Everything happened for a Reason

I sold my soul for my fiancé, Dante Guy. I liquidated my company and handed him my entire inheritance to save his construction empire from collapse.

He thanked me by taking a wrecking ball to my parents' legacy-a children' s hospital wing-to build luxury condos for his mistress, Karly. Just as I reeled from the betrayal, I discovered I was pregnant.

But from my hospital bed, I overheard the words that shattered what was left of my world.

"Her child… it' s a mistake. A complication," Dante whispered to Karly on the phone. "You and our son are the future."

He called me a parasite living off his generosity, twisting every sacrifice I' d made into a weakness. The man whose new empire was built on my family' s ashes had not only betrayed me; he had erased me.

That night, Karly had me strapped to a chair and tortured with an electroshock device, trying to harm our unborn child. When Dante found me broken on the floor, he chose to comfort her, telling me I needed to "make sacrifices for the family."

As he carried me back to our gilded cage, my mind went eerily calm. He thought I was nothing without him. He was about to find out just how wrong he was.

Chapter 1

Brooklyn Villarreal POV:

I sold my soul for my fiancé, Dante Guy, and he thanked me by demolishing my parents' legacy.

"Are you sure about this, Brooklyn?" Maya' s voice was a soft crackle through the phone' s speaker, a thin thread of sanity in the sterile quiet of the lawyer' s office. "Liquidating everything? The company you built from the ground up?"

I stared at the document on the mahogany table. The paper was crisp, the ink a stark, unforgiving black. It represented the end of everything I was, and the beginning of whatever I was becoming for him.

"Dante needs it, Maya," I said, my voice flatter than I intended. "Guy Construction is on the verge of collapse. This is the only way."

"Dante needed you when your parents were still alive, and they practically handed him their architectural firm on a silver platter to merge with his failing company. You gave him your inheritance. Now you' re giving him your future? When does it stop?"

The pen in my hand felt heavy, a small, dense weight pulling me toward a decision I knew, deep down, was a mistake. I pressed the nib to the signature line.

"This is different," I whispered, more to myself than to her. "This is for us. For our marriage."

"Is it?" she pressed, her voice sharp with a skepticism I refused to acknowledge. "Or is it just for him? Again?"