My husband beat me with a heavy leather belt just to impress his arrogant mistress. Covered in bruises, I pulled out my phone to call my dad. My husband snatched it, put it on speaker, and laughed. “Let’s tell your pathetic, broke mechanic father how worthless you are,” he mocked. The line connected. But the deep, booming voice that answered wasn’t a poor mechanic. My father said one sentence and hung up the phone. And exactly five minutes later, they begged for forgiveness.

He dialed Chloe’s number for the fiftieth time that week. He desperately needed an alibi. He needed someone, anyone, to corroborate his frantic, fabricated lies about being a victim of a corporate setup.

The automated, robotic voice replied instantly, echoing in his hollow ear: The number you have reached has been disconnected or is no longer in service.

Julian slowly hung up the phone. His arm dropped limply to his side. He stared blankly at the graffiti-carved concrete wall in front of him.

His high-priced, shark-like defense lawyers had abandoned him the exact moment the massive retainers bounced from his entirely frozen accounts. The overworked public defender assigned to his case had openly laughed in his face when Julian frantically claimed he was a self-made billionaire victim of a grand, sweeping conspiracy. He was currently facing thirty-five years in a maximum-security federal penitentiary for massive wire fraud, embezzlement, and defrauding global investors.

Chloe, desperate to save her own skin, had immediately turned state’s evidence against him, offering up every private conversation they ever had. Yet, her betrayal hadn’t saved her social standing; she found herself permanently blacklisted, evicted from her luxury apartment, and entirely exiled by every wealthy circle in the city. She was a pariah. But Julian… Julian was entirely, horrifyingly, permanently alone in the dark.

Thousands of miles away, the reality was vastly, beautifully different.

In a sun-drenched, private medical recovery suite overlooking the brilliant, azure waters of the Mediterranean Sea, I stood in front of a massive, gilded full-length mirror.

The sterile, quiet safety of the clinic, filled with the scent of fresh sea salt and blooming lavender, was the absolute antithesis of that bloody marble floor in Beverly Hills. I let the heavy, white silk robe slip slowly from my shoulders, letting it pool around my waist. I gently traced my fingertips over the healing skin of my back. The deep, purple bruises were finally fading to a dull yellow, but the raised, red lacerations remained.

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