In the eighth month of my pregnancy, they cut the child out of me.

When the anesthesia thinned and my senses drifted back into the sterile white glare of the recovery room, my hands moved instinctively to my stomach. It was flat. Hollowed out.

A scoopedout hollow where life had kicked against my ribs just hours before. Damian stood at the foot of the bed, his tailored coat immaculate, his handsome face carved from stone.

He didn’t ask about the pain.

He didn't even look at the intravenous line dripping cold saline into my collapsed vein. "Bianca fell because of you three years ago," he said, his voice level, possessing the cruel tranquility of someone handing down a mild administrative fine. "She lost her womb.

She will never carry a child. In exchange, the least I can do is clear the path for her career." He adjusted his platinum cufflink. "Don't look at me like that, Iris.

Once her standing in the industry is entirely secured, I’ll arrange for an artificial womb.

When the next one is born, I will personally enter its name into the Craig family registry. That child will inherit everything." For ten years, this was the ritual.

Nine times before this, he had taken my newborns from my chest the moment they drew breath, sending them across the ocean to an esoteric temple in northern Thailand—sacrificing flesh and bone to dark, desperate blessings so that his rising starlet, Bianca, could ascend the heights of Hollywood without a stumble.

This time, the tenth time, I didn't scream. I didn't throw the porcelain vases against the wall. I didn't beg on my knees until my forehead split against the hardwood.

Across high society, they had spent a decade laughing at me.

The legal wife of Damian Craig, treated with less dignity than a street stray, less regard than an offthebooks mistress.

The heir apparent of the Craig empire thought my silence meant compliance. He sent word through his personal assistant that I was finally growing sensible.

What he didn't know was that a silent, malignant tumor had been growing inside my pelvic wall. The forced extraction had ruptured the capsule.

The cancer cells had spilled into my bloodstream, colonizing my lymphatic system in an irreversible, violent bloom. I was already dying.

While he took Bianca by the hand to kneel before bloodstained altars in Chiang Mai, offering up a decade of my lifespan to buy her fame, I knelt on the cold marble outside the old study of the Craig estate. "I have paid Desmond's debt," I whispered into the wood of the heavy oak door. "I can never bear another child.

Please, sir. Let me go." I knelt through the damp, biting chill of the night. At dawn, the latch clicked.

A housekeeper handed me an envelope containing a clean passport and a oneway ticket scheduled ten days out.

Damian truly believed I was madly, hopelessly in love with him—that my ten years of submission were born of a desperate devotion to his person.

He never knew that from the very first second I met him, the only thing I ever loved was the ghost lingering behind his eyes. … When Damian returned from Thailand with Bianca, my revision surgery was barely fortyeight hours behind me.

The surgical incision across my lower abdomen was still raw, seeping serum through the gauze. Midnight had just struck when my bedroom door was kicked open.

Bianca strode toward the bed, the silk of her designer slip whispering against her thighs.

She leaned over my mattress, smiling, her breath smelling of expensive champagne and sickening malice. "Iris, darling," she purred, tapping a manicured nail against my bandaged stomach.

Her touch was like a reptile gliding over an open wound. "Do you want to know what happened over those seven days?" Her eyes glittered with feverish satisfaction. "Every prayer was answered.

Every single door in the industry has opened for me." She leaned closer, her grin stretching wide. "But my favorite part? Your ending. I lost my uterus, Iris.

I can never be a mother. So why on earth should you be allowed to carry Damian’s blood? Now look at you. Just like me.

Barren forever." A mother’s primal, feral grief ripped through the fog of my sedatives.

The memory of that kicking, breathing baby boy being ripped from my body before I could even touch his cheek overwhelmed me. "Get away from me!" I rasped, shoving her with whatever strength remained in my trembling arms.

Bianca anticipated the motion. She leaned into the shove, spun theatrically, and threw herself into the corner of the room, curling into a ball and shrieking in fabricated agony.

The heavy door was slammed back against the wall. Damian strode in. His eyes swept over Bianca sobbing on the hardwood floor, then snapped to my bloodshot, wild gaze.

In an instant, a murderous storm settled over his features. "Crack." The back of his hand caught me across the cheek with bonejarring force. My neck snapped to the side.

