Chapter 1

For seven years, my husband, Dwight, was a saint for publicly forgiving me for letting his mother die.

Today, he let my father die. And I learned his forgiveness was just a seven-year-long lie.

He refused to send a medical helicopter, choosing instead to listen to his new, twenty-two-year-old lover, Charity, preach about the universe's plan.

At my father's funeral, she crashed the service in a wedding dress, drew a clown smile on my father's face with lipstick, and announced she was pregnant.

"You're a barren wasteland," she sneered. "A broken woman he can't stand the sight of."

That's when I understood. His forgiveness was never real. It was a slow-burning revenge for a crime his own mother had orchestrated against me-a crime that left me unable to ever have children.

He thought he had taken everything from me. He was wrong. He left me one thing: revenge. And I was about to burn his entire world to the ground.

Chapter 1

Alex POV:

Seven years ago, my husband, Dwight Adkins, became a saint for publicly forgiving me for letting his mother die. Today, he let my father die, and I learned that forgiveness was just a seven-year-long lie.

I remember the day I met Dwight. It felt like my black-and-white world had suddenly exploded into color. He was everything I wasn't-born into old New York money, charismatic, the brilliant CEO of a tech empire he built from the ground up. And he loved me with a terrifying, all-consuming intensity.

He wasn't just devoted; he was obsessed.

Before we were married, he had his lawyers draft a document that transferred every single one of his personal assets to my name. His stocks, his properties, his liquid cash. Everything.

"So you' ll never feel insecure," he' d whispered, his lips against my hair. "So you know that everything I have is yours."

It was an insane gesture, a grand, theatrical performance of love that the world applauded. But it didn't stop there.

A year into our marriage, he did something even more extreme. He had a small bio-tracker chip, no bigger than a grain of rice, implanted into the flesh of his forearm. It was linked to an app on my phone.

"This way, you can find me anytime, anywhere," he' d said, showing me the faint scar. "And this way," he added, his eyes dark with a passion that bordered on madness, "you know I' ll never go anywhere you can' t reach."

His love was a cage, but it was a beautiful, gilded one, and for a long time, I was happy to live inside it. I loved him just as fiercely. I would have done anything for him. And I did.

I let his mother die.

Eleanor Adkins was a monster disguised as a society matriarch. She hated me from the moment Dwight brought me home. She saw me as a contamination to her pristine bloodline. On the day she collapsed from a sudden, aggressive cancer, I was the only one with her.

I remember standing over her, my phone in my hand, her life hanging on the single act of me dialing 911.

She looked up at me, her breath shallow, a cruel smirk still playing on her lips even then. "He'll never truly love you," she rasped. "You're just filth he picked up off the street."

I didn' t call for help. I watched the life fade from her eyes.

When Dwight arrived, he found me standing beside her cold body. He fell to his knees, his cries echoing through the grand, empty mansion. He begged me to tell him I tried, that I did everything I could.

I looked him straight in the eye and said, "No. I let her die."

He didn't scream. He didn't rage. He just looked at me, his face a mask of shattered disbelief. The world expected him to leave me, to ruin me. Instead, he did the opposite.

He forgave me.

At a press conference, with cameras flashing and the world watching, he held my hand and announced that he would not be pressing charges. He signed a legal document, a formal declaration of forgiveness, absolving me of any responsibility.

That night, he held me in his arms, his body trembling. "Do you hate me?" I' d whispered into the darkness.

He kissed my forehead. "Never, Alex. I could never hate you. I love you. That's all that matters."

His forgiveness became a legend. Our love story was a dark, twisted fairy tale that people whispered about. The man who loved his wife so much, he forgave her for the unforgivable.

We stayed married. For seven years, we played the part of the devoted, if tragic, couple.

Then everything changed.

He met Charity Boone.

She was twenty-two, a wellness influencer with wide, innocent eyes and a vocabulary full of words like "cosmic energy" and "the Universe." She was pure, fertile, and unbroken. Everything I wasn't.

