"Mommy, what does chocolate cake taste like?" The little boy's voice crackled out of the phone, small and hopeful, the way it always was. "Grandma Constance showed me a picture. Daddy bought Theo a big chocolate cake, and Daddy was laughing the whole time. Can Daddy eat cake with me too? Just one time? For my birthday?" Then a woman's voice, soft and bright and full of lies. "Daddy's very busy, baby. But I'll talk to him. I promise." "Pinky promise? If you break it, you turn into a puppy." "Pinky promise, Noel." Ivy Hart pressed play again. And again. Snow fell from a black sky over Raven Point. Far below the cliff, the waters of Puget Sound smashed against the rocks, and the wind tore through her thin hospital gown as if it wanted to rip what was left of her apart. Behind her, the whole of Seattle was lighting up with Christmas Eve fireworks. Tonight was Noel's sixth birthday. There was no chocolate cake. There was no Daddy laughing. There was only a small black box in Ivy's arms, and her son was inside it. He never got a single birthday with his father. Not one. Not even at the end. Blood dripped onto the lid of the urn. One drop. Then another. Then too many to count. The cuts on her wrists were deep. She had made sure of that. She had maybe ten minutes before her body gave out. That was all right. Ten minutes was enough. "Wait for me, Noel," she whispered. "Mommy's coming." Headlights tore across the snow. A black Maybach rolled to a stop fifty feet away. The rear window slid down, and in the soft glow of the interior light, Ivy saw him. Dominic Pierce. The most powerful man in Seattle. The man who had owned her for six years. The father of her son. Beside him, wrapped in a cashmere coat over her own hospital gown, sat Ivy's stepsister, Celeste Shaw. Celeste's eyes were red. They were always red when Dominic was watching. "Dom," Celeste whimpered, "she's not stable. What if she does something to Theo? What if—" She broke off into a delicate, perfectly timed cough. Theo. Celeste's son. The Pierce heir that all of Seattle knew about, born one week after Noel, photographed at charity galas on his father's knee. While Noel grew up hidden in a back bedroom like a dirty secret, Theo got the birthday parties, the chocolate cake, the father who laughed. "She won't," Dominic said. He didn't even look at Celeste when he said it. He was looking at Ivy. His assistant, Miles, opened the rear door, and Dominic helped Celeste out of the car as if she were made of glass. They walked through the snow together. His arm around her waist. Her head on his shoulder. The perfect family. "Stop right there!" Ivy screamed. They stopped. Ivy looked at Celeste. "Your son is wearing my son's eyes." Celeste flinched behind Dominic's shoulder. "Ivy, please, I know you're grieving, but Theo needed that transplant, the doctors said—" "I authorized it," Dominic cut in, cold and flat. "Noel's corneas went to Theo on my order. Celeste had nothing to do with it." Ivy had known. Of course she had known. But hearing him say it out loud, in that bored, steady voice, as if he were signing off on a merger, felt like a knife twisting under her ribs. "He was six years old, Dominic! He was SIX!" "The police ruled it an accidental drowning," he said. "That's the truth, Ivy. You have to accept it." "Accidental?" She laughed. The wind whipped her hair back, and his eyes dropped to the left side of her face. To the scar. Five inches long, jagged, ugly. He'd put it there himself three years ago, with a letter opener, because she had tried to run. "Your mother killed my father," he said. The old words. The old poison. "You owed my family a life. Now your son is gone. Consider the debt paid. Come away from the edge. I'll give you money. You can leave Seattle and start over." A life for a life. That was all Noel had ever been to him. A payment. "Did you watch the file I sent you?" Ivy asked. Something flickered across his face. "What file?" "The one with sixty-three minutes of video. Your golden boy, Theo, making my son crawl on the floor like a dog while the staff laughed. Theo sitting on his back. The nanny slapping him when Theo fell and cried." Her voice cracked into pieces. "Noel kept saying sorry. He kept saying he'd be good. He was the one getting hurt, and he kept saying sorry." Celeste went white. Dominic turned his head, very slowly, and