Chapter 3 Why Hurt Ashley

I was on my way to tell my boyfriend, Cooper, that I was pregnant. He was my savior, the man who rescued me after a brutal assault left me an orphan. But when I arrived at his penthouse, I overheard him talking to his sister, Kenya. My entire life was a lie. The assault wasn't random; it was a "prank" they had orchestrated so he could play the hero. It only got worse. Kenya tortured and killed my dog for "surgical practice," and Cooper defended her. They leaked a private video of me, destroying my reputation at school. When I tried to escape, Kenya sent thugs after me, and the attack caused me to miscarry our child. As I lay bleeding in the hospital, Cooper blamed me for losing the baby. He then told me the miscarriage had left me permanently infertile. His final demand was the cruelest. He said I had to "compensate" his sister for all the trouble I'd caused by donating one of my kidneys to her. But they had made one fatal mistake. They thought I was a powerless orphan. They didn't know I had just inherited a billion-dollar empire from a secret aunt. And I was about to use every penny to burn their world to the ground.

My son was dead. The official report called it a suicide, a drug overdose. But I knew it was a lie. I was a Crime Scene Investigator, and I had processed his body myself. The evidence screamed murder. I appealed, seven times, each time presenting irrefutable proof. Each time, District Attorney Bentley Shannon slammed the door in my face, dismissing my grief as delusion. The system I had served for twenty years was protecting a killer. So, I took the law into my own hands. I kidnapped the District Attorney's daughter, Dallas Shannon, and broadcast my demands to the world. For every chance he wasted, I would use a forensic tool on her, permanently disfiguring her. The world watched, horrified, as I stapled her arm, then cauterized it, drawing thin red lines on her skin with a scalpel. My former mentor, Dr. Hooper, and my son's girlfriend, Alexandra, were brought in to convince me, to paint my son as depressed, to present a fabricated suicide note. For a moment, I wavered, the pain of being a "bad mother" crushing me. But then I saw it-a hidden message in his "suicide note," a secret code from his favorite childhood book. He wasn't giving up; he was crying for help. They had twisted his plea into a lie. My grief burned away, replaced by an unbreakable resolve. "I do not accept this note," I declared, pressing the cauterizing pen to Dallas's leg as the FBI swarmed in.

I woke up in the hospital after my husband tried to kill me in an explosion. The doctor said I was lucky-the shrapnel had missed my major arteries. Then he told me something else. I was eight weeks pregnant. Just then, my husband, Julius, walked in. He ignored me and spoke to the doctor. He said his mistress, Kenzie, had leukemia and needed an urgent bone marrow transplant. He wanted me to be the donor. The doctor was aghast. "Mr. Carroll, your wife is pregnant and critically injured. That procedure would require an abortion and could kill her." Julius's face was a mask of stone. "The abortion is a given," he said. "Kenzie is the priority. Florence is strong, she can have another baby later." He was talking about our child like it was a tumor to be removed. He would kill our baby and risk my life for a woman who was faking a terminal illness. In that sterile hospital room, the part of me that had loved him, the part that had forgiven him, turned to ash. They wheeled me into surgery. As the anesthetic flowed into my veins, I felt a strange sense of peace. This was the end, and the beginning. When I woke up, my baby was gone. With a calmness that scared even me, I picked up the phone and dialed a number I hadn't called in ten years. "Dad," I whispered. "I'm coming home." For a decade, I had hidden my true identity as a Horton heiress, all for a man who just tried to murder me. Florence Whitehead was dead. But the Horton heiress was just waking up, and she was going to burn their world to the ground.

For three years, my fiancé Jaxon kept me in a top Swiss clinic, helping me recover from the PTSD that shattered my life. When I was finally accepted into Juilliard, I booked a one-way ticket to New York, ready to surprise him and start our future. But as I was signing my discharge papers, the receptionist handed me an official certificate of recovery. It was dated a full year ago. She explained that my "medication" for the last twelve months had been nothing but vitamin supplements. I had been perfectly healthy, a prisoner held captive by forged medical reports and lies. I flew home and went straight to his private club, only to overhear him laughing with his friends. He was married. He had been for the entire three years I was locked away. "I've been handling Alina," he said, his voice laced with amusement. "A few tweaked reports, the right 'medication' to keep her foggy. It bought me the time I needed to secure my marriage to Krystal." The man who swore to protect me, the man I worshipped, had orchestrated my imprisonment. My love story was just a footnote in his. Later that night, his mother slid a check across the table. "Take this and disappear," she ordered. Three years ago, I had thrown a similar check in her face, declaring my love wasn't for sale. This time, I picked it up. "Alright," I said, my voice hollow. "I'll leave. After my father's death anniversary, Jaxon Francis will never find me again."

The call came from my son's elite private school. The nurse was cheerful, telling me seven-year-old Jace had a minor scrape and needed a routine blood transfusion. Then she said something that made my blood run cold. "It's a good thing we have his A-positive blood type on file." My husband, Christian, and I are both O-negative. It's biologically impossible. A secret DNA test confirmed the horrifying truth. Jace was not my son. He was Christian's child with our live-in nanny, Kassidy. They had swapped my baby at birth. For seven years, I had been raising my husband's affair child while my own son was missing. My entire life, my perfect marriage to the man I'd loved since high school, was a lie. The man I had spent years searching for after a car accident supposedly gave him amnesia had been playing me the entire time. But in a twisted attempt to gaslight me with a new, manipulated DNA test, Christian made a fatal mistake. He accidentally sent a hair sample from my biological son. The test confirmed he was alive. Suddenly, I had a reason to live. I would find my son, and then I would burn my husband's world to the ground.

I suspended a five-year-old student named Leo for pushing another child down the stairs. As the head child psychologist at an elite academy, I was used to difficult children, but there was a chilling emptiness in Leo's eyes. That evening, I was abducted in the faculty parking lot, dragged into a van, and beaten unconscious. I woke up in a hospital, every inch of my body aching. A kind nurse let me use her phone to call my husband, Franco. When he didn't answer, I opened his social media page, my heart pounding with fear for him. But he was fine. A new video, posted just thirty minutes ago, showed him in a hospital room, gently peeling an apple for the little boy I had suspended. "Daddy," Leo whined. "That teacher was mean to me." My husband's voice, the voice I had loved for a decade, was a soothing murmur. "I know, buddy. Daddy already took care of it. She won't ever bother you again." The world tilted on its axis. The attack wasn't random. The man who had vowed to protect me forever, my loving husband, had tried to have me killed. For another woman's child. Our entire life was a lie. Then the police delivered the final blow: our five-year marriage had never been legally registered. As I lay there, broken, I remembered the wedding gift he'd given me-40% of his company. He thought it was a symbol of his ownership. He was about to find out it was his death sentence.