Chapter 1
Two days after I discovered Victor was running a massive criminal financial empire behind my back, I gave birth to our daughter Lily by emergency C-section, and instead of driving me home he turned the SUV straight up a frozen mountain pass in the middle of a historic Category 4 blizzard, ignoring every road sign and my terrified begging to stop.
On the most isolated stretch of road, inches from a thousand-foot drop, he slammed on the brakes, unbuckled my seatbelt, and physically threw me out into the waist-deep snow before dropping Lily’s carrier beside me like trash, locking the doors and smiling through the glass as he yelled that everyone would believe I’d wandered off into the storm suffering from postpartum psychosis.
I curled my freezing body around my hours-old baby, sharing every last bit of warmth I had left as my fingers went numb and the hypothermia set in, and with what I thought were my last breaths I didn’t curse him—I prayed for the strength of a lioness to keep my child alive, because I knew deep down that if I survived this night, I would spend every day after that making sure Victor understood exactly how wrong he was to assume he got to write the end of our story.
