Chapter 2

Scarlett's POV

With shaking hands, I pulled my phone from my purse and dialed Nicole Ward, my best friend and law partner.

She picked up almost immediately, her voice warm and energetic. “Scarlett? What kind of mess did Tristan dump on your plate this time?”

My throat constricted. “Nicole, find me the best lawyers in the city. Not divorce lawyers... I need corporate property and criminal litigation attorneys. I’m taking back everything that’s mine.”

After hanging up, I pulled my car over onto the shoulder of the bridge.

Mist rose off the river. The radio was humming with financial news, the anchor highlighting Vance Group’s latest stock surge, crediting the three hundred core patents in green energy and advanced manufacturing that formed their corporate moat.

I reached out and clicked the radio off.

Absolute silence filled the car. Leaning back against the headrest, watching melted snow run down the windshield, my mind drifted years into the past.

Tristan and I used to be the couple everyone in our social circle envied.

The Sterling and Vance estates had sat directly across from each other, separated only by a quiet, tree-lined avenue.

When I was eight, I recklessly climbed an old oak in the yard, slipped, and fell. Ten-year-old Tristan had sprinted across the grass like a lunatic, throwing his body underneath me to break my fall.

I hadn't gotten a single scratch. Tristan’s right arm was shattered, leaving him in a cast for two months and saddling him with joint pain whenever it rained. Even covered in cold sweat from the pain, the boy had used his uninjured left hand to wipe my tears. “Don’t cry, Scarlett. It doesn’t hurt.”

When he was eighteen, he went behind his family’s back to enter an underground mountain race. The course was lethal. He took hairpin turns like he had a death wish, his car completely wrecked by the time he crossed the finish line in first place.

The prize was a limited-edition pink diamond ring.

That night, covered in cuts and bruises, he climbed onto my balcony, slid the ring onto my finger, and looked at me with burning intensity. “Scarlett Sterling, I traded my life to win this ring. From now on, my life is yours, and I am yours. I’ll love you forever.”

Then, at twenty-two, right before our engagement party.

A business rival sent hitmen after the Vance family, abducting Tristan and me to an abandoned industrial plant.

They were going to break Tristan’s hands. To shield me, he took repeated hits from iron pipes, breaking three ribs and coughing up blood, but he kept me pinned beneath him, refusing to let them touch a single hair on my head.

The moment the police sirens howled in the distance, one of the thugs lost his mind, drawing a blade and driving it straight toward Tristan’s heart.

Without thinking, I threw myself over him, taking the blade in his place.

The steel tore through my lower abdomen, tearing into my uterus. I fought for my life in the ICU for three days and three nights before stabilizing, but the surgeon handed our families a grim prognosis: I would likely never be able to carry a child again.

When Evelyn heard the news, she threw a massive fit, demanding the engagement be broken off on the spot, claiming Tristan could never marry an invalid who couldn't produce an heir. For the next three days, torrential rain poured from the sky. Tristan, his ribs still fractured, knelt on the flagstones of the Vance courtyard in nothing but a thin shirt, refusing food and water.

His knees bled through his trousers, his voice raw as he screamed at his mother: *“Scarlett ended up like this because she took a knife for me! If I can’t marry her, I won’t marry anyone! If there’s no room for her in this family, I’ll end my life right here and give it back to her!”*

In the end, Evelyn gave in.

Once we healed, Tristan threw me a lavish wedding that was the talk of New York society. Under the arch of white roses, he kissed the back of my hand and swore before every guest that I would be his only love for the rest of his life.