looked at her. For one second, just one, Ivy thought he might actually see it. See Celeste for what she was. "Don't listen to her, Dom!" Celeste grabbed his sleeve. "She's crazy, she'll say anything—" Ivy raised her right hand. Clutched in her bloody fingers was a small black remote with a single red button. "Theo's at Children's Hospital tonight, isn't he?" Her voice was eerily calm. "Room 412. Recovering from his surgery. There's a bomb taped under his bed." Celeste's scream split the night. "Watch the file, Dominic," Ivy said. "Right here. Right now. Watch every minute of what they did to our son. Or I press this, and Theo goes to keep Noel company." "Ivy." For the first time in six years, Dominic's voice wasn't steady. "Put it down." "Watch it!" "She's going to do it!" Celeste shrieked toward the trees. "Shoot her! She's going to kill my baby!" There was no bomb. There had never been a bomb. The thing in Ivy's hand was the remote control for Noel's toy fire truck, and she had been holding it for three days because she couldn't make herself let go. She could never hurt a child. Not even that one. She had only wanted Dominic Pierce to feel, for one single minute, what it was like to stand there helpless while your son died. She opened her mouth to tell him so. The shot came out of the dark. It punched through her chest, and the world went white and silent. The remote slipped from her fingers and skittered across the bloody snow. Men in black tactical gear poured out of the trees. "IVY!" Dominic was running. Dominic Pierce, who never ran for anything, who never raised his voice, was running toward her, shoving Celeste away so hard she fell into the snow. Two officers caught him by the arms a foot from the edge. His hand was reaching for her. It was the first time in six years he had ever reached for her. Too late. Ivy wrapped both arms around her son and let herself fall backward into the night. Snow brushed her cheeks like tiny kisses. Somewhere far away, a child was singing, off-key and sweet. "Mommy, don't be scared. I'm right here." Noel. Her Noel, with his gap-toothed smile, holding out his hand. She smiled and took it. The ocean swallowed her whole. If I get another life, baby, she prayed, I'll protect you. I'll burn the whole world down before I let anyone hurt you again. Black. Cold. Then pounding. "Miss Hart! Miss Hart, open this door right now!" Light stabbed into her eyes. Her ears rang. She was standing in a bathroom. White marble. Gold fixtures. A woman stared back at her from the mirror, pale and wet-eyed. Her own face. No scar. Ivy looked down. In her hand was a pregnancy test. Two pink lines. Ivy Hart had died on Christmas Eve, on a cliff, six years in the future. And she had just woken up on the morning she found out she was pregnant with Noel.

Ivy didn't breathe for a full ten seconds. Then she dropped the test on the counter and shoved up the sleeves of her sweater. Her forearms were smooth. No cigarette burns. No white, puckered circles from the nights Dominic had pressed his Marlboro into her skin to see if she would scream. She grabbed the phone off the sink with shaking hands and typed in her old passcode. It worked. November 13th. Six years ago. She pinched the inside of her wrist until it hurt. It hurt. She was here. She was alive. She had come back to the exact day she found out she was pregnant with Noel. "Oh God," she whispered, and slid down the cabinet to the floor, both hands over her flat stomach. "Oh God. Baby. You're here. You're still here." She cried until she couldn't see. She cried for the little boy who used to hide at the top of the stairs whenever his father's car pulled in, just to catch a glimpse of him. Who never once dared to say the word Daddy out loud. Who asked her every Christmas if he'd been bad, because why else wouldn't Daddy and Grandma love him? She had been so weak last time. She had told herself that if she just took it quietly, if she paid for her mother's sins and kept her head down, her son would be safe. He died anyway. And they took his eyes before he was cold. Not this time. Ivy wiped her face with the heel of her hand and stood up. In the mirror, her amber eyes looked back at her, red-rimmed and dead calm. This time she would climb. She would lie, steal, smile, beg, whatever it took. Her son would not be born a dirty secret locked in a back