Chapter 2

I didn't go to Newark.

I walked three blocks from the bus station to a storage unit I'd rented eighteen months ago, the day I signed the surrogacy contract. Inside: a fireproof safe containing my real passport, three prepaid phones, a laptop, and a bank card linked to an account the Kensingtons knew nothing about.

Balance: four hundred and twelve million dollars.

The Mercier fortune was old — older than the Kensingtons by a century. My grandmother, Colette Mercier, had built a pharmaceutical empire across Europe before I was born. When she died, everything passed to my mother. When my mother passed, everything came to me.

I was twenty when I inherited it. Twenty-one when I realized the money made me a target. Twenty-two when a man I thought loved me tried to have me committed to steal my trust fund.

After that, I disappeared. New name. New identity. I became Elara Voss — a nobody from nowhere with a GED and an empty bank account.

When the Kensington family posted a discreet listing for a surrogate wife — someone healthy, young, and desperate enough to sign away her dignity — I applied.

Not for the money.

For Sebastian.

Three years before the contract, Sebastian Kensington had been involved in a deal that destroyed a small pharmaceutical company in Lyon, France. That company was a subsidiary of Mercier Holdings. Twenty-six employees lost their jobs. The CEO — my mother's oldest friend — suffered a heart attack from the stress and died.

The Kensingtons never even noticed. It was a rounding error on their quarterly report.

It wasn't a rounding error to me.

I had entered the Kensington family to gather evidence of their illegal business practices from the inside. The surrogacy contract gave me access to their home, their files, their private conversations.

What I hadn't planned on was getting pregnant and actually feeling something.

My daughter wasn't supposed to be real to me. She was supposed to be part of the strategy — an obligation, a biological transaction.

But the moment I heard her heartbeat on the ultrasound, the strategy shattered.

She was mine. Not a chess piece. Not leverage. Mine.

And they had taken her.

I opened the laptop and logged into a secure server. Seventeen months of data was stored there — financial records I'd copied from Sebastian's home office, recorded conversations with Kensington family members, emails between their CFO and offshore accounts in Zurich.

Enough to bring them down. But not enough to get my daughter back. Family courts moved slowly, and the Kensingtons owned half the judges in the state.

I needed something faster. Something they wouldn't see coming.

My phone buzzed. A text from a number I hadn't used in three years.

"I know you're alive, Elara. And I know what they did. Call me."

The sender: Dominic Thorne.

My chest tightened.

Dominic. The one person from my real life I hadn't been able to fully erase. Former Mercier Holdings security chief. My grandmother's most trusted advisor. The man who had trained me to think three moves ahead — and the man I'd left behind without explanation when I vanished.

I stared at the message for a long time.

Then I called.

He answered on the first ring. "You stubborn, reckless woman."

"Hello to you too, Dominic."

"Eighteen months undercover in a hostile family. No backup. No extraction plan. And now they have your child." His voice was clipped, furious, but underneath it — relief. "Tell me you at least have an exit strategy."

"I have something better. I have evidence."

"Evidence doesn't get a baby out of a mansion guarded by private security."

"No," I agreed. "But you do."

Silence on the line.

"Elara. What exactly are you asking me?"

"I'm asking you to come to New York. I'm asking you to help me get my daughter back. And then I'm asking you to help me destroy every Kensington who touched her."

The pause lasted three seconds.

"I'll be there by morning. And Elara?"

"Yes?"

"Next time you disappear for three years, at least send a postcard."

The line went dead.

I closed the phone, opened the laptop, and began to plan.

By this time tomorrow, Sebastian Kensington would realize that the disposable surrogate he'd thrown away had teeth.

And they were already at his throat.