A highpitched, metallic whine swallowed all sound in my left ear. Before I could breathe, Damian grabbed the collar of my gown and yanked me off the bed.

My feet caught in the tangled sheets, and I crashed onto the floor. The violent motion tore my abdominal sutures wide open.

A warm, dark trickle seeped through the bandages, dripping onto the white oak boards.

Damian froze for a fraction of a second, his gaze catching the spreading red, but the cruelty in his eyes returned instantly.

His fingers wrapped around my throat, pinning me down. "Who gave you permission to lay a hand on Bianca?" he hissed, his jaw clenched so tightly the muscles jumped. "If you hadn't manipulated my grandfather into forcing this marriage ten years ago—if you hadn't stolen the life that belonged to her—she wouldn't be barren!

She wouldn't be hiding in the shadows while you sit in the Craig drawing rooms!" I stared up at him through blurred vision.

He sneered, his grip tightening. "You clawed your way into this house, Iris, and now you have the nerve to be jealous because I give her what she deserves? You stole her life.

You will pay for every misery she suffers. You brought every ounce of this on yourself." He stood, kicking the back of my knee to force me upright into a kneel. "Kneel.

Apologize to her." I instinctively braced to push away, but his heavy hand came down on my bare shoulder, pressing me into the floorboards like an anchor. "Refuse," he said quietly, "and you spend the next thirty days in solitary confinement in the cellar." Ten days.

I only had ten days left until my flight. If he locked me in the dark, I would miss the plane. I would die in the cellar of this house. My struggle ceased instantly.

The blood was pooling beneath my knees now, staining the hem of my nightgown, but I kept my back straight, eyes pinned to the floor. "I am sorry," I croaked out, my voice scraping like rusted metal.

Damian stared at the blood gathering behind my legs. A flicker of something complicated—an unreadable, fleeting hesitation—crossed his gaze.

But it vanished just as quickly, replaced by an aristocratic disdain. "For all this money and status," he said, turning his back on me, "you really are a pathetic creature, Iris." Usually, at this point, my eyes would be swimming with tears.

I would look at him with that shattered, yearning expression that he had grown so accustomed to feeding on. The room went dead quiet. Damian stood there, waiting for my tears.

I didn't blink. I didn't weep. My face was a blank slate of dead flesh. My silence seemed to infuriate him more than any rebellion could have.

With a dark curse, he scooped Bianca up into his arms and slammed the door behind him. He left two private security guards standing at the threshold to ensure I didn't move.

I knelt there for eight hours.

When the morning guard shift changed and the sentries finally stepped away, my legs gave out, and I collapsed sideways into the dried red stain on the floor.

When the pale gray of dawn crept through the sheer curtains, the door swung open again. Old Mr.

Craig—Damian’s grandfather—stepped inside, leaning heavily on his carved mahogany cane.

He looked down at me, broken and soiled on the floor, and released a heavy, weary sigh. "Iris," the old man murmured, the weight of dynastic guilt hanging on his shoulders. "You gave ten years of your youth to Damian.

You bore his burdens. The Craig family has failed you." He paused, studying my hollow cheeks. "You cannot bear children anymore.

But if you wish to remain, I will ensure you live in comfort and wealth for the rest of your days. No one will ever cast you out." "No, Grandfather," I whispered, shaking my head.

My voice was dry dust. "Thank you. But no." Ten years ago, the patriarch had demanded I marry Damian to secure the Craig lineage.

I had agreed to the hellish arrangement for one reason only: to repay Desmond. Desmond Craig. Damian’s older brother. The only man I had ever loved.

Desmond had pulled me from the path of a speeding semitruck outside the orphanage when we were kids. He had given his life so that I could draw breath.

He died right in front of me, his blood soaking my childhood clothes. When the Craig patriarch found us, he had lost his golden heir.

Out of twisted grief and calculation, he made me swear to repay the gift of my life by standing beside the remaining son—Damian.

Damian was naturally cold, repulsed by intimacy, a man of frigid detachment.

It had taken me years of patient warmth to soften his sharp edges, to allow him to touch me, to conceive his children. Then Bianca showed up.

She fell down a flight of stairs on a film set, ruptured her reproductive organs, and pointed her trembling finger at me.

From that day onward, Damian made it his life's mission to break me. Ten pregnancies.