bedroom. And every single person who had hurt him was going to pay. All of them. "Miss Hart! I'm getting the spare key!" Ivy opened the door. Doris Pratt, the head housekeeper, froze with the key halfway to the lock. Doris ran Dominic's lake house the way a warden runs a prison, and last time she had made Ivy's life hell in a thousand small ways. Cold food. Lost letters. Running to Dominic every time Ivy cried. "You scared me half to death," Doris snapped. "I thought you'd climbed out the window again." "The bathroom window has bars on it now, Doris. Remember? Dominic had them put in after the last time." Doris narrowed her eyes. "Don't get smart with me. Because of your little escape attempt, Tara got fired. I'm not losing my job over you." Ivy walked past her. "Murderer's daughter," Doris spat at her back. "Don't you dare act like the lady of the house. Mr. Pierce keeps you here as a punishment, not a girlfriend." Murderer's daughter. Ivy had been hearing those words since she was twelve years old. Everyone in Seattle knew the story. Twenty years ago, Harold Pierce, Dominic's father, drove off the coast road above Puget Sound and died. The woman in the car with him was Evelyn Hart, Ivy's mother. Evelyn's body was never found. The police said she ran. The Pierce family said she killed him. What Seattle didn't know was that Evelyn had also been Richard Shaw's mistress, and that Ivy was the baby she left behind. The Shaws had kept that part buried for twenty years. Inside the Pierce and Shaw households, though, everyone knew exactly whose daughter she was. Grandma June raised her on a farm in Montana until she was twelve. Then her father moved her into the attic of the Shaw mansion, where she lived like a ghost while her stepsister Celeste lived like a princess. And three months ago, when the Shaw Group needed a favor from Pierce Holdings, Richard had put something in Ivy's drink at a party and delivered her, unconscious, to Dominic's penthouse. A gift. A peace offering. A payment on an old debt. Dominic had kept her. Not as a lover. As a prisoner. Every day she spent at this lake house was another installment on the life her mother owed his family. Ivy let Doris talk. Doris was on her list. She just wasn't at the top. Because Ivy remembered exactly what happened next last time. Last time, she had been twenty years old and terrified. She hadn't wanted to give that monster a child. So she threw herself down the main staircase, hoping to lose the baby. She woke up with nine stitches in her forehead and a concussion. The baby was fine. Noel had always been tougher than both of them. But Dominic found out what she'd done. And to punish her, he made one phone call and had her grandmother's cancer treatment stopped. Grandma June went into the ICU that week. She died the day Noel was born. Alone. Ivy stopped at the top of the staircase and looked down at the marble steps. This time she wasn't going to fall by accident. And she wasn't going to fall alone. Ten minutes earlier, while she was still crying on the bathroom floor, she had sent a text. A photo of the pregnancy test and four words. To Celeste. I'm pregnant. It's his. Tires crunched in the gravel driveway. Right on schedule. The front door banged open, and the staff downstairs chirped, "Good morning, Miss Shaw." Celeste didn't answer them. Her heels cracked up the marble stairs like gunshots. Ivy's stepsister was beautiful. Blond, delicate, the kind of face photographers fell in love with. The Shaw family's golden girl. The famous young painter. Dominic Pierce's fiancée. Right now that face was twisted into something ugly. "You little slut," Celeste hissed when she reached the landing. Ivy tilted her head and smiled. "You don't look so good, sis." Doris, hovering at the bottom of the stairs, nearly rolled her eyes out of her skull. Ivy could practically hear what she was thinking. Sis? A bastard like Ivy had no right to call Celeste anything. Celeste whirled on her. "Did I ask you to stand there? Get out!" Doris scurried off. "Why yell at the help?" Ivy said. "She's not the one carrying Dominic's baby." Celeste swung her hand at Ivy's face. Ivy caught her wrist in midair. Celeste gasped. She tried to yank free and couldn't. Six years of scrubbing floors and carrying a child on her hip had made Ivy strong. Six years of Celeste had made her patient. "You're