dust.

The next day, I made a decision. I would marry Michael Blackwood.

"Sarah, are you insane?" my best friend Emily asked, her voice tight with worry over the phone. "The man is a monster in the business world. And what about the rumors? They say he had a terrible racing accident. He can't have kids!"

I looked out the window, my heart a hollow space in my chest. "He's the one."

The formal meeting was held in the Hayes family' s grand living room. I sat silently, a ghost at my own life' s negotiation. My adoptive father, David Hayes, smiled warmly at Michael Blackwood, a man who commanded the room just by sitting in it.

"Mr. Blackwood, we are so honored. Of course, our family has two daughters," David said, his tone smooth as honey. "Olivia, our eldest, is currently studying dance in Europe. She' s exceptionally talented, a real star."

He was trying to sell Olivia, even from thousands of miles away.

Michael Blackwood didn't even glance at the photos David was trying to show him on his phone. His dark eyes were fixed on me.

"I am only interested in Sarah Miller," he said, his voice low and firm, cutting through David' s sales pitch. "A counterfeit has no place in the Blackwood family."

David' s smile froze. Martha, my adoptive mother, shifted uncomfortably on the sofa. For the first time in a long time, I felt a flicker of something other than pain. It was a chance.

A lawyer placed a pre-nuptial agreement on the table in front of me. It detailed what I would get, and what I would not. I didn't even read it. I picked it up and tore it in half.

Everyone stared.

I looked directly at Michael. "If I marry you, I want one thing."

"Name it," he said, his expression unreadable.

"You will not, under any circumstances, touch the Hayes family business. You will not help them, and you will not harm them. They will be on their own."

A slow smile spread across Michael's face. It transformed him, making him look less like a ruthless tycoon and more like a man who had just won a prize.

"Deal," he said.

With that, our engagement was set.

Later that evening, David found me in the garden. "Sarah, I don't understand. You and Daniel... you' ve been engaged for so long. What changed so suddenly?"

His confusion was genuine. They had never seen my struggle, my one-sided love. They only saw the perfect arrangement.

I didn't answer him. I simply pulled the silver bracelet from my wrist. It was a matching piece to Daniel's, a symbol of our engagement he had given me seven years ago. I had never taken it off.

I placed it in David's hand, closed his fingers around it, and walked away without a word.

The flashback to that night was still so clear. I had spent the day trying to get a reaction from Daniel, wearing a new dress, making his favorite food. He had thanked me politely, his face a perfect mask of indifference, and then excused himself to his room.

Driven by a desperate need to understand, I had followed him. I expected to find him reading or meditating, as he often claimed to do.

But his room wasn't a sanctuary of peace. It was a shrine.

Olivia's face was everywhere. Smiling from a graduation photo, laughing on a beach, posing in her dance costumes. And in the center of it all was Daniel, clutching her scarf like a lifeline, whispering his undying, twisted love for the woman who was supposed to be his sister.

I was a fool. A placeholder. An obstacle.

I had fled his room, my heart shattering with every step. Seven years of my life, of my love, had been a lie. I ran out of the house, gasping for air, the image of his obsession burned into my mind.

That was the end. And this, my marriage to Michael Blackwood, was the beginning of my escape.