Ten children taken from my body like livestock to feed rituals and soothe Bianca’s bruised vanity.

Now, with my uterus gone and the cancer metastasizing through my bones, the debt was paid. Desmond had given me life. I had given ten lives back to his bloodline. We were even.

That night, shivering beneath the thin duvet, I stared at the digital clock on the bedside table, counting down the hours. The surgical wound had flared with a secondary infection.

Heat radiated from my core; my skin was scorching to the touch, my teeth rattling violently from the fever.

I tried to swing my legs over the edge of the bed to reach a glass of water, but the door was kicked open a second time. Damian walked in, shedding his jacket.

He didn't look at my flushed face. He reached down, caught my chin in his hand, and tilted my head back.

His expression was that of an emperor bestowing a careless mercy upon a peasant. "Stop sulking," he said, unbuttoning his cuffs. "I’m giving you a chance to make amends." Before I could comprehend his words, his hands gripped the front of my silk gown, tearing it down the middle.

A guttural scream tore from my throat. With every ounce of adrenaline left in my fevered body, I shoved him hard against the chest.

The rejection struck him like a physical blow. "Slap." My head snapped sideways against the headboard.

The heat of my skin against his palm made him pause for half a heartbeat, but his bruised ego flared hotter. In ten years, I had never once pulled away from his touch.

I had welcomed him, endured him, held him through his night terrors. "Iris," he growled, disgust rolling off him in waves. "Playing hard to get doesn't suit you." Ignoring the agony etched into my features, he grabbed my arm and shoved me violently off the mattress.

My spine cracked hard against the hardwood. The internal incision ruptured entirely this time; a hot, wet gush flooded between my thighs.

I gasped, the air completely knocked from my lungs, unable to form a syllable. "Stop acting," Damian scoffed, looking down at me with cold indifference. "Isn't this what you’ve spent ten years begging for?" When I failed to rise, his desire curdled entirely into irritation.

He reached for his coat, stepped over my legs, and slammed the door. I don't know how long I lay paralyzed in the dark.

Eventually, inch by agonizing inch, I dragged myself across the floor and pulled my torso back onto the edge of the mattress. Then, the shadows by the balcony shifted.

A man slipped into the room, smelling of cheap cologne and stale tobacco.

Before I could scream, a heavy, calloused hand clamped down over my mouth, suffocating me against the pillows. "Miss Bianca sent me," the stranger whispered into my ear, his voice wet with amusement. "She said you were desperate for company tonight.

Said I should help you out. No need to thank her." Terror seized my chest.

I clawed at his face, thrashing with the frantic desperation of a trapped animal, but the relentless loss of blood was draining my consciousness. The room spun into gray static.

My muffled weeping was swallowed whole by the midnight rain outside. … The intruder slipped away as the sky turned the color of bruised slate.

Clinging to the last shred of my sanity, I dragged myself to the secondfloor study, sobbing uncontrollably, and threw open the doors.

Damian was seated behind his mahogany desk, reviewing financial reports.

When I choked out what had happened—the intruder, Bianca's name, the violation—he didn't even look up from his ledger.

A faint, mocking smirk touched the corner of his lips. "Did you enjoy yourself?" he asked. I froze. The room seemed to tilt beneath my bare feet.

Damian finally raised his eyes, cold and bored. "Bianca is incapable of that kind of cruelty. But you? You push me away, and then you invite a stray off the street into my house?

What are you trying to prove, Iris? That you're as cheap as everyone says?" The blood drained entirely from my face.

Before I could speak, he rose from his chair, grabbed me by the shoulder, and shoved me out of his office. I slammed against the corridor wall. He didn't look back.

He wiped his hands on a clean handkerchief as if he had brushed against garbage, and walked down the stairs.

Nine days left. "I cannot die here," I told myself. "I will not die in this house." I wiped the tears from my cheeks, bit down on my lip until it bled to stay upright, and managed to change into a long, highcollared dress to hide the bruising.

I needed medical attention; the sepsis from the torn stitches was setting in. Yet the second I opened the front gates of the estate, a wall of flashing cameras blinded me.

Microphones surged toward my mouth, blocking every exit. "Mrs. Craig, can you confirm the rumors of your midnight liaison with an unidentified man?" "Mr.