just like your whore mother," Celeste spat. "A murderer's daughter crawling into another woman's bed." "Another woman's bed?" Ivy leaned in until her lips nearly touched Celeste's ear, and dropped her voice to a whisper meant only for her. "He hasn't married you, Celeste. Legally, he isn't yours. So listen carefully. Starting today, I'm going to take it all. The Pierce name. Your place in the Shaw family. Your career. Everything you have, everything you think you are, I'm going to peel it off you piece by piece." Celeste stared at her. And for the first time in her life, Celeste Shaw looked afraid of Ivy Hart. Then fear turned to rage. "You'll never—" Both of Celeste's hands slammed into Ivy's chest. Ivy had her arms wrapped around her stomach before she hit the first step. The world flipped. Marble cracked against her shoulder, her hip, her head. Someone was screaming. Maybe her. The last thing she saw was Celeste at the top of the staircase, hands still stretched out in front of her, and every member of the household staff standing at the bottom. Watching. Witnessing. Good, Ivy thought, and everything went dark. When she opened her eyes again, every inch of her body hurt. She kept them closed. She knew that smell. Antiseptic and money. Pierce Memorial, the private hospital Dominic's family owned. Noel had been born on the fourth floor. A warm, familiar voice was speaking near the window. Dr. Evan Cole, chief of surgery, Dominic's best friend since boarding school and the only man alive Dominic actually trusted. "Stitches are fine. Mild concussion. But there's a complication." Paper rustled. "Here. Her blood work." "Just say it." Dominic's voice. Low. Bored. Lethal. It went through Ivy like ice water. Her fingers curled into the sheets. Evan sighed. "She's pregnant, Dom. About eight weeks." The silence that followed was so heavy she could hear the IV pump clicking. Then Dominic laughed softly. It was not a nice sound. "Then she keeps it," he said. "A woman with a child is so much easier to control."

Under the blanket, Ivy spread her hand over her stomach. Same as last time. The exact same words. He doesn't love this baby, she reminded herself. He never did. He made me have Noel the way you'd put a collar on a dog. "Dom, come on," Evan said. "That's your kid." "It's leverage," Dominic said. "Nothing more." Evan's pager buzzed. He muttered something about an OR, and the door clicked shut behind him. Then it was just the two of them. Footsteps crossed the room, slow and unhurried. Ivy fluttered her lashes, frowned as if she were surfacing from a dream, and opened her eyes. Dominic Pierce stood over her bed. He was thirty, and he looked like something carved for a cathedral and then left out in the rain too long. Black hair. Black suit. Black eyes that never warmed for anyone. He had been running Pierce Holdings since he was twenty-four, and the business pages called him the Reaper because of what he did to companies that crossed him. The last time Ivy saw him, he had been screaming her name in the snow. Now his hand closed around her jaw. He squeezed until tears burned her eyes. "You knew," he said. It was not a question. Under the blanket, her nails cut half-moons into her palms. Six years of fear came rushing up her throat. Her body remembered him even if she had sworn her heart wouldn't. The concrete basement under the lake house, where he had locked her for four days with no heat and no light after she tried to run. The leather belt across her back the first time she said no to him. The glowing tip of his cigarette pressed into her arm while he watched her face, waiting for her to scream. I can't do this, a small voice inside her whimpered. I can't fool him. Nobody fools him. Then she thought of a little boy crawling across a marble floor. I can do anything. "I don't..." She let her voice shake. "I didn't know." His hand slid from her jaw down to her throat. It wasn't a choke. Not yet. It was a reminder. His thumb pressed slowly against her pulse. "You set Celeste up to push you," he said quietly. "Did you think a little tumble down the stairs would get rid of my child? Did you think I'm stupid enough to buy it?" Ivy let her eyes fill. She let her lips tremble. And then she did the thing she had rehearsed a hundred times in her head while she lay there pretending to sleep. She reached up and