“I was the architect of my husband's legitimate empire, the queen to his throne as the Don of a powerful crime family. Our home was our sanctuary, our bed the one sacred place he always returned to. But in the middle of the night, I woke to a woman's moan coming from a guest room that was supposed to be empty. The space beside me was cold; my husband, Brendan, was gone. The woman's voice belonged to Kiya, my protégée-a girl I'd mentored like a sister. Through the door, I heard him call me "a piece of furniture that sleeps soundly." I heard him tell her she possessed something I didn't. Then, a video confirmed the ultimate betrayal: a four-year affair, a pregnancy, and his casual dismissal of me as a business arrangement. He called me a title, but he called another woman's child his heir. He had broken the one rule that held our world together, turning my life's work into ash. He thought I was just a fixture in his grand design, a brilliant mind he could control and discard. He was wrong. There was only one way to escape this agony. I would have every memory of him surgically cut from my mind, erase him from my soul like a cancer, and disappear so completely that not even a ghost of me remained.”