Craig publicly confirmed this morning that you’ve broken your marital vows while he was supporting Miss Bianca on set!

Do you have a statement regarding your conduct?" "Is it true you're barren, and this was an act of personal retaliation against the family?" The venom in their voices struck me like stones.

Then it clicked. The study had a security camera mounted above the bookshelves.

My broken, weeping confession—every humiliating word I had whispered to Damian begging for his help—had been clipped and handed directly to the press.

All because Bianca had shed a few delicate tears over breakfast, claiming I was slandering her name.

Within three hours, tabloids across the country ran my bruised, ducking face on every cover. "The Craig Heiress: A Decade of Depravity." Overnight, I became the most despised woman in the city.

Even as I tried to slip into local clinics, the paparazzi trailed me like vultures. When pedestrians recognized me, they pointed and sneered.

Outside a pharmacy, someone hurled a paper cup filled with scalding coffee at my chest; later, a shattered soda bottle grazed my cheek.

The afternoon I stepped out of a private clinic with a bottle of broadspectrum antibiotics, an angry bystander shoved me from behind. I hit the concrete pavement hard.

I didn't get up. I couldn't. I curled into a ball in the middle of the sidewalk, shielding my head with my arms, while strangers spat insults above me.

Tucked inside my fist, hidden beneath my collar, was a simple silver crucifix on a worn chain.

It was the only thing Desmond had left behind. "Just hold on, Iris," I whispered into the dark of my crossed arms. "Just one more day." My phone vibrated against my ribcage. "Craig Aviation: Your international departure is scheduled in 24 hours.

Please arrive at the private hangar on time." When I limped back through the Craig manor doors that evening, I smelled of sour trash and street dust.

The maids turned their heads, holding linen handkerchiefs over their noses as I passed, their whispers sharp and cruel.

The entire mansion was ablaze with crystal chandeliers; florists, caterers, and decorators were moving frantically through the grand ballroom.

Tomorrow was Bianca’s twentyseventh birthday. Damian was throwing her a gala that would dominate the social pages for a month. My fever had crested again.

My vision was swimming in black dots. I wanted nothing more than to climb the stairs and let the hours run out in silence, but Bianca turned the corner, walking straight toward me.

She slammed her shoulder into mine with deliberate force. My torn incision screamed.

Before I could steady myself, Bianca let out a theatrical gasp and tumbled backward onto the marble foyer. "What is happening here?" Damian’s voice boomed from the gallery above.

He took the stairs two at a time.

Bianca lay on the floor, her eyes brimming with unshed tears, smiling with brave, tragic grace. "It's fine, Damian," she said softly, holding her wrist. "Iris is just upset about the party.

She doesn't want me to have it. Let's cancel it. I don't want to cause trouble." Damian’s jaw hardened into iron.

He turned his glare on me, his eyes burning with disgust. "You really don't know when to stop, do you?" he snarled. "Bianca has nothing, and you begrudge her a single evening?

If you're so desperate to be part of this, fine. Every single rose for tomorrow night’s ballroom will be prepped by your hands.

Consider it your public penance." With a flick of his fingers, he dismissed the entire household staff from the hall. "Leave her," he ordered. "No one helps." The massive double doors swung shut.

I was left alone in the vast, echoing ballroom. A delivery van pulled up to the service entrance, unloading crate after crate of imported blackbaccara roses.

I walked over to inspect them. There were no floral clippers. No thornstrippers. Not even a pair of canvas garden gloves.

Outside the window, I heard the delivery driver remark to the butler, "Strange request from Miss Bianca—she specifically insisted we leave every single long thorn intact, and confiscated all the processing tools.

Said the person arranging them had to do it raw." The driver’s laughter faded down the driveway. A cold, hollow chill settled into my chest. Of course. Another petty, sadistic trap.

The tumor inside my abdomen pulsed with a dull, sickening ache. The incision continued to weep fluid. But I knew Damian’s guards were watching from the mezzanine.

If I abandoned the task, he would lock me away before midnight tomorrow. I knelt on the cold marble floor. I reached out my bare hands and took hold of the first stem.

A thick, needlesharp thorn drove straight into the meat of my thumb. Blood welled up, thick and dark, dripping onto the pristine white silk runner. I didn't stop.

