Chapter 1

To see if I had really learned anything, my billionaire parents spent twenty years pretending to be poor.

When I was kidnapped and the ransom demand came, they thought it was just another one of my dramatic stunts for attention.

"Just kill her. Pretend we never had a daughter."

While they threw an extravagant coming-of-age party for my brother, I was bleeding out in the cold, rainy night.

It wasn't until the police showed up with the DNA report that they finally panicked.

*****

The cold edge of the blade pressed against my neck, the metal's chill sinking deep into my skin and bones, sending a jolt of fear through me.

The abandoned factory reeked of damp, moldy dust and the pungent scent of rusted metal.

My hands were bound behind me with thick, coarse rope, and my wrists had been rubbed raw, stinging with a sharp, fiery pain.

But I couldn't focus on that. My eyes were fixed on the old phone resting on the broken wooden crate in front of me, the only glimmer of hope I had.

"Ready to die?" Rocco's voice broke the silence. His face was twisted with menace as he twirled a glinting knife between his fingers. "If your parents don't come through, this time next year will be your death anniversary."

Behind him stood two scrawny thugs, their eyes fixed on me with the detached, hungry gaze of people looking at livestock.

"Please, sir... Just let me try again," I begged, my voice trembling, barely above a whisper. "My family's poor. It's probably... probably just bad signal. They didn't hear me right."

Rocco sneered, his expression mocking, as if he were watching some kind of joke unfold. "Still not giving up, huh? Fine, go ahead. Put it on speaker."

With shaking hands, I dialed the number again on the broken-screen phone, a number I knew all too well.

Each dial tone felt like a hammer pounding on my chest. After what felt like an eternity, the call finally connected.

"Hello?" came Dad's voice. There was noise in the background, the soft strains of a cello and the delicate clinking of glasses.

"Dad! It's me, Emily!" I clutched the phone like a lifeline as tears began streaming down my face. "Dad, please help me. I've been kidnapped. They're holding me at the abandoned chemical plant out in the west suburbs, and they want 1.6 million, or they're going to kill me!"

There was a brief pause on the other end. Then came a cold, impatient grunt.

"Emily, are you seriously sick in the head?" My father's voice was flat and cutting, as if he were dressing down an annoying salesperson. "You're really stepping up your game now, aren't you?

"Last month, you had pneumonia and needed seven hundred bucks for treatment. Now you've graduated to a kidnapping for 1.6 million? You think money just blows in through the window?"

"That's not it, Dad! This time it's real!" I was sobbing so hard, desperately trying to convince him. "There's a knife against my throat right now. I'm not lying to you. I swear!"

"Enough!" My mother's shrill voice came through the line. She'd clearly grabbed the phone from my father. "Emily, do you have even a shred of decency?

"Your brother is celebrating his eighteenth birthday today, his coming-of-age ceremony. The whole family is having a wonderful time, and you just had to call right now to ruin the mood, didn't you?

"You know exactly how things are at home. Your father and I work our tails off every single day, digging through trash and running a street stall just to keep you in college.

"We don't have five hundred dollars to spare, and you're asking for 1.6 million? Are you trying to destroy us?"

I went completely still. The story about them scraping by as trash pickers and street vendors was one they had fed me my whole life.

But I could hear it, the unmistakable sound of a cello playing softly in the background, along with the occasional murmur of someone offering flattery.

"Mom, I'm begging you. Even if it's just a little, anything at all. They really will kill me." I was groveling now, my forehead slamming hard against the dusty concrete floor.

"Not a penny! You're getting nothing!" My mother's voice was sharp and full of contempt. "If you're so determined to die, go do it somewhere else. Don't bring that kind of bad luck to our doorstep.

"You want money? Try coming back as a rich man's daughter in your next life."

Then, from their end of the line, I heard a young boy's excited shout. It was my twin brother, Adam Grant. "Dad! Mom! Hurry up and come cut the cake! This top-grade M9 Wagyu is going to get cold! Oh, and where's my present?"

"Coming, sweetheart! Don't you worry!" My mother's tone shifted completely in an instant, turning warm and dripping with affection, the kind of doting I had never once heard from her in all twenty-two years of my life. "We'll be right there. We've got a huge surprise for you!"

In the background, the unmistakable sizzle of steak hitting a hot pan crackled through the phone.

"Guess you heard all that, didn't you?" Rocco's voice broke the silence, the earlier menace on his face shifting into something almost grotesquely amused.

"Looks like your parents are busy eating Wagyu and throwing a birthday party for their son, while you're down here groveling like a dog, begging them to save your worthless life."

I tried to speak, but my throat had seized up completely, as if it had been packed tight with cotton.

"Dad..." I pushed the word out with the very last of my strength, my lips barely moving against the receiver.

The line went dead. And in that instant, the world seemed to grind to a complete halt.

Rocco and his man stood motionless. And I was frozen in place.

So they did have the money after all. They simply didn't think I was worth spending it on, not even to keep me alive.