Chapter 1

Three days after the miscarriage, Adrian Moretti finally came back to our villa by the Hudson.

I sat on the gray sofa in the living room with a hospital cashmere blanket over my shoulders. My lower abdomen felt hollow, as if someone had carved a piece out of me, and even breathing came with a dull ache.

Adrian stepped through the door with cold rain still clinging to his black coat. When he saw me, there was no worry in his eyes. Only anger he hadn’t bothered to hide.

“Selena, are you happy now?”

I looked up at him.

This man had once taken a knife for me at the most dangerous dock in New York. On the first Christmas after my parents died, he had driven three hours to bring me back to the Moretti estate. Adrian Moretti knew how to be gentle. His tenderness just had a pecking order.

And I was no longer first.

“The Commission sent me a warning,” Adrian said, tossing his leather gloves onto the coffee table. His voice was hard. “They said I moved the family medical team without approval and delayed support for the East Side convoy. Other than you, who would run to the Commission and snitch?”

I watched him in silence.

So he knew the East Side support had been delayed. He also knew the medical team should have been with me that night.

Still, he didn’t ask why I had been in the hospital or why I hadn’t answered his messages for three days. He only cared that the Commission had called him out.

“Evelyn just lost her husband, and she’s pregnant,” he said, rubbing his brow as if he was dealing with a difficult employee instead of his wife. “She was falling apart. The baby’s heartbeat was unstable. I had to take Dr. Harrison to her. Selena, you’ve always been reasonable. Don’t make this harder for me.”

I let out a quiet laugh. Evelyn was carrying another man’s child, so every skipped heartbeat deserved Adrian’s vigil. I had lost his child, and somehow I was the problem making his life difficult.

“I’m sorry,” I said softly. “I shouldn’t have put you in that position.”

Adrian froze. He must have braced himself for shouting, crying, accusations, anything but my calm. He lowered his voice and took a pink silk scarf out of a black gift bag.

“I had someone bring this from Paris. You used to like this color.”

The scarf was soft and expensive, with a designer logo embroidered in the corner. Half an hour earlier, I had seen it in Evelyn’s story.

In the photo, the same scarf had been tossed beside a dog bed. Her caption read:

[A keeps giving me these fussy little old-money things. This pink looks like it crawled out of some dusty ladies’ salon. Not even my dog would wear it.]

And around her neck was the ruby necklace Adrian had promised me for our tenth anniversary.

The ruby had come from the Moretti family’s private vault. He had once held it in his palm and told me with complete seriousness, “Only the true mistress of the Moretti family deserves this stone.”

Now he had given my promise to her and brought me the trash she didn’t want.

“What’s wrong?” Adrian frowned. “You don’t like it?”

I took the scarf and slowly closed my fingers around it. Then I gave him a polite smile. “I like it.”

He seemed relieved. He took off his coat and headed toward the study. At the door, he suddenly remembered something and asked like it had just crossed his mind, “By the way, three days ago, you kept hitting the emergency alert. What happened?”

I lowered my eyes and pressed my fingers lightly against my stomach.

“Nothing,” I said. “I just wanted to ask if you were coming home for dinner.”

Once the study door closed, the living room went quiet again. I pulled my phone out from under the blanket and dialed Professor Clark’s encrypted number.

“Professor, are the papers ready?”

The old man’s voice was low. “The Artemis Northern Institute is willing to grant you the highest level of classified protection. But once the Black Ice Protocol starts, your current public identity will be erased. Your financial records, travel history, and medical file will be sealed under a death classification. You won’t be able to turn back.”

“I know.”

“Your marriage to Adrian, your Moretti family clearance, everything you have in New York, all of it will be cut off.”

I looked at the shut study door. The last bit of warmth in my chest went out.

“Good.I don’t want any of it.”