Hour after hour, through the dead of night, I stripped hundreds of stems with my bare flesh. Thorns snapped off beneath my fingernails.

My palms were shredded into raw, weeping ribbons. By dawn, the last urn was filled. My hands were covered in a crust of dried black blood and fresh crimson.

When I tried to stand, my knees buckled, and my vision went entirely gray. Footsteps echoed across the ballroom. It was Damian.

He stopped a few feet away, his gaze falling upon my mangled, bloody hands.

A sharp, violent shock flickered across his face. "Get the medical kit," he commanded the shadows, his voice unusually tight. The butler rushed forward with a silver tray.

Damian knelt before me, took a roll of sterile gauze, and began wrapping my torn fingers himself. As he worked, he glanced up. I was looking directly into his face.

My gaze was soft, drenched in an agonizing, bottomless warmth. Damian let out a small, satisfied breath. A shadow of smug irony curved his mouth.

He thought that no matter how much he degraded me, no matter how many times he pushed me into the dirt, I would still look at him with that same unshakeable adoration.

He didn't realize that my eyes weren't focused on him at all. I was tracing the sharp slope of his jawline, the slight arch of his left eyebrow.

The seventenths of his face that belonged, identically, to his dead brother, Desmond. Desmond and I had shared stale bread in the back alleys behind the orphanage.

When the Craig lawyers finally identified Desmond as their missing heir, he had refused to step into their limousine unless they took me along.

At the orphanage gate, the drunk driver came out of nowhere. Desmond’s last act on this earth was to throw his weight against my chest, tossing me onto the grass verge.

His eyes were the last thing I saw before the headlights consumed him. To appease the old patriarch's grief, I became Damian's wife.

I spent ten years enduring his frigid nature, slowly thawing a man who hated intimacy, until he finally allowed me to bear his heirs. Then came Bianca.

She destroyed her own womb through her own vanity, blamed it on me, and Damian made me pay with nine infant lives—and finally, my own body. It was over now.

Damian looked at my mangled hands, then up at my soft, longing eyes. A rare pang of guilt seemed to strike his chest.

He pulled out a linen handkerchief and began gently dabbing the blood from my palms. Suddenly, Bianca’s scream shattered the silence of the hallway. Damian’s hands froze.

Without a word, he dropped the gauze and sprinted out of the room. I stood up slowly, cradling my wrapped hands, preparing to walk toward the back stairs.

A sharp click of stilettos echoed behind me. "Whore," Bianca spat. Before I could turn, her fingers caught the delicate silver chain around my neck.

With a vicious yank, she snapped the link, tearing Desmond’s crucifix from my throat, and threw it straight into the roaring stone fireplace.

My soul left my body. "No!" It was the only piece of Desmond left in the physical world.

I threw myself toward the hearth, but Bianca stepped directly into my path, blocking the grate. "Get out of the way!" I screamed, lunging forward.

The second my shoulder brushed hers, Bianca shrieked and threw herself backward toward the fire irons. "Bianca!" Damian burst into the room. He didn't look at the hearth.

He only saw my outstretched arms and Bianca falling toward the floor. "You venomous bitch!" he roared.

He crossed the room in two strides, seized my shoulders, and hurled me violently toward the stone hearth to protect her.

My body struck the edge of the hearth and tumbled directly into the burning logs. A scream tore from my throat as the heat ate through my clothes.

The embers scorched the skin of my back, my arms, the side of my neck. I rolled frantically across the stone apron, sobbing in searing agony.

Damian took an instinctive step toward the fire, his face suddenly pale, but Bianca threw her arms around his waist, wailing into his chest.

A maid rushed forward with a wool blanket, but Damian’s voice cracked through the room like a whip. "Leave her!" he shouted, though his fists were trembling at his sides. "She has legs.

She chose not to move. If she wants to put on a show, let her lie there and think about what she’s done!" … The next evening, the birthday gala commenced with deafening grandeur.

I stood hidden behind the velvet drapery of the service entrance, wrapped from neck to wrist in thick medical bandages.

When Damian passed by the corridor and caught sight of me, a flicker of raw pity crossed his eyes, only to be swallowed whole by his usual sneer. "Look at you," he murmured, his voice laced with disdain. "Even burned like that, you still crawl out to watch me.

