Chapter 1 - The Staircase
My mother-in-law shoved me down a flight of stairs over the deed to my $5 million lake house, and my husband stepped over my bleeding body to pick it up off the floor: "You should've just given it to her." While I lay in a hospital bed in a full leg cast, he filed for divorce and demanded the entire estate as settlement.
I stood at the top of the grand staircase, gripping the folder that held the deed to my grandfather's five-million-dollar waterfront estate so tightly my knuckles had gone white.
"Hand it over, you selfish brat!" Marguerite, my mother-in-law, hissed, her eyes bright with naked greed. "You think you deserve this house more than my son does?"
At the bottom of the stairs, my husband, Desmond, stood swirling a glass of scotch, watching the whole thing unfold. He said absolutely nothing to defend me.
Then Marguerite lunged, and shoved me hard.
I went backward down fourteen hardwood steps. Pain tore through my leg and shoulder in a blinding white flash as I crashed onto the cold marble floor below. Gasping, I reached a trembling hand toward the man I loved.
"Desmond... please..."
He stepped calmly over my broken body instead of helping me up. He bent down, picked the fallen deed up off the floor, and looked down at me with something cold and dead behind his eyes.
"You should have just given it to her, Wren," he muttered, and turned his back on me.
Four hours later, I woke up in a sterile hospital room, my leg wrapped in a heavy cast. A process server walked in and handed me a thick envelope.
Divorce papers. Desmond wanted the entire estate as part of the settlement.
I stared at the pages for a long time. Then I picked up my phone and dialed my grandfather's estate attorney.
"Phoebe," I said, my voice eerily even. "Draft the transfer agreement."
The line went completely silent. "Wren... what are you saying right now?"
"I'm giving Desmond the lake house. Transfer the title into his name immediately."
"Have you lost your mind?" Phoebe snapped. "That estate is worth five million dollars. He'll take everything you have left!"
I smiled — cold, deliberate, a smile with nowhere to land but the empty hospital room. "Let him celebrate his victory," I whispered into the phone. "While he still can."
Two weeks later, Desmond and Marguerite threw a lavish housewarming party. They bragged proudly to their wealthy friends about how they'd legally taken a multimillion-dollar mansion off a helpless, broken wife. They were absolutely certain they'd won.
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They had no idea that before my billionaire grandfather died, he'd buried something inside that property that had nothing to do with the house itself. When Desmond proudly signed his name to accept the estate, he wasn't claiming a fortune.
He was walking straight into a trap.
