Blurb：
When Evelyn Sterling, a top neurosurgeon, gets an urgent call about her mother’s critical brain tumor, she rushes to perform the life-saving surgery. But her husband, Alexander Sterling, kidnaps her to operate on Sophia’s dog Tubby instead. Threatened with a hammer to her skilled hands, Evelyn is forced to choose between saving her mother or the pet. With Sophia’s tears manipulating Alexander, Evelyn’s pleas are ignored. After Tubby’s surgery, delays cost her mother’s life. Now, Evelyn vows vengeance against Alexander Sterling and Sophia, uncovering secrets in scattered photos that could destroy them all.
Content：
My mother’s condition took a sudden, critical turn. They needed me—her daughter, one of the nation’s leading neurosurgeons—to perform the surgery that could save her life.
I was rushing to the hospital as soon as I got the call, my mind already in the OR, mapping the delicate terrain of her brain. I never made it.
My husband, Alexander Sterling, intercepted me. His men bundled me into a car, and we didn’t go to the hospital.
“Sophia’s dog has a steel needle lodged in his leg,” Alexander stated, his voice devoid of the urgency thrumming through my veins. “You need to operate on him immediately.”
I refused without a second thought. “My mother is dying. A human life comes first.”
His childhood friend, Sophia, burst into tears right then, “Evelyn, I know you’ve always misunderstood my relationship with Alex. But Tubby is family to me. Must I get on my knees and beg you?”
My husband, Alexander Sterling, flew into a rage. He picked up a heavy hammer from a workbench nearby and leveled his gaze at my hands—the hands that held a scalpel with the steadiness of a rock, the hands that were my mother’s only hope.
“If you don’t save Tubby, you won’t need these hands anymore.”
“My family’s fortune is vast enough to support a cripple for the rest of her life.”
My blood ran cold. “Alexander, please. My mother—”
“I’ll take you to your mother after we’re done here.” he cut me off, his tone leaving no room for argument.
But I knew, with a sickening certainty, that it would be too late.
Seeing Mom’s body in the morgue, my heart stopped beating in that moment too.
………
Summoning every ounce of my skill, I worked at lightning speed to remove the needle from the dog’s leg.
Putting down the scalpel, I turned to Alexander Sterling, who was gently comforting a weeping Sophia on the sofa,
“It’s done. The dog will live. Let me go now.”
An hour ago, my mother’s attending physician had called. He said her condition had deteriorated suddenly, urgently needing surgery.
My mother’s brain tumor was in a critically dangerous location. I had developed the specialized technique to remove it. I was her only chance
I’d immediately cut short my research fellowship abroad and taken the first flight home.
Only to be kidnapped by Alexander Sterling the moment I landed – all to save a pet dog.
It was absurd.
If the dog was hurt, take it to a vet! How could a human life be worth less than a dog’s?
But to Alexander, Tubby was more. He was Sophia’s happiness. And Sophia’s happiness was everything.
No matter how I explained Mom was dying and needed me to save her, he didn’t hear a word.
Instead, he ordered his bodyguards to raise a hammer, aiming it at my hands.
“Tubby is Sophia’s family, not just a pet anymore. Can’t you stop being so selfish?”
“If you refuse to operate today, I’ll destroy those hands. My family fortune is vast enough to keep you.”
My heart froze. But to protect these hands that could save lives, I swallowed my fury and agreed.
Sophia rushed over to see the dog, supported by Alexander.
After the family vet confirmed the surgery was successful, Alexander finally nodded.
“Good work, Evelyn. I’ll have the guards take you to the hospital now.”
Before I could react, Sophia burst into tears again.
“Alex, Tubby just had major surgery! He’s not out of the woods yet! If he… if he dies during recovery, I… I can’t live without him!”
Alexander’s face softened instantly. Comforting Sophia, he turned back to me, his previous concession forgotten,
“You’re the surgeon. You’ll stay and monitor Tubby until it’s stable.”
Incredulity washed over me.
“The surgery was a success! The vet can handle aftercare. By the clock, my mother’s likely in surgery, fighting for her life now! This is murder, Alexander Sterling! Are you determined to be an accomplice to my mother’s death?”
Alexander frowned, a flicker of something—irritation, not conscience—crossing his features. But Sophia cut him off.
She flung a stack of printed photos at me. They scattered across the floor.
The images showed me in my white coat, leaning over a male patient.
The angle was deliberately salacious, making a routine examination look intimate, my stethoscope pressed against his chest, my posture misrepresented to suggest something sordid.
“I never wanted to interfere in your marriage,” Sophia said, her voice dripping with false sorrow, “but this is too much. How dare you cheat on Alex!”
Seeing Alexander’s darkening expression, I knew he mostly believed it.
My heart, already shattered, crumbled into dust.
