The Forgotten Genius: Rising From Ruin

I woke up in a sterile hospital room with a throbbing head and a memory as blank as the white walls. Before I could even ask who I was, my fiancé, Beckham, stormed in with my sister, Isamar, and ended our engagement with a look of pure disgust.

"Stop the act, Chanel," he sneered, accusing me of crashing my car just to hound him for money. "The accident won't save you this time. You're a pathetic gold digger, and you just lost your meal ticket."

The nightmare only deepened from there. My own mother disowned me over the phone, freezing my bank accounts and calling me a disgrace for "faking a suicide" just to get Beckham's attention. When I returned to the family estate to reclaim my legal documents, my mother slapped me across the face, and my brother, Liam, tried to beat me, treating me like a common thief in my own home.

Left with nothing but a black business card and a debt I couldn't pay, I fled into a rainy night on a stolen ATV. My adrenaline was crashing, and my hands shook on the handlebars as I rounded a sharp, wet curve. I lost control, skidding across the asphalt and smashing head-first into a luxury Maybach.

The man who stepped out of the car was none other than Duke Montgomery-the most feared, powerful man in the city, a "disfigured recluse" the tabloids whispered about in hushed tones.

I didn't understand why my own blood treated me like trash or why my sister was smirking while I bled in the mud. I was a stranger to my own past, discarded by everyone I was supposed to love, and now I owed a fifty-thousand-dollar repair bill to a man who looked like he could crush me with a single word.

But as I looked into Duke's cold, aristocratic eyes, something inside me snapped. I didn't beg for mercy. I stood my ground and offered a high-stakes negotiation.

"I will work it off," I told him, stepping into his car and choosing to walk straight into the lion's den to take back the life they stole from me.