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"That bitch Valerie called the cops and slit her wrist—she's a real piece of work. You're positive the Todd family won't come after me if I take her to bed? Even if things get rough?"
A man's voice slid through the line, dripping with filth.
A woman on the other end let out a cold, delighted laugh. "Take it easy. So what if she ends up dead? Nobody cares. The Todds don't give a damn about her."
Heat flared through Valerie's wrist as consciousness clawed its way back. That woman's poisonous voice was the first thing she heard—followed by a rush of memories slamming into her like a broken dam. Three lost years snapped back into place.
She had once ruled the underworld as the most terrifying assassin alive, the ruthless commander of an elite mercenary corps. To the world, she had been known as Phantom.
Three years earlier, an accident had wiped her memories clean, and she'd been unconscious in a hospital bed. The hospital staff and police had run her DNA and found she was the Todd family's long-lost daughter.
Fooled into believing she was the useless trash they all despised, Valerie had swallowed three years of cruelty, bowing beneath Paulina Todd, whom the Todd couple had adopted.
However, that ended tonight.
Paulina had lured her to a hotel suite, slipped an aphrodisiac into her drink, and offered her to some aging businessman in exchange for a multimillion-dollar deal.
Shame and cruelty had pushed Valerie to the edge, and the moment the knife sliced across her wrist, the shock of her own blood had snapped her real self awake.
Her lashes dipped as she took in her state—clothes ripped apart, wrists and ankles clamped in cold metal, a thin line of blood sliding from the gash along her wrist.
Most people in this position would've curled up and waited for death to claim them. But Valerie wasn't one of them.
She had once commanded the deadliest mercenary force on the planet—surviving firefights that turned whole valleys crimson, trekking across barren wastelands that swallowed weaker souls, and walking out of missions the world labeled untouchable.
For a woman like Valerie, even the worst nightmare was just one more wall to break through.
With a violent flick of her aching wrist, the cuffs snapped apart.
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