Chapter1

I dealt with the dead for six years.

Washing corpses on the graveyard shift.

The smell of embalming fluid permanently soaked into my pores.

I did it for my six-year-old son, Rowan.

After the car crash, Cassian told me Rowan was left in a permanent vegetative state.

He blamed my reckless driving.

For six years, I believed my baby was hooked to life support in a private Swiss clinic.

I needed $150,000 for his final experimental stem-cell surgery, and I had finally saved enough.

But when I rushed to my husband's downtown executive suite, he didn't look relieved.

Cassian wasn't wearing his faded thrift-store clothes. He wore an immaculate, bespoke suit.

Evander, my older brother, lounged on the leather sofa nearby.

I held out the cashier's check. My hands shook from exhaustion.

Cassian didn't reach for it.

"Rowan isn't in a coma, Maris," Cassian said.

His tone was completely bored. "He doesn't need a stem-cell transplant. There is no clinic in Geneva."

"I never went bankrupt, either," my husband confessed, leaning back in his leather chair. "I didn't lose the real estate firm. Faking Rowan's medical bills was just a creative way to keep you busy."

He deliberately covered his nose with a silk handkerchief.

"I couldn't stand the smell on you. Squeezing into that roach-infested basement with you was physically repulsive."

I stared at him.

The moldy bread. The expired ramen. The shattered pelvis I ignored to pick up extra night shifts.

It was all a sick joke.

Evander stood up and walked over. He plucked the check from my trembling fingers, treating the paper like rubbish.

"We actually took bets," my older brother added casually. He dropped the check directly into a buzzing paper shredder.

"Our sister Sabine said you’d quit the mortuary after a month and beg us for an allowance. You proved her wrong."

The shredder blades chewed through six years of my blood and sweat.

Evander spoke smoothly over the noise.

"Since I still hold your financial power of attorney from the crash, I already called the bank to void that draft.

Making a living off dead people is morbid.

We wouldn't dare pay for Rowan's private school tuition with your dirty money."

My stomach muscles violently contracted. A sharp, tearing agony spiked through my ribs.

I pressed my forearm hard against my abdomen.

Before, I would have fallen to my knees. I would have grabbed their legs and begged them to explain.*

*Now, looking at the shredded paper, my chest just felt entirely hollow.

Three days ago, a free clinic doctor had handed me an ultrasound scan.

Terminal stomach cancer. Only 21 left.

I had tossed the diagnosis in the trash. I pushed through the internal bleeding because I thought my son was on a ticking clock.

"School?" I forced the words out. My voice grated like rusted iron. "Where is my son?"

Cassian tapped a button on his remote. The massive flat-screen TV on the wall flickered on.

A high-definition video started playing. A perfectly healthy little boy in a pristine white uniform sat at a grand piano. Sabine was sitting next to him, guiding his small hands.

The boy looked up and smiled. "Look, Mom! I did it!"

"I signed his custody over to Sabine," Cassian stated. It was a simple business update to him.

"She renamed him Julian. He’s my heir, Maris. You wash corpses for minimum wage.

Sabine sits on the hospital charity board. Who do you honestly think is the better mother?"

Every Sunday for six years, I cried over fake medical bills in a freezing basement.

Meanwhile, my baby had been playing with her new mom in a gated mansion.

My knees finally gave out. I hit the hardwood floor.

The office door swung open. Lenora and Graham Ellery walked in. My parents.

My mother stepped inside but stayed near the door, refusing to get closer to me.

" Ithink you ran off to be a vagrant," my mother said coldly, adjusting her silk scarf to block out my scent.

"Meanwhile, Sabine just secured a ten-million-dollar grant for the pediatric wing.

She brings absolute honor to the Ellery name. You? You are an absolute embarrassment."

My father, Graham, finally stepped out from behind her. His expression was filled with profound disgust.

"Sabine still cries at the dinner table when someone mentions your name,

Maris. And how do you repay her kindness? By acting like an ungrateful lunatic."

My own parents were willingly defending the woman who had stolen my life.

"Then why are you all here?"

I rasped, looking up at the people who shared my DNA.

"If Sabine is a saint and I'm such a monster, why not just let me rot until I die?"

"Because Julian needs a biological sister," my brother said reasonably. "

And Sabine’s fertility specialist said her body is too delicate to endure childbirth.

So, you need to carry the next daughter."

Cassian nodded from his desk. "It's a generous path, Maris.

After that , your parents might actually forgive your past behavior."

She stole my life, but my family members wanted to turn my body into a breeding facility for the woman who replaced me.

"I have to give her a child?"

A dry, broken laugh tore out of my throat. "Absolutely not!"

Evander snapped. "She is a devoted mother to Cassian's heir and a flawless daughter to our parents.

You were always too bitter, too unhinged to fit into our world!"

"She's delicate?!" I screamed.

I hooked my fingers into the collar of my cheap uniform and violently yanked the fabric down over .

A grid of burn scars twisted across my shoulder.

"Look at me!" I shoved it toward my parents. "Her mother abducted me!

She locked me in a pitch-black cellar for three years!

That human trafficker pressed a branding iron into my skin every time I cried for you, while your precious Sabine slept in my bedroom!"

Evander’s face went completely cold.

He lunged.

I barely weighed a hundred pounds.

My cancer-ridden body had zero strength left.

My older brother grabbed my bruised arm and shoved me violently backward.

My back slammed against the heavy mahogany desk.

The tumor inside me ruptured. I folded over, gasping for air

"We had a court-appointed psychologist review your files years ago,"

Evander hissed. His fingers dug directly into my fresh bruises.

"Sabine’s mother was a saint who took you in when you ran away as a teenager.

You mutilated yourself in a psychotic episode just to frame them. You are a pathological liar."

My mother watched from the doorway with crossed arms.

She looked at my scars with nothing but revulsion.

"She still hasn't learned her lesson," my mother sneered. "

She's just as hateful toward Sabine as she was on day one."

I looked up at Evander. Blood dripped from my bitten lip onto Cassian's pristine Persian rug.

I whispered, staring into my brother's empty eyes. "But I refuse it."

"Learn to shut your mouth," My brother ordered.

I stopped struggling. I let my head fall back against the wood.

Let them lock me up.

The biological clock in my stomach ticked silently.

1 9 days left.

This is my body, I refused it.