Six months pregnant and bleeding after Marcus shoved me down the stairs, I woke chained to an iron furnace beneath my boyfriend’s mansion.

Six months pregnant and bleeding, I woke chained to an iron furnace beneath Ashcroft Manor after Marcus Ashcroft shoved me down twelve stone steps.

Marcus was my boyfriend Adrian Ashcroft’s cousin and the trustee of the Ashcroft family fortune. Beside him stood Adrian’s mother, Lady Lucinda Ashcroft, who had spent months calling me a gold digger and insisting that a woman like me had no place in their family.

Upstairs, nearly two hundred wealthy guests were arriving for the Ashcroft Foundation’s winter auction. They believed Lucinda was preparing to announce Adrian’s engagement.

Instead, she had chained his pregnant girlfriend beneath the mansion.

“The bastard in your belly will never touch a cent of our inheritance,” Lucinda hissed before striking me across the face.

She believed Adrian was in Zurich.

She also believed I was nothing more than a provincial accountant who had trapped her wealthy son.

She was wrong about both.

Adrian had originally hired me as a forensic accountant after money began disappearing from the Ashcroft Foundation. During the three months that followed, I traced forty-eight million dollars in charitable funds through shell accounts and finally into purchases of physical gold stored somewhere beneath the estate.

Somewhere along the way, Adrian and I had fallen in love.

Marcus discovered my investigation.

He pushed me down the cellar stairs after I refused to sign away any future claim my unborn child might have against the Ashcroft family trust.

Then he and Lucinda chained me beside the old furnace.

What neither of them knew was that my watch was not a fitness tracker.

It was a satellite distress device issued by Vantage Shield, Adrian’s private protection company. I had helped program its emergency function myself. More importantly, federal investigators working with me had access to its audio feed.

Marcus pressed a pen into my hand.

“Sign, or your fall becomes fatal.”

Blood stained my dress.

The watch vibrated once.

Signal received.

I pressed the concealed alarm.

Ten seconds.

Lucinda lifted her hand again.

I looked directly into her eyes.