Dwight fell for her, hard.

The first thing he did was have the bio-tracker chip surgically removed from his arm. The scar, once a symbol of his eternal connection to me, was now just a faint white line. He told me it was because Charity believed such technology interfered with one's "natural energetic field."

The second thing he did was undergo a vasectomy reversal. He' d gotten the procedure done years ago, a quiet act of solidarity after I had been forced to have a hysterectomy. He had said, "If you can't have children, then neither will I." Now, he wanted that choice back. For her.

The pain of that betrayal was a physical thing, a constant, dull ache in my chest. But I endured it. I had to. I had nowhere else to go.

Until today.

My phone rang, a frantic call from a nurse at a small, underfunded clinic back in my hometown. My father, Frank McCormick, had collapsed. A massive heart attack. They didn't have the equipment or the specialists to save him.

"He needs to be transferred to a top-tier cardiac unit immediately," the nurse said, her voice tight with urgency. "Every second counts."

I knew what I had to do. Despite everything, there was only one person in the world who could arrange that kind of medical transport in minutes.

I called Dwight.

My hands were shaking so badly I could barely hold the phone. He answered on the second ring, but it wasn't his voice I heard.

It was Charity's. Sweet, cloying, and dripping with condescension.

"Alex," she cooed, "Dwight is meditating right now. We're aligning our chakras. Can I take a message?"

"Put him on the phone, Charity," I said, my voice dangerously low. "It's an emergency."

"Oh, another emergency?" she sighed dramatically. "Alex, you have to learn to let the Universe handle things. Clinging to this negative, frantic energy is so damaging to your aura."

I could hear Dwight's voice in the background, calm and distant. "Who is it, Char?"

"It's Alex," she said, her voice shifting to a pout. "She's being very dramatic about something."

"Charity, give me the phone," I heard him say. A moment later, his voice came on the line, cool and detached. "What is it, Alex?"

"My father," I choked out, the words sticking in my throat. "He's dying, Dwight. He needs a helicopter, a team. The best. Please."

There was a long pause. I could hear Charity whispering in the background. "Cosmic balance... karma... everything happens for a reason..."

Then Dwight spoke, and his words shattered the last fragile piece of my heart.

"Alex," he said, his voice devoid of any emotion. "Charity has been teaching me about the natural flow of life and death. The Universe has a plan for your father. We can't interfere with that. It would be wrong."

I was silent. The blood drained from my face, and a cold, terrifying calm washed over me. The seven years of lies, of his performative forgiveness, of my quiet suffering-it all crystallized into a single, sharp point of pure rage.

He was letting my father die as payback.

"I see," I said, my voice barely a whisper.

I hung up the phone. For a moment, I just stood there, the nurse's frantic words echoing in my ears. Then, I moved.

I knew where Charity lived. A pristine, all-white loft in SoHo that Dwight had bought for her. It took me fifteen minutes to get there. The door was no match for the skills I'd learned long before I met Dwight Adkins.

I found her in the living room, sitting on a white fur rug, lighting incense. She looked up, her eyes widening in surprise, but not fear.

"Alex? What are you doing here? Your energy is very disruptive."

I didn't say a word. I crossed the room, grabbed her by her long, blonde hair, and slammed her face into the marble coffee table. There was a sickening crunch as her nose broke.

She screamed, a high-pitched, piercing sound.

I dragged her to her feet, pulled out my phone, and hit video call on Dwight's number. He answered instantly. His face appeared on the screen, creased with annoyance.

"Alex, I told you-"

He stopped. His eyes widened as he saw Charity, her face a bloody mess, her eyes wide with terror, her screams choked by the hand I had wrapped around her throat.

My face was a calm, cold mask.

"You have one hour, Dwight," I said, my voice as steady as a surgeon's hand. "Get my father to the best cardiac ICU in New York."

I tightened my grip on Charity's throat, and she let out a strangled gasp.

"Or she dies."