Home Entertainment Game Technology Six months after a bullet left me paralyzed, my fiancée secretly ordered the staff to stop my afternoon therapy because she believed helping me was pointless, but the exhausted aide earning twenty-five dollars an hour refused to treat me like a lost cause. I had spent my life surrounded by men terrified of my name, yet it took one brutally honest woman washing my back to make me realize the person wearing my engagement ring had already abandoned me.352

I heard only prison.

Six months later, I slept in what had once been the east guest suite of my house because my old bedroom was upstairs and I refused to install a mechanical lift beside the marble staircase where my father had carried my mother after their wedding.

Pride is an expensive addiction.

Mine had cost me more than I knew.

That morning, pale October light spilled through the windows while Arya sat at the vanity applying lipstick.

Deep red.

She always wore red when she had somewhere important to be.

The diamond on her left hand caught the sunlight each time she lifted the lipstick tube.

My mother's ring.

Three months until our wedding.

At least according to the invitations stacked unopened in the study.

“Dominic needs your signature on the harbor property,” she said.

She didn't look at me.

I was sitting against the raised hospital bed, a wool blanket covering legs that looked increasingly unfamiliar.