Chapter 1

The Night in Medellin

Karol Kensington POV

The progress bar on my screen crawled from ninety-eight to ninety-nine percent as my heart was beating so fast. 

I stared at the blue screen of my laptop, across the darkness of my Medellín apartment. 

It was past two in the morning. Outside, the city was dead, but the air inside my living room was suffocating; every instinct in me screamed that I should shut the laptop and walk away before it was too late.

But I couldn't.

My pulse beat wildly.

Ninety-nine percent.

One more percent,

I robbed my burning eyes, exhaling a breath. Every file, every encrypted patient log, and every scrap of chemical analysis from the Kensington Institute’s servers was currently filtering into an untraceable offshore cloud drive. I was stealing from my own family. Or rather, I was salvaging whatever was left of my life before they could completely erase me.

My mother had traded me to protect the Kensington business. The realization still felt like a physical blow to the ribs. To protect her corporate empire, Esperanza Kensington had handed over my employment contract to the very man I had spent my entire professional career learning to despise.

Ciro Restrepo.

Just thinking aloud his name in my head made my stomach twist with a toxic mix of anger and something else I refused to admit. I closed my eyes, but all I could see was the memory of the stadium lights glinting off his sweat-drenched skin hours before the injury. I remembered the arrogance in his bronze eyes when he looked at me from across the pitch, a man who possessed the world and knew exactly how to make it bend.

But then came the crack. The agonizing snap of his knee. The way he had writhed on the grass, stripped of his god-like invincibility in a fraction of a second. When I had broken protocol and run onto the field, ignoring the screaming medics and with the roar of eighty thousand fans, Ciro had grabbed my wrist. His fingers had dug into my skin, burning with a desperate, crushing heat. Even blinded by agony, his grip was possessive and demanding.

"Fix me,” his touch had screamed.

And now, thanks to the punitive buyout clause my mother had signed, I had to. If I didn't rehabilitate his knee perfectly, the financial penalties would bankrupt me. I was bound to him. Forced into a gilded cage on his private island until he could walk back onto that pitch.

Fine, I thought, 

My jaw clenched as the progress bar finally hit one hundred percent. The screen flashed green. 

Upload Complete. I would heal the arrogant bastard. I would push him to his limits, collect my f*e, and use these very files to expose the chemical sabotage that tore his knee apart in the first place. I wasn't just going to clear my name; I was going to burn the corruption out of my family’s legacy, even if I had to tear down my own sister to do it.

I pulled the encrypted flash drive from the port and slipped it into the hidden lining of my bag.

Then, the silence of the apartment snapped.

The security alarm mounted on my front door started ringing with an ear-splitting scream. Then the red light kicked on, painting my living room in violent flashes of crimson. Adrenaline flooded my veins like ice water.

Three in the morning.

I hid behind the kitchen island; my fingers were shaking so badly I could barely maintain my grip. I squeezed my phone, blindly dialing emergency services.

I heard it. The heavy, unmistakable crunch of glass shattering my bedroom window.

A heavy footstep hit the wood floor.

I grabbed the heavy iron skillet left on the stove, backing myself into the narrow pantry alcove, another footstep. Slow. Heavy. This wasn't some random burglar looking for valuables; they were moving straight toward my workspace. Towards me.

The wail of police sirens instantly echoed from the street below, cutting through the damp Medellín night. The flashing blue and red lights flashed through my living room windows.

The heavy footsteps stopped dead. A long, agonizing second stretched out. Then, the sound of the heavy boots sprinting back toward the broken window.

By the time the police kicked open my front door, sweeping the apartment with tactical flashlights, the intruder was completely gone. The night air poured through the shattered glass of the bedroom window. I slowly lowered the iron skillet, my whole body trembling as an officer barked into his radio that the suspect had fled down the fire escape.

I walked numbly into the living room, wrapping my arms around myself to ward off the biting cold. But my blood turned completely to lead when I looked at my work table.

My laptop screen was cracked and broken right in the middle. And resting perfectly on the broken keyboard was a single, pristine white Kensington Institute medical glove.

They didn't come to rob me. They came to silence me.