My mother-in-law pressed a pillow over my face while I lay helpless in a body cast, whispering that I should have died when I went over the balcony. She thought she was finishing what she'd started—but detectives were already listening, and what they uncovered afterward revealed I wasn't the first wife Ethan Morgan had nearly lost.

By three in the morning, Mason received a call from the forensic team currently searching the Morgan estate in Buckhead.

"Claire," Mason said, hanging up his phone with a stunned expression. "We just found something in the basement of your house."

"My house?" I echoed, my mind spinning.

"The search team brought in cadaver dogs to inspect the grounds," Mason explained, grabbing his jacket. "The dogs alerted behind a false brick wall in the wine cellar. Behind the wall, they found a soundproofed basement suite."

A heavy, suffocating panic gripped my chest. I had lived in that house for eighteen months. I had walked past that wine cellar every single day, completely oblivious to what lay behind the brickwork.

"What was inside?" I asked, my voice barely audible.

"A bed anchored to the floor," Mason said softly, his voice trembling slightly. "Restraints. A small bathroom. Medical monitoring equipment. And thousands of pages of journals written in dark ink."

Tears streamed silently down my face as the horrific reality locked into place.

Emily hadn't fallen from the balcony four years ago. Margaret and Ethan had staged her death using a body, bribed the coroner, and locked Emily away in a subterranean dungeon beneath the very house I was living in.

She had been living directly beneath my feet for eighteen months while I cooked dinner, hosted parties, and slept in Ethan's bed.

"Why?" I sobbed out loud. "Why would they keep her alive in a cage?!"

"Because Emily wasn't just Ethan's wife," Mason revealed, holding up a digital file sent from his forensics team. "Emily's biological father was Arthur Vance—the founder of Vance Pharmaceuticals. Before Emily married Ethan, her father placed a fifty-million-dollar trust in her name."

"A trust..." I whispered.

"A trust that could only be accessed if Emily was alive," Mason said darkly. "If she died, the money reverted to a medical charity. Margaret and Ethan needed Emily alive to collect the monthly dividend payouts from the trust, but they needed her 'dead' to the rest of the world so she couldn't leave Ethan."