Chapter 2

I didn't sleep.

I sat on the narrow bed in the east wing — the servants' wing, though Roman never called it that — and stared at my phone until the words burned into my retinas.

Sole heir. Marchetti fortune. Come home.

My mother had never told me.

She was Elena Marchetti, the disgraced youngest daughter of Victor Marchetti, the Italian steel magnate. She had fallen in love with my father, an American schoolteacher with no money and less ambition. Victor disowned her. She fled to New York with nothing.

She never spoke of her family. She raised me in a one-bedroom apartment in Queens, working double shifts as a seamstress until the cancer ate her alive.

When the hospital bills hit six figures, I was twenty-two, desperate, and drowning. That's when Roman Castellano's attorney appeared with a contract.

Surrogate. Healthy male heir. Five million upon completion.

I didn't know Roman then. I only knew that my mother needed a surgery that cost three hundred thousand dollars and that the contract would pay for it ten times over.

I signed.

My mother got her surgery. She survived.

And I walked into a gilded cage.

Now I sat in the dark, reading about the grandfather I never knew.

Victor Marchetti had spent the last decade searching for Elena's child. He had hired private detectives, forensic genealogists, even a retired Interpol agent. But my mother had changed our last name. She had buried her past so deep that even a billionaire's resources couldn't unearth it.

Until three months ago, when a DNA database — the one I had submitted to for a college genetics project years ago — flagged a match.

Victor had found me.

And then he died.

The will was iron: Everything to my granddaughter, Isla Marchetti, née Isla Brennan.

I heard footsteps in the hallway. Heavy. Confident. Roman's gait.

He stopped outside my door. I held my breath.

The footsteps moved on. He was going to the master suite. To Vivienne.

I exhaled.

I opened my laptop and booked a one-way ticket to Milan. Departure: tomorrow, 2:00 PM.

Then I opened a second browser tab and searched: Castellano Industries + Marchetti Holdings + outstanding debt.

The results made me smile for the first time in months.

Castellano Industries had taken a massive loan from Marchetti Holdings' banking arm eighteen months ago. Four hundred million dollars. The loan was callable at the discretion of the Marchetti estate.

Which meant it was now callable at my discretion.

Roman owed me four hundred million dollars. And he didn't even know it.

I closed the laptop.

Tomorrow, I would kiss my son goodbye. It would be the hardest thing I had ever done. But I would come back for him. Not as a surrogate begging for scraps — but as a woman with the power to buy Roman's entire world and burn it to the ground.

I lay back on the thin mattress.

For the first time in three years, I didn't cry myself to sleep.

I planned.