His missing maid was tied inside an abandoned farmhouse by the woman he planned to marry—then the billionaire kicked down the door.

Inside the decaying farmhouse, Leah’s vision had begun to fracture into swirling rings of black and violet.

Her lungs burned with a desperate, agonizing hunger for oxygen. Her fingers dug frantically into the wooden floorboards, her fingernails breaking against the grime as she fought against the relentless, cruel pull of the nylon rope around her neck.

Sloane knelt behind her, her expression calm, detached, and utterly merciless as she maintained pressure on the cord.

“Save your strength, Leah,” Sloane whispered into the cold air. “It’s much easier if you just let go.”

“Please…” Leah managed to force a single, fractured syllable past her crushed windpipe. Her mother’s face flashed briefly across her mind—and then Grant’s.

The exhausted man who forgot breakfast. The man who drank black coffee because everyone expected him to be unbreakable. The man who had sat with her in the quiet kitchen at 2:00 a.m. and admitted he didn't know how to grieve.

She had never told him she loved him. She had never even allowed herself to say the words out front. And now, she was going to die in a forgotten cage of rotting wood, branded as a thief, while the world went on without her.

A sudden, sharp sound echoed from the front of the farmhouse.

A heavy impact against the rotting oak exterior door.

Bang.

Sloane froze, her hands tightening reflexively on the rope before she caught herself. Her head snapped toward the hallway.

Leah heard it too.

Bang!

A second impact—brutal, massive, and entirely mechanical. The sound of reinforced steel hitting old, decaying timber with the force of a battering ram.

Someone was at the door.

Sloane’s eyes widened, a flicker of genuine panic cutting through her icy facade for the first time. She dropped the ends of the rope, leaping to her feet and backing toward the back window where her leather bag and car keys rested on an old crate.

“Who…?” Sloane hissed under her breath.

Before she could reach the window, the front door of the farmhouse exploded inward.

The ancient wooden frame splintered into a thousand jagged shards, showering dust and debris across the hallway.

A tall figure stepped through the ruined threshold, backlit by the gray morning light filtering through the broken doorway.

Grant Mercer didn't look like a billionaire executive. He looked like an apex predator who had just found its mate trapped in a snare. His dark coat was flying open, his sleeves rolled up, his eyes blazing with an incandescent, terrifying fury that seemed to drop the temperature in the room by twenty degrees.

He scanned the ruined interior, his chest heaving, his gaze locking onto the scene in the corner.

He saw Sloane standing by the window, trembling slightly.

And then he saw Leah, collapsed on the floor, gasping for air as she clawed desperately at the rope around her neck.