My parents.
Alive.
Impossible.
Mine.
I touched the silver compass around my neck.
For most of my life, other people had decided what I was.
An orphan.
An heiress.
A wife.
A resource.
A problem to be removed.
But the truth was stranger and kinder than anything I could have imagined.
I was the abandoned child Beatrice tried to erase.
The daughter Daniel died protecting.
The heir who unknowingly married into the family that stole her birthright.
And the woman who bought her husband’s debt one morning and brought an empire down before dinner.
Julian’s last words to me before sentencing were spoken through thick courtroom glass.
“You took everything.”
I leaned closer.
“No,” I told him. “I only took back what you stole.”
Then I walked away.
