Chapter 1Beyond The Basement Walls

It was the third month of my kidnapping when I finally broke out.

I didn't go to the police. I didn't go home.

I went to the hospital.

The ER doctor stared at me, his brow furrowed so deeply it looked like a knot. "Where is your family? I need a signature for the emergency surgery. Now."

I lay on the gurney, my eyes tracing the sterile, humming fluorescent lights on the ceiling.

"My parents are dead," I said, my voice barely a rasp. "I don't have anyone."

That night, Victoria arrived.

My wife—on paper, at least. The ice-queen CEO with a net worth in the billions.

She swept into the trauma ward wearing a custom Chanel suit and four-inch Jimmy Choos, her makeup flawless, not a single hair out of place. She looked as though she had just stepped off the red carpet of some charity gala.

She stood over my bed, looking down at me. Her tone carried that familiar, polished impatience. "Harry, what kind of game are you playing this time? If you were hospitalized, why didn't you have someone call my office?"

I looked at her.

I didn't panic and scramble to explain myself the second her brow twitched, the way I always used to.

I didn't scream at her. I didn't ask why she hadn't picked up a single one of the three hundred and seventy-four desperate phone calls I had made to her.

I didn't even ask her why, when the rumors of my brutal murder were circulating through the city's elite, she was busy walking arm-in-arm with her untouchable first love at a private auction in Paris, dropping millions to buy him a toy.

Instead, the corners of my mouth twitched. I offered her a polite, entirely hollow smile—an expression she had never seen on my face before.

"Ms. Crawford, you must be mistaken."

"We don't know each other well enough for you to be here."

* * *

Victoria’s expression froze.

For the first time in our three years of marriage, a crack of genuine, unfiltered shock shattered the placid surface of her dark eyes—eyes that usually saw through every corporate bluff and boardroom scheme.

"What did you just say?" Her voice remained cold, but the final syllable carried a microscopic tremor.

Are you deaf? I said, we're strangers.

I didn't repeat myself. I simply turned my head, letting my gaze drift toward the heavy ink of the night sky outside the window. For three months, I had stared at a sky exactly like that through the single, mold-choked air vent of a basement cell.

Back then, my only lifeline, my only sustaining thought, was that she would find me.

Now, that hope—along with the battered, hollowed-out remnants of my heart—was dead.

"Harry, do you have any idea who you are talking to?" Victoria was clearly insulted by my indifference. She took a step forward, the sheer, crushing weight of her presence instantly dominating the small hospital room.

It was her favorite tactic. Overpower. Intimidate. Force the surrender.

The old me would have crumbled under that look. I would have shrunk down, apologized profusely, and bent over backward to smooth out the crease between her brows.

But right now? I just found it incredibly funny.

I turned my head back to her. My eyes were as still as stagnant water.

"Ms. Victoria Crawford." I enunciated every syllable, using the most formal, distant title possible. "According to the state, we are legally married. But I don't believe our current dynamic warrants a midnight hospital visit."

My voice was terrifyingly soft. My vocal cords had been shredded by weeks of screaming and chronic dehydration. It came out as a gravelly, broken wheeze.

The sound of it drained another shade of color from Victoria’s face.

It seemed she was finally noticing that I wasn't just "hospitalized" for a routine check-up.

My face was a map of fading, ugly contusions. Beneath the thin fabric of the hospital gown, my arms were wrapped in heavy gauze, blood seeping through where the blades had cut down to the bone. I was emaciated, my cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass, my eyes sunken deep into their sockets. I looked like a walking corpse.