"Harrison, save me!" I clung to the phone, my last thread of hope trembling in my voice.
After a pause, a sweet, syrupy voice came through: "Luci, Harrison just finished with me. He's too tired to move right now." Summer's words dripped with venom. "If you have any self-awareness at all, stop bothering him and just go die!"
I'm Luci Lane. I once loved Harrison Forrester with everything I had—from age seventeen until the day I finally gave up. I followed him for years, proposed to him, even got a marriage certificate with him. But in his eyes, I was nothing more than an annoying pest he couldn't shake off.
The night we accidentally slept together, he left before dawn and never mentioned it again. I became pregnant with his son, Eden, but before I could tell him, I was kidnapped to Villa Coronela in South America. For three years, I endured hell—torture, branding, near-death experiences—while Harrison never came looking for me. Because to him, I had simply "run away from the wedding."
When I finally escaped and returned to Los Angeles, I wanted only one thing: divorce. But Harrison had other plans. His beloved Summer needed a kidney transplant, and he decided mine would do perfectly. He forced me onto an operating table, ready to carve out my organs for the woman he truly loved.
What Harrison didn't know was that the woman he'd been desperately searching for these past three years—the one whose scent he couldn't forget, the one who'd made him tremble that night—was me all along.
Now he's realized his mistake. Now he says he loves me. Now he's begging for forgiveness.
But as I told him: "You're really out of luck, because I will never love you again for the rest of my life."
Some hearts, once broken, can never be mended. Some second chances come too late.
Yet as I walked away from him that night, I didn't see the way his hands trembled, or the desperation growing in those deep blue eyes. I didn't know that Harrison Forrester—the man who controlled an empire, who never begged for anything—was about to do something that would change everything.
Because some men don't know what they have until it's gone. And some will burn the whole world down trying to get it back.
