Chapter 1 Chapter 1

My fiancé, Liam, told me to sign a document to save his family's company.

It was a false confession, pinning a hundred-million-dollar mistake on me. A mistake his childhood sweetheart, Chloe, had made.

When I refused, he showed me a live feed of my mother in her hospital bed. Her life-saving cancer treatment was funded by his family.

He smiled, his thumb hovering over an icon on his phone. "One call, Ava. The funding stops. Her treatment is over."

Later, after I signed, he locked me in a lab that caught fire. He thought I was trying to sabotage Chloe.

As I pounded on the door, choking on smoke, he stood on the other side, comforting a perfectly fine Chloe. He looked at me, trapped and burning, and shouted, "This is your own damn fault. I'm disappointed in you, Ava."

He left me to die.

But I survived.

When I woke up in the hospital, I made a single call to my hacker contact.

My message was one word: "Execute."

Chapter 1

"Sign it, Ava."

Liam Vanderbilt, my fiancé, slid a legal document across the polished mahogany table. His voice was calm, but his eyes were ice.

"This is insane, Liam. It's a lie." My own voice shook. I was a lawyer. This document was poison to my career. It was a confession, a false admission that I was responsible for the catastrophic failure of the Sterling-Vanderbilt merger. A deal worth hundreds of millions.

A deal Chloe Preston, his childhood friend, had single-handedly destroyed.

"Chloe made a mistake. A correctable one," he said, his tone dismissive. "Your signature makes it correctable."

He wanted me to take the fall. To sacrifice my license, my entire future, for her.

"I won't do it."

Liam's smile didn't reach his eyes. He pulled out his phone and tapped the screen. A live video feed appeared. My mother, frail in a hospital bed, her face pale against the white pillows. Wires and tubes connected her to a symphony of beeping machines. She was fighting stage-four cancer, and the experimental treatment Liam's family was funding was her only hope.

Her only lifeline.

"The oncology department at St. Jude's is very responsive," Liam said, his gaze fixed on the screen. His thumb hovered over an icon. "One call, Ava. The funding stops. The trial ends. Her treatment is over."

My breath caught in my throat. I looked at my mother's sleeping face on the screen, the rhythmic rise and fall of her chest tied to the machines. The threat was not in the future. It was now.

"Liam, please... she's my mother."

He tilted his head, a gesture of mock sympathy. "I know. That's why you'll sign."

His thumb moved slightly. On the screen, I saw a nurse enter my mother's room and look at the main monitor. Liam's thumb pressed a button on his own phone. The steady, life-affirming beep of the heart monitor in the video became erratic, slowing dangerously. My mother's breathing hitched.

A cold terror gripped me. He could do it. He could stop her heart from his phone.

"Don't," I whispered, my voice raw. "Please, don't."

He smiled, a genuine, chilling smile this time. "Is there a limit, Ava? A line I can't cross?"

His question hung in the air, thick with malice. He was enjoying this, the absolute power he held over me.

"It's just a piece of paper," he continued, his voice soft, almost a caress. "A small price to pay. Think of it as compensation for Chloe. She was so distressed by her error."

He was defining my professional ruin as a gift for his childhood sweetheart. The absurdity of it was suffocating.

He glanced back at his phone. The slow, struggling beep continued. "Ten seconds, Ava. Then I'll have the doctors turn everything off for good. Ten... nine..."

My mind raced, a whirlwind of memories. I remembered the day he proposed. He had filled my tiny apartment with a thousand white roses, knelt on one knee, and told me he had never met anyone so pure, so brilliant. He promised me the world.

He promised me a wedding. The grandest the city had ever seen.

"We'll get married at the Plaza," he had said, his eyes shining with what I thought was love. "Just wait."

I waited. Two years we were engaged. Two times we set a date. Two times, the wedding was canceled.

The first time, the day before the ceremony, Chloe had a breakdown. She called Liam, sobbing that she couldn't live without him, threatening to drive her car off a bridge. He left me standing in my final dress fitting.

"Wait for me, Ava," he'd pleaded over the phone, his voice tight with concern for her. "I love you. Just wait."

I waited. I stood alone at the Plaza, a bride with no groom, while the guests whispered and the Vanderbilt family's PR team spun a story about a sudden illness. I became a joke.

The second time, a week before the rescheduled date, Chloe tripped and sprained her ankle. A minor injury. But Liam rushed to her side, canceling our wedding tasting to personally spoon-feed her soup. I saw them through her apartment window, him doting on her, looking at her with a tenderness he hadn't shown me in months.

"Eight... seven..."

The countdown pulled me back to the present. To the cold room, the cruel man, and the dying woman on the screen. My mother.

Tears streamed down my face, hot and silent. The choice was never a choice at all.

"I'll sign."

The words were a surrender. A death sentence for the life I had built.

I reached for the pen, my hand trembling. I signed my name, Ava Mitchell, on the line that would destroy me. The ink was a black stain on my soul.

The moment my signature was complete, I shoved the document back at him. "Fix it. Now."

I scrambled for my own phone, my fingers fumbling as I brought up the hospital's patient monitoring app. Her vitals were stabilizing. The steady beep had returned.

Liam picked up the document, a triumphant smirk on his face. He glanced at my tear-streaked face. "See? All better." He folded the paper neatly and tucked it into his breast pocket. "Your hatred is a little unbecoming, Ava. But don't worry."

He leaned in, his voice a low promise. "We'll still have our wedding. I'll make it up to you."

He turned and walked out of the room, leaving me in the suffocating silence. He thought he had won. He thought I was broken.

But as the door clicked shut, I wiped my tears away. My hand was steady now. I pulled out my phone again, but I didn't open the hospital app. I opened a secure messaging channel.

My fingers flew across the screen, typing a message to a contact in London. Dr. Ethan Hayes. An old mentor. A brilliant lawyer who had offered me a position in his firm months ago, an offer I had foolishly declined for Liam.

"Ethan," I typed. "The plan is a go. I need to move my mother. Immediately. Can you arrange a private medical transport jet?"

He thought he had taken everything. He was wrong. This wasn't the end. It was the beginning.