The contraction hit me in the back of a locked bedroom, and nobody came. I screamed. I pounded the door until my fists bled. I was eight months pregnant with Alexander Blackwell's baby, and I was locked in the servants' quarters of his Manhattan estate like a dog. His fiancée, Vivienne, had the only key. Let me go back twelve hours so you understand how I ended up here. My name is Maren Cole. I'm twenty-four. I was a nursing student with $200,000 in debt from my mother's cancer treatments when I signed a surrogacy contract with Blackwell Fertility Partners. The deal was clean: carry the embryo, deliver a healthy baby, receive $150,000. No contact with the biological father. No complications. They lied. The biological father was Alexander Blackwell himself — thirty-two, billionaire, CEO of Blackwell Industries, and the coldest man I have ever met. He looked at me the way you look at a piece of medical equipment. Functional. Temporary. Disposable. "You will live in the east wing," he told me on my first day at the estate, not even looking up from his phone. "You will follow the nutritional plan. You will not enter the main house without permission. And you will not speak to me unless spoken to." I should have walked out. But my mother was dying, and the hospital bills were drowning us. So I swallowed my pride and said, "Yes, Mr. Blackwell." For three months, it was bearable. The east wing was comfortable. The doctors were professional. I followed every rule. I grew his baby inside my body and asked for nothing. Then Vivienne Laurent moved in. She was his fiancée — a French socialite with porcelain skin, razor-sharp cheekbones, and eyes like a snake. She hated me on sight. Not because I'd done anything wrong. But because I was carrying the one thing she couldn't give him. She was infertile. That's why they'd hired a surrogate. And every time she looked at my growing belly, I saw murder in her eyes. It started small. My meals would arrive cold, or not at all. My prenatal vitamins disappeared from my bathroom. The thermostat in my room was turned down to fifty degrees in the middle of winter. I reported it to the house manager. He smiled politely and did nothing. I tried to tell Alexander. He didn't even let me finish. "Vivienne is the lady of this house," he said, his voice like a blade. "If you have a problem with her, the problem is you. Don't waste my time again." So I stopped complaining. I wrapped myself in extra blankets. I bought my own vitamins with the little money I had. I ate whatever scraps I could find in the kitchen at 2 a.m. I told myself: Just survive until the baby comes. Take the money. Save your mother. Get out. But Vivienne wasn't done. Last night, at a dinner party with thirty of Alexander's business associates, she made her move. She stood up, flicked her champagne glass toward me, and screamed. "She tried to POISON me! I saw her put something in my drink!" Every head turned. Alexander's face went white, then red. He didn't ask me what happened. He didn't check the glass. He didn't even look at me. He grabbed my arm so hard I heard something pop in my shoulder, dragged me out of the dining room in front of everyone, and threw me into the servants' quarters. "You stay here until I decide what to do with you," he snarled. The door locked from the outside. That was twelve hours ago. Now I'm on the floor, contractions ripping through me, eight months pregnant, alone, and I can hear Vivienne laughing on the other side of the wall. And the worst part? The baby I'm about to deliver early, in this cold room, on this concrete floor — she isn't just a surrogacy contract. She's mine. Alexander doesn't know. Nobody knows. The clinic made an error. They implanted MY egg. This is my biological daughter. And her father just locked me in a room to die.
