Chapter 1

I carried his heir for nine months, nearly died on the delivery table, and when I opened my eyes, my husband was kissing another woman in my hospital room. The baby I almost bled to death for? Already in her arms.

"Careful with his head, Sophia," Alexander murmured, adjusting the blanket around my newborn son with a tenderness he had never once shown me.

Sophia Langley — his college sweetheart, his "soulmate," the woman whose photograph he kept in his wallet the entire eleven months of our contract marriage — smiled down at my baby like she'd grown him herself.

"He looks just like you, Alex," she cooed.

He beamed. Actually beamed. I had never seen that expression directed at me. Not when I said "I do." Not when I showed him the first ultrasound. Not when I screamed his name for six hours in labor while the nurses paged him fourteen times and he didn't come.

He'd been picking Sophia up from the airport.

I tried to sit up. Pain ripped through my abdomen — the emergency C-section stitches pulled tight, and I gasped. Neither of them looked over.

"Alexander," I managed. My voice was barely a whisper. "Can I hold him?"

Sophia glanced at me the way you'd glance at a stain on the carpet. Alexander didn't glance at all.

"The doctor said you need rest, Vivienne. Sophia's got it handled."

Sophia's got it handled. Four words that summarized my entire marriage.

When I couldn't attend the company gala because of severe morning sickness — Sophia handled it as his plus-one. When I was put on bedrest at seven months — Sophia handled redecorating the nursery in colors I wasn't consulted on. When I delivered his son via emergency surgery while he was twenty miles away — Sophia handled comforting him through "the stress."

I stared at the ceiling, blinking back tears I refused to let fall.

Our contract was clear: carry the Reed family heir, receive five million dollars, then disappear. No custody. No contact. No claim to the child or the man. I had signed it willingly — I needed the money desperately. My mother's medical debt had ballooned to four million after her third cancer surgery, and the collectors had started circling like vultures.

But no contract prepares you for what it feels like to hear your newborn cry and not be allowed to hold him.

"The lawyers will come by tomorrow with the final paperwork," Alexander said, still not looking at me. "Once you sign the relinquishment, the funds transfer within forty-eight hours."

"Relinquishment," I repeated. Such a clean word for such a brutal thing.

Sophia adjusted my son in her arms and turned toward the door. "I'll take him to the nursery. The pediatrician wants another look at him."

I watched her carry my child out of the room, and something cracked inside me — not my heart. That had already broken months ago. This was something deeper. Something structural. Like the last load-bearing wall in a condemned building finally giving way.

Alexander straightened his cuffs and checked his watch. "Get some rest. The sooner you heal, the sooner we can finalize everything."

He walked out without a backward glance.

Alone in that sterile white room, I pressed my palms against my empty belly and let myself feel it — the hollow, aching void.

Then my phone buzzed. An unknown number. I almost ignored it, but something compelled me to answer.

"Ms. Vivienne Ashford?"

"Yes?"

"This is Garrett Yue from Kensington & Yue, attorneys at law. I'm calling on behalf of your grandfather's estate."

I blinked. "I don't have a grandfather."

A pause. Then: "Ms. Ashford, you do. And he just passed away. He's left you... everything."

"What do you mean, everything?"

"I mean the Ashford Group. Thirty-two billion dollars in assets. And a letter — addressed to the granddaughter he's been searching for since the day you were born."

The room tilted. Thirty-two billion. Alexander Reed's entire empire was worth barely three.

"There must be a mistake."

"There's no mistake, Ms. Ashford. The DNA results were confirmed six months ago. Your grandfather hired forty investigators across three continents to find you."

My hands shook. The man I married for five million — the man who treated me like a rented womb — was about to discover that his disposable contract wife was the sole heir to a fortune that dwarfed his own.

I stared at the door Alexander had just walked through and, for the first time in eleven months, I smiled.