But my voice stayed cold, “Those are fakes. Any competent forensic analyst can prove it.”
Then I looked directly at Alexander, “I’m pregnant. I just found out. Let me go to my mother now, or I swear on this child’s life, I will end it. Both of us.”
In the face of Sophia’s calculated fragility, this unborn child was my only leverage against Alexander’s warped sense of duty.
Sophia had congenital heart condition. Alexander, supported by the Sterling family fortune, had been her protector since childhood.
Before me, everyone assumed they would marry and rule Sterling Industries together
But he had chosen me.
He had proposed, promising a lifetime of devotion. For a few beautiful years, he had delivered.
But as Sophia’s heart began to falter more seriously, and the world tilted.
I’d get angry when Sophia’s calls made him abandon me, hurt when she always came first, jealous of his limitless indulgence towards her…
Yet Alexander always swore there was nothing between them, that he loved only me.
I believed him, loved him with a reckless, all-consuming fire.
And this was my reward.
I had to get back. I had to save my mother.
Alexander’s expression shifted instantly, a fragile hope dawning in his eyes. His fingertips trembled with barely contained emotion.
He gestured to a bodyguard, who stepped forward to escort me out towards the waiting car.
Alexander himself stepped forward, surprising me by offering to drive me to the hospital himself.
Suddenly, Sophia’s voice, thin and tearful, cut through the moment. “Alex… now that you’re going to have a child of your own… will you forget all about me?”
Alexander froze. “Of course not, my dear. It’s just that Evelyn is carrying my—”
“But what if the baby isn’t yours!” Sophia blurted out, then slapped a hand over her mouth in a theatrical gesture before pressing on with righteous fury, “I’m not mistaken! She’s involved with her patients! These photos are proof!”
She spoke with righteous fury as if she’d witnessed the affair herself.
I had always treated every patient with professional detachment, my focus solely on medicine. Yet, I watched as Alexander’s face darkened, suspicion twisting his features as he looked at me.
An icy dread seeped into my limbs. My lips trembled. “You don’t trust me?”
Alexander avoided my gaze. A moment later, he turned and ordered the family physician, “Prepare an amniocentesis. Now.”
I felt as if I’d been struck by lightning.
His distrust ran this deep!
Crack!My palm connected sharply with his cheek.
“You utter bastard!” I spat, snatching the car keys from a stunned guard’s hand and striding toward the door.
After such humiliation, I should have been raging, should have vowed to shove the prenatal report in his face and reclaim my dignity.
But I couldn’t.
Mom was in that hospital. Nothing else mattered more than her life.
Operating on the dog had already cost precious time.
I hadn’t taken five steps before the bodyguards tackled me to the ground.
“What’s this? Running away because you’re guilty?” Alexander pressed a hand to his stinging cheek, his eyes filled with a venomous glare.
“Let me go! I need to operate on my mother!”
“You promised! The dog’s surgery is done, you let me go! Don’t you dare go back on your word!”
Alexander remained unmoved, a statue of cold resolve.
The guards strapped me to a gurney. A long, sharp needle glinted coldly under the lights, advancing towards me.
“No! Please!” All defiance gone, I pleaded desperately, my voice breaking.
“I’m sorry, Alex! Check the baby after my mother’s surgery, I beg you! I’ll cooperate, I swear… Mom is on the operating table right now! Only I can save her! Please, just let me go…”
The needle pierced my skin. A cold sedatives flooded my veins. My fingers weakly clawed at the blurring figure above me, my voice fading into a whisper, “You promised… you promised to let me go…”
Darkness swallowed me whole. My heart seemed to stop beating.
When I awoke, the room was empty.
I had been unconscious for three hours.
The restraints were gone. The slightest movement sent a sharp, bone-deep pain radiating from my abdomen.
They’d actually gone through with the amniocentesis.
I ignored the agony, stumbled outside, hailed a taxi, and sped toward the hospital.
Colleagues met me with silent, pitying looks.
“You’re too late, Evelyn. Even thirty minutes earlier… she might have had a chance.”
“She called for you… right until the end.”
I collapsed to the cold hospital floor, a grief so profound it felt like my soul was being torn in two. My sobs were raw, wrenching sounds that echoed in the sterile hallway.
Mom was gone. Forever.
Suddenly, a searing, ripping pain tore through my abdomen. A warm, terrifying wetness soaked through my clothes, spreading between my legs.
Was I losing the baby too…?
I struggled weakly, helplessly, as the world began to spin.
Darkness swallowed me once more, this time accompanied by a profound silence that felt like the end of everything.
I spent the night in the morgue, my body wracked with dry heaves that eventually brought up blood, staining the cold, sterile floor. A concerned doctor found me, his face grim. He warned me my body was critically weakