My mother's sudden death. The brand's catastrophic collapse. All the pain, all the despair — it had all been engineered by the man who slept beside me every night.
No wonder he could always pinpoint the exact solution to every crisis the brand faced. No wonder he knew my mother's patents inside and out. I had been naive enough to believe it was just his brilliance, his dedication.
It never occurred to me that the man who had shared my bed for five years, the man who had given me all my warmth and all my hope, was the very person who murdered my mother.
Five years of tenderness and care. Five years of safety and companionship. All of it was nothing but an elaborate lie he'd woven around me — a guilt-ridden act of atonement to quiet his own conscience.
How pathetic. How utterly absurd.
A tidal wave of hatred and despair surged through my chest, threatening to rip me apart from the inside.
With bloodshot eyes, I pulled out my phone and called his greatest rival — Joshua Cox. The one opponent Samuel could never beat. And as it happened, Joshua owed me a favor.