You really are pathetic, Iris. Down in the dirt for me." He had no idea that beneath the bandages, my flesh had turned necrotic.

The fever was burning at 104 degrees; the ruptured tumor was spilling poison into my peritoneum. I was keeping myself upright by pure force of will.

Inside the ballroom, hundreds of highsociety guests raised crystal flutes. Bianca stood beneath the chandelier in a custom couture gown, diamonds dripping from her ears.

As the photographers leaned in, she tilted her head slightly, deliberately exposing several faint red marks on her collarbone.

She pressed herself against Damian’s arm, biting her lip.

When a society reporter inevitably pressed her about the bruises, Bianca lowered her eyes. "It’s nothing," she murmured into the microphone, sounding heartbreakingly small. "It’s my fault.

I upset Mrs. Craig earlier. I tried to apologize in the corridor, but she... she became emotional. Maybe we should just end the party.

I don't want to make her unhappy." The room erupted into shocked murmurs. Every gaze turned toward the corners of the hall, dripping with disgust for the unseen, tyrannical wife.

I said nothing. I kept my eyes fixed on the antique grandfather clock in the foyer. Three hours left. Just three hours until midnight.

My silence, to Damian, looked like cold defiance.

The veins in his temples pulsed with fury. "Security," he commanded, his voice carrying across the silent hall. "Lock her in the cellar.

Let her sit in the dark until she learns how to behave." "No!" Panic broke through my numb haze. "Damian, no!" Guards grabbed my arms, dragging me away from the light.

The heavy iron door of the cellar slammed shut. There were no windows. Only absolute, suffocating blackness.

The internal pain hit me all at once—the burns, the infection, the tumors gnawing through my internal organs. I collapsed onto the damp stone floor, vomiting dark, congealed blood.

Suddenly, a monitor on the far wall flickered to life. Damian’s internal security feed was broadcasting the gala above.

The camera zoomed in on Bianca laughing beside Damian under the spotlights. The host leaned in, chuckling. "Miss Bianca, your skin looks utterly incandescent tonight.

The press is dying to know your secret." Bianca leaned into Damian’s shoulder, smiling with practiced innocence. "It’s Damian’s special gift to me.

A bespoke cellular serum formulated from the embryonic stem cells of nine fetal extractions. Extremely rare. Extremely precious.

I couldn't be more grateful." In the pitchblack cellar, the world ceased to spin. The words echoed in my skull like shattering glass. Nine extractions.

Not just dark prayers at a foreign altar.

My babies—the nine children they cut from my body over ten years—had been distilled into cosmetic vials to preserve the porcelain complexion of his mistress.

A sound tore from my throat that was hardly human. I fell forward onto my face, choking on blood and bile, my fingernails scraping against the stone. The debt was paid.

The debt was repaid a thousand times over in blood, bone, and soul. When the clock on the monitor struck midnight, the cellar latch groaned.

The door swung wide, revealing two men in dark suits sent by Old Mr. Craig. "Miss Delaney," the lead driver said quietly, averting his eyes from my bloodied state. "Your time is up.

The Chairman ordered us to escort you to the airstrip." I let them lift me. I did not look back at the grand house.

Through the blinding rainstorm, the black sedan sped away from the Craig estate, carrying my dying body into the night. Back in the ballroom, the music was reaching its crescendo.

Damian stood beside Bianca, but his gaze kept drifting toward the service door.

An inexplicable restlessness was gnawing at his ribs. "She spent ten years at my feet," he reasoned silently to himself. "She sacrificed ten pregnancies.

Perhaps... perhaps it's time to keep my word. To give her hope." He turned to his chief of staff. "Wrap up the press.

I’m heading to the penthouse suite." As he strode down the private elevator corridor, he spoke into his phone. "Bring Iris up from the cellar to the topfloor suite.

Tell her I keep my promises. Tonight, I will give her another child. And that child will inherit the entire Craig trust." He was certain of it. She had loved him for a decade.

She would be waiting in that room, weeping with gratitude. He sat on the velvet sofa of the penthouse for thirty minutes. The door never opened. Damian’s face darkened.

He reached for his phone to reprimand the staff, but his security chief burst through the double doors, gasping for breath, his face pale as chalk. "Sir... Miss Delaney is gone."