My billionaire husband smiled, kissed my forehead, and invited me on a romantic helicopter ride over the California coast while I was pregnant. Seconds later, he shoved me out of the open door, believing he was about to inherit everything I owned. What he didn't know was that I'd been expecting his betrayal for months... and I had already prepared for the moment he tried to kill me.

Driven into a corner by the sudden asset freeze, Richard retreated to his penthouse, desperate to find a way to break the trust's legal locks. He couldn't afford a long legal battle. What the public—and the board—didn't know was that Richard was secretly drowning in massive, underground debt.

To fund his lavish lifestyle and covert investments, he had borrowed fifty million dollars from a ruthless syndicate of overseas offshore lenders, pledging his expected inheritance of Hayes Global as collateral. Now, those lenders were getting impatient.

Through our intercepted audio feeds inside his penthouse living room, Vance and I listened to Richard pacing the hardwood floors late into the night.

"I need that freeze lifted now!" Richard roared into his encrypted satellite phone, slamming a tumbler of scotch onto the table. "I did my part! She’s at the bottom of the ocean! The company should be mine!"

"You guaranteed us immediate liquidity, Mr. Hayes," a cold, heavily accented voice replied over the speakerphone. "Our investors do not care about legal freezes or federal marshals. You have seven days to deliver the thirty percent stake in Hayes Tech, or we will collect our debt through... alternative means."

"Just give me a few days!" Richard pleaded, his voice breaking into a panic. "I’ll sell off her art collections! I’ll liquidate her personal real estate! I just need time!"

Sitting in my armchair, gently rubbing my belly as my baby moved, I looked at Vance. "He’s drowning. He’s going to do something drastic to raise quick cash."

"He already is," Vance said, tapping his tablet to bring up a fresh wiretap log. "He just made an appointment to meet a private buyer at an abandoned wharf in San Pedro tomorrow midnight. He’s planning to sell off secret prototypes from your advanced defense division."