“To save my dying grandmother, my stepfamily forced me to marry the Blackburn heir, a man rumored to be a crippled, twisted monster. Desperate to escape the pre-marital medical exam, I climbed out a bathroom window and stumbled into an adjacent hotel suite. I begged the powerful stranger inside to help me, unbuttoning his shirt and snapping fake photos to trick my pursuing guards into thinking we were having an affair. But the stranger didn't just play along. He turned my lie against me, taking my innocence as the brutal price for his "services." Humiliated and broken, I left a single fifty-dollar bill on his nightstand as a final insult before fleeing. But my brief freedom was crushed when my stepsister caught me and dragged me straight to the Blackburn estate for the wedding. The ceremony happened without a groom. My crippled husband was supposedly confined to his sickbed in the East Wing. I thought I was finally safe, hiding in my solitary gilded cage, praying the monster I married would just rot away in his room. But that night, the shadows in my heavily guarded bedroom shifted. The stranger from the hotel stood over my bed, his eyes burning with a cold, possessive fury over that fifty-dollar bill. "You think your invalid husband is going to protect you?" As he pinned me down and my vision went black from the struggle, a terrifying realization hit me. I hadn't escaped the monster at all. I had just paid the real devil fifty dollars to own me.”