Chapter 2

Daniel Hayes found me in an orphanage. I was ten, small and silent, a ghost haunting the edges of the playground. My parents, his closest friends and business partners, had died in a house fire six months earlier. I was the only survivor.

He came one afternoon, smelling of expensive cologne and an authority that made the other children scatter. He knelt in front of me, his dark eyes serious.

"I'm Daniel," he had said. "Your father was my best friend. I'm going to take you home now, Olivia."

Home. It became a word I associated with him. He had a vast, empty mansion that felt more like a museum than a house, but he filled it. He gave me the biggest bedroom, tutors for my education, and anything I pointed at in a store. He was my guardian, my 'Uncle Daniel'. He was my entire world.

As I grew, my adoration for him deepened. He was my confidant, my protector. He taught me about art, about business, about the world. I would watch him during dinner parties, a commanding presence that held everyone's attention, and feel a swell of pride. He was mine.

The shift was gradual, almost imperceptible. A lingering touch on my arm. A look that held a second too long. The way he would dismiss any boy who showed interest in me at school functions with a cold, final glare. I was too young to understand it as possession. I saw it as love.

On my eighteenth birthday, he threw a lavish party. After the last guest had left, we stood on the balcony overlooking the sprawling gardens. The night was warm, and the scent of jasmine hung in the air.

I was trembling, my heart a frantic bird in my chest. I had to tell him. I couldn't hold it in anymore.

"Daniel," I whispered, my voice barely audible. "I... I love you."

He didn't seem surprised. He simply turned to face me, his expression unreadable in the moonlight. He was silent for a long moment, and in that silence, I felt a terrifying shame. I had crossed a line. I had ruined everything.

"I know," he said finally, his voice soft. He reached out and tucked a stray strand of hair behind my ear, his fingers brushing against my cheek. "I love you, too, Olivia. Not as an uncle loves a niece. As a man loves a woman."

Relief washed over me, so potent it made me dizzy. He pulled me into his arms, and I buried my face in his chest, inhaling his familiar scent. It was everything I had ever wanted.

It felt forbidden, dangerous, and utterly intoxicating.

A year later, he proposed. He didn't get down on one knee. It wasn't his style. We were having dinner, and he simply slid a black velvet box across the table. Inside was a diamond that stole the breath from my lungs.

"Marry me, Olivia," he said, his voice a low command. "Be my wife. You are the only one I want. The only one who has ever mattered."

I had cried, tears of pure, unadulterated joy. I said yes without a second of hesitation. He was my past, my present, and my future. I trusted him completely. I gave him every broken piece of me, and I believed he had made me whole.

Now, I was back in the dressing room, the memory turning to ash in my mouth. Staring at the phone on the floor, at the image of the woman named Sarah and her son, I felt a new kind of fire burn through me.

Not the fire that took my parents. This was a cold fire, a blaze of betrayal that threatened to consume what was left of my heart.

The words he had spoken, the promises he had made, all of it replayed in my mind. "You are the only one."

A lie. It had all been a lie.

The perfect, beautiful world Daniel had built for me was nothing but a gilded cage, and I had just realized the door had been locked the entire time.