Chapter 1
My husband smashed a dinner plate over my head because I refused to give his mother my apartment.
The plate shattered against my temple.
Pain exploded through my skull.
I stumbled into the dining table, sending glasses and silverware crashing to the floor.
Derek grabbed my hair before I could recover.
“Sign it over—or get out.”
Blood ran down the side of my face, but I refused to cry.
The apartment had belonged to my grandmother.
She raised me there after my parents died.
Derek had moved in only two years earlier, after we married.
Now he acted as if it belonged to him.
His mother, Margaret, stood beside him with the deed transfer papers in her hands.
“Stop being selfish, Claire,” she said. “Family shares property.”
“You’re not getting my home.”
Derek tightened his grip.
“You heard my mother.”
I drove my fist into his stomach.
He released me with a gasp.
Before he could straighten, I slapped him across the face.
Margaret screamed and lunged toward the cabinet where I had placed the original deed.
I caught her by the shoulders and shoved her away.
She crashed into the dining table.
“You vicious little snake!” she shouted.
Derek charged at me.
I grabbed my phone and backed into the kitchen.
“Touch me again, and you’ll regret it.”
He laughed.
“You think anyone will believe you? My mother saw everything.”
Margaret immediately understood.
“She attacked us,” she said. “We were only trying to calm her.”
My hands shook as I called 911.
Derek folded his arms.
“You have no idea who you’re dealing with.”
Neither of them knew about the security camera above the kitchen doorway.
I had installed it three weeks earlier after money began disappearing from my purse.
It had recorded everything.
The plate.
The threat.
His hand in my hair.
Margaret trying to steal the deed.
Police arrived within minutes.
Derek opened the door wearing his most innocent expression.
“My wife had some kind of breakdown,” he told them. “She attacked my mother.”
Margaret pointed at a bruise forming on her arm.
“That woman tried to kill me.”
One officer looked at the blood running down my neck.
“Ma’am, what happened?”
I silently unlocked my phone and opened the camera application.
The room grew quiet as the recording played.
Derek’s face changed first.
Then Margaret’s.
“That video is illegal,” Derek snapped.
“No,” the officer said. “It isn’t.”
Derek stepped toward me, but the second officer blocked him.
A minute later, his hands were cuffed behind his back.
Margaret tried to run into the bedroom.
The police stopped her at the hallway.
“I live here!” she cried.
“No, you don’t,” I said.
I held up the deed.
“This apartment is mine. It was mine before the marriage.”
Derek stared at me as they led him toward the door.
“You’ll pay for this.”
“I already paid,” I said. “With two years of my life.”
Margaret’s voice turned cold.
“You think this is over?”
I met her eyes.
“It is for both of you. Neither of you will ever enter this home again.”
The elevator doors closed behind them.
For the first time that night, I was alone.
Then a phone began ringing beneath the dining table.
It wasn’t mine.
I reached under a broken chair and found Margaret’s second phone.
A message appeared on the screen.
DEREK FAILED. GET THE ORIGINAL DEED TONIGHT.
Another message arrived.
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IF CLAIRE LEARNS WHY WE NEED THAT APARTMENT, WE ALL GO TO PRISON.
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