Chapter 1

The anesthetic was a thick fog in my head, but the ache in my side was sharp and real, a constant reminder of the kidney I had just given away. I did it for Alex Peterson, the man I loved, the man I had spent the last three years building a life with. The doctors said he was terminally ill, that his kidneys were failing, and a transplant was his only hope. Without a second thought, I volunteered. For him, I would do anything.

Lying in the sterile white hospital bed, I tried to focus on his face, the handsome, sensitive face of the struggling artist I had fallen for. I pictured him recovering, getting his strength back, us finally moving forward with the life we had planned. The pain in my side felt like a small price to pay for that future.

A low murmur of voices drifted from the hallway, pulling me from my drowsy thoughts. The door to my room was slightly ajar. I recognized one of the voices immediately, it was Alex's best friend, Mark.

"I can't believe she actually did it," Mark said, his voice dripping with a humor I didn't understand. "You told her you were dying, and she just rolled up her sleeve and gave you a kidney. She's so naive."

My heart gave a painful lurch. Naive? Why would he say that?

Then, I heard Alex's voice, a sound that was supposed to be my comfort, but it was laced with a coldness I had never heard before. He scoffed. "She's always been easy to fool. A few pretty words, a couple of sad stories about my 'art', and she'd do anything for me."

The fog in my head started to clear, replaced by a chilling dread. This wasn't right. They weren't supposed to be talking like this.

"Still, all this for Chloe?" Mark asked. "Seems like a lot of work."

Chloe. My adoptive sister. The golden child of our family, the one my parents adored while I was just an afterthought. What did she have to do with this?

"Everything is for Chloe," Alex said, and the conviction in his voice was like a physical blow. "I never loved Sarah. Not for a second. This was always about revenge. For Chloe."

The world tilted. The white ceiling of the hospital room seemed to spin. Three years. Our entire relationship, every laugh, every shared secret, every promise for the future, it was all a lie. A carefully constructed plan.

"So the whole 'struggling artist' thing was an act?" Mark sounded impressed.

"Of course," Alex said with a dry laugh. "While she was working double shifts as a nurse to pay our rent, I was just waiting. The heir to Peterson Tech, pretending to be poor. All for Chloe. She's the only one who matters."

I squeezed my eyes shut, but the tears leaked out anyway, hot and silent on my cheeks. He wasn't a struggling artist. He was the heir to a massive tech company. A company I knew my adoptive father, Mr. Davis, desperately wanted to partner with. And Chloe... Chloe was my sister. The sister who always got everything. My parents had adopted me, Sarah Miller, but they had given their hearts to their biological daughter, Chloe Davis. They gave her the best of everything, while I was just the convenient, quiet girl who lived in their house. I was the true heiress to my own family's small tech startup, a fact they buried so Chloe could shine as the face of the family.

My breath hitched in my chest. The pain in my side was a dull, throbbing echo of the gaping wound that had just been torn open in my heart. He never loved me. He used me. My love, my body, my sacrifice... it was all just a tool for his revenge. For Chloe.

Then, Alex said something that shattered the last piece of my soul.

"So, what are you going to do with the kidney?" Mark asked casually.

Alex's voice was light, careless. "I don't know. I don't need it. Maybe I'll have them dispose of it. Or donate it to science. It's kind of funny, isn't it? She gave me a part of her body, and it's completely worthless to me."

They both laughed.

The sound echoed in the quiet hallway, a cruel, sharp noise that cut through my disbelief and left only a hollow, aching emptiness. My kidney. The part of me I gave to save his life. He was going to throw it away. Like trash. Like me.

The laughter faded as they walked away, leaving me alone in the silence. The physical pain was nothing now. It was drowned out by a tsunami of betrayal, a pain so profound it left me numb. I lay there, motionless, as the truth settled over me like a shroud. My life for the past three years had been a lie. My family's love was a lie. The man I loved was a monster.

But as the hours passed and the first light of dawn crept into the room, something else began to form in the wreckage of my heart. It was a tiny, hard kernel of something cold and sharp. It was resolve. He thought I was naive. He thought I was easy to fool. He thought I was worthless.

He was wrong.

I would not let them destroy me. I would reclaim my life. An old, forgotten arrangement came to mind, a marriage my parents had tried to set for Chloe. A marriage to a reclusive, paralyzed tech billionaire named Ethan Cole. They had been terrified of sending their precious Chloe to a man in a wheelchair.

They would send me instead. And I would go. But I would go on my own terms. I would take back everything that was mine. My name, my company, my life. This was no longer about saving Alex. It was about saving myself.