My fiancé paid a stranger to destroy my face so he could marry another woman, but while pretending to be unconscious, I overheard a secret far more devastating than the attack.

Two years later, on a quiet rainy evening in late autumn, I sat in my foundation office reviewing our annual grant applications.

My phone chimed with a encrypted email notification from Marcus’s private intelligence contact in Washington D.C.

Attached to the email was a series of recently unredacted federal wiretap transcripts from an ongoing international fraud investigation.

I opened the file, scrolling down through the pages until a familiar name caught my eye.

The wiretaps were recorded three weeks before my acid attack in Soho.

They detailed a series of secret phone calls between Rachel Thorne’s father and an anonymous high-ranking executive inside my late father’s former investment firm.

“Logan is just the distraction,” the executive's recorded voice read on the transcript.

“Once he gets Maya out of the way, we execute the secondary takeover of the European biotech patents.”

“Does Logan know about the patents?” Arthur Thorne had asked.

“No. Logan thinks he’s stealing fifty million. He has no idea the patents are worth two billion.”

My breath caught in my throat as my eyes scanned the final line of the transcript.

The executive’s code name in the federal indictment was listed as 'Pharos'—and his location was currently traced to an office three blocks from my building.

Logan hadn't been the mastermind of the betrayal; he had been a useful idiot manipulated by someone far higher up the corporate ladder.

I closed the file, picked up my phone, and dialed Marcus's number as the rain lashed against my office window.

"Marcus," I said, my voice dropping into that cold, lethal register that had brought Logan Vance to his knees.