Men in heavy, high-visibility gear repelled down the cliffside. Hands dug into the snow. Voices shouted over the roar of helicopter rotors.
A man knelt beside me. He didn’t look like a paramedic. He wore a tailored, heavy wool coat, his silver hair plastered to his forehead. He possessed a face of carved granite, authoritative and terrifyingly intense. He gently brushed the blood-soaked, freezing hair from my uninjured eye.
He stared at my face, and for a second, the billionaire stoicism broke. A look of profound, earth-shattering shock washed over his features. He was looking at my eyes—eyes I would later learn were the exact shade of emerald green as the woman he had loved and lost three decades ago.
This was Arthur Harrison. The legendary, ruthless CEO of Apex Insurance Group. The biological father I never knew existed, who had spent the last five years using his bottomless resources to hunt for his stolen daughter.
“Get the medical chopper down here!” Arthur roared into a radio strapped to his chest, his voice vibrating with a terrifying power that rivaled the storm. “We have her. And she’s still breathing.”
As the paramedics strapped me onto the rigid backboard, Arthur climbed into the belly of the helicopter right beside me. He stripped off his heavy coat and laid it over my shivering, ruined body. As the chopper lifted off, violently swaying in the mountain winds, a man in the front seat turned around, shouting over the noise.
“Mr. Harrison! My contacts in local law enforcement just flagged a report. Carter has already filed the missing persons report, and initiated the initial claim on the Apex policy.”
Arthur’s face went pale, not from fear, but from a cold, absolute fury that seemed to lower the temperature in the cabin. He looked down at me, his large, warm hand enveloping my freezing fingers.
“Let him play his game,” Arthur said, his voice a low, lethal growl. “We are going to let him dig his own grave.”
Chapter 3: Scars and Champagne
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