laid her palm against his cheek. "Nico," she whispered. "Why are you being like this?" He went completely still. Nico. Nobody called him that. Nobody had called him that since the night his father died. Ivy only knew because, four years into her last life, he had come home drunk on the anniversary, sat on the floor of her dark room with a bottle of whiskey, and said, "He was the only one who ever called me Nico. Nobody else gets to." She had never dared to use it. Now she watched it hit him like a bullet. He ripped her hand off his face. "What did you call me?" "Nico." She blinked up at him through tears, hurt and confused. "You told me to call you that. You said only the person you love gets to—" "Shut up." "—and you said once we had a baby, we'd get married, and your mother couldn't stop us." She pushed herself up onto her elbows. "So when's the wedding?" For the first time since she had known him, Dominic Pierce looked like a man who didn't know what was happening. Then his eyes went black. His hand closed around her throat for real. "You must have a death wish," he said through his teeth. "Marry you? Your mother killed my father. You're here to pay off a debt. And you dare talk to me about weddings?" Ivy clawed at his wrist. Spots danced in front of her eyes. "Nico... please... I can't breathe... I can't talk..." He let go. She curled over, coughing, and when she looked up at him again, she let all of it show. Hurt. Betrayal. A girl whose lover had changed overnight. "Did you change your mind?" she rasped. "Is there someone else?" "Is there—" He actually laughed. "Ivy, cut the act." "What act?" She was shouting now, tears streaming. "We agreed! When I got pregnant, you'd marry me! Now I'm carrying your baby and you want him to be a bastard? Like me? You want our son to grow up the way I did?" His jaw flexed. "You will marry me, Dominic," she said, every word slow and clear. "That's my line. I won't cross it." "Your line." He leaned down until his face was an inch from hers. "Let me be clear. I'm keeping this child so I can make you suffer. If you get difficult, I'll get rid of it tomorrow." She didn't say anything. She just looked at him while the tears fell, her bottom lip shaking, her jaw locked so hard it hurt. Refusing to sob out loud. Something passed over his face. Ivy had seen it once or twice before, on rare nights. It looked almost like confusion. For three months he had thrown everything at her. The cellar. The cold. The hunger. And she had never cried for him once. Never begged. Now she was crying. For a baby. He straightened and looked down at her stomach, and slowly, a cold, satisfied smile spread across his mouth. "Well," he said. "Look at that. Turns out this kid is good for something after all." "What does that mean?" "You'll find out." He adjusted his cuffs. "I'm starting to look forward to meeting him, Ivy." The door slammed. Ivy lay back on the pillows and let her eyes fall shut. Her back was soaked with sweat. Her throat throbbed. When she opened her eyes again, there were no more tears in them. Half an hour later, Evan brought in a psychiatrist, Dr. Patel, who asked a lot of gentle questions. What year was it? Who was the President? Did she remember the fall? Did she remember why she was living at Mr. Pierce's lake house? "Because we're in love," Ivy told her, and smiled. "He's going to marry me. Why does everyone keep looking at me like that?" She heard the rest through the wall of the VIP lounge next door. Old hospitals had thin walls, and Ivy had spent a lot of nights in this one. "Post-traumatic stress," Dr. Patel was saying. "Possibly a dissociative episode triggered by the head injury. Her memory has reorganized itself around a safer story. In her mind, she and Mr. Pierce are a couple. It's rare, but it happens after prolonged trauma." "She's faking it," Dominic said. "Dom." Evan's voice. "Look at what you've put her through. The cellar? The burns? She's twenty years old. People break." Silence. "You sound very concerned about her," Dominic said softly. "I'm concerned about my medical license! Look, she's pregnant. Be gentle with a pregnant woman. That's all I'm saying." A door slammed. Then Ivy heard Dominic in the hallway, low and clipped, on the phone. "Miles. Her grandmother. I want you to—" The elevator chimed and swallowed the rest. Ivy's blood turned to ice. Grandma.