Chapter 2

The nurse wheeled me to the lobby like I was already garbage being taken out.

My stitches hadn't dissolved. My milk had just come in. Every step of that wheelchair over the linoleum tiles sent a jolt of fire through my abdomen. Two perfect, screaming, furious babies，now asleep in the nursery three floors above me.

And I was going down.

A man stood by the discharge desk. Charcoal suit. No tie. Hair slicked back like he was attending a board meeting, not the disposal of his boss's inconvenient mistress.

Marcus. Alexander's personal assistant.

I'd seen him a hundred times over two years — picking up dry cleaning, booking restaurants under fake names, arranging the "private apartment" where Alexander kept me like a vintage wine he only drank when no one was looking.

Marcus had never once looked me in the eye.

He did today.

And I wished he hadn't, because what I saw there was pity.

"Ms. Sinclair." He placed a leather folder on the counter between us. Embossed. Voss Group legal department. "I've been asked to walk you through the terms."

I didn't touch it.

"There's a car waiting outside," he continued, adjusting his cufflinks — a nervous tic I'd catalogued years ago. "It will take you wherever you'd like to go. The funds will be wired within twenty-four hours upon execution of the agreement."

Execution. What a word.

I opened the folder.

The first page was a standard Non-Disclosure Agreement — eleven pages of legalese that essentially said: You were never here. He never touched you. The children are a private family matter.

The second document was the one that stopped my breathing.

VOLUNTARY RELINQUISHMENT OF PARENTAL RIGHTS.

Two million dollars. That was the number at the bottom. Two million dollars for two children. One million per heartbeat that I had grown inside my body.

My eyes moved down the paragraphs, and that's when I found it — buried in Section 7, Clause 3(b), in font so small you'd need a magnifying glass:

"The undersigned agrees to permanent and irrevocable prohibition of contact with any member of the Voss family, their subsidiaries, employees, or affiliates. Violation of this clause shall result in immediate repayment of all disbursed funds, plus liquidated damages, plus criminal prosecution for harassment."

They weren't just buying my silence.

They were erasing me.

My hand went to my stomach — the fresh wound beneath the bandage, the place where my children had lived. I could still feel the phantom weight of them. I could still hear Lily's cry, sharper than her brother's. Theo had grabbed my finger in the delivery room, and his grip had been so strong that the nurse laughed and said, "That one's going to be a fighter."

A phone buzzed on the counter. Marcus picked it up, listened, then held it toward me.

"Mrs. Voss would like a word."

Not Alexander.

His mother.

I took the phone.

"Ms. Sinclair." Catherine Voss's voice was champagne — golden, expensive, and designed to make you feel cheap for existing. "I trust Marcus has explained everything. I want you to know this is not personal. Alexander has responsibilities to this family. You were a… detour. A pleasant one, I'm sure, but a detour nonetheless. Sign the papers, take the money, and build yourself a nice little life somewhere. You're a smart girl. You'll land on your feet."

She paused.

"But if you fight this — if you go to the press, if you so much as whisper his name — I will bury you so deep that your own children won't know you existed. And trust me, dear, I have done it before."

The line went dead.

Marcus held out a pen. Montblanc. Probably cost more than my mother's rent.

I thought about fighting. I thought about lawyers I couldn't afford, courtrooms where a girl from the South Side of Chicago would stand opposite a dynasty with a hundred years of judges in their pocket. I thought about my babies upstairs and how Catherine Voss had already filed for temporary custody through a family court judge who golfed with her husband every Saturday.

I thought about Alexander. How he wasn't here. How he had sent his assistant.

How two years of my life — two years of loving him in the dark, of being told "soon, I'll tell them soon" — came down to a leather folder and a Montblanc pen.

I signed.

My hand did not shake.

But a single tear fell onto the page — right across Section 7, Clause 3(b). The clause that said I could never come back.

I pulled that page from the folder. Folded it once, twice,until it was small enough to fit in my palm. I put it in the pocket of my hospital gown, right over my heart.

Marcus blinked. "Ms. Sinclair, the document needs to remain—"

"You have copies." My voice didn't sound like mine. It sounded like something forged in a furnace. "You have always had copies."

He didn't argue.

I stood from the wheelchair. My stitches screamed. My breasts ached with milk my children would never drink. I reached into the bag the nurse had packed.

And at the very bottom, wrapped in a pair of cotton socks: a USB drive.

I held it up to the fluorescent hospital light. Small. Black. Unassuming. The old man had pressed it into my hand three weeks before he died, in the garden of the Voss estate, while Catherine was hosting a charity luncheon inside.

"My son is not who you think he is," Richard Voss had whispered, his oxygen tube fogging in the cold air. "And my wife is worse. When the time is right, you use this. Not a moment before. Promise me."

I'd promised.

I looked at the U drive now, turning it slowly in the light.

"Old man," I murmured, "you said 'when the time is right.'"

I slid the USB drive into my bra, against the skin where my milk was leaking, against the body that had just been priced at two million dollars.

"The time isn't right yet."

Marcus watched me walk toward the exit. I know he did because I heard his voice crack behind me.

"Ms. Sinclair — where should I tell the driver to take you?"

I pushed through the glass doors into the Chicago winter. The wind hit my face like a slap — cold, vicious, clarifying.

"Tell him nothing," I said without turning around. "You people don't get to know where I go anymore."

The doors closed behind me.

And somewhere three floors above, my twins were sleeping in a nursery with the name VOSS on their wristbands.

I would come back for them.

But when I did, I wouldn't be the girl who signed that paper.

I'd be the woman who burned the paper — and everything it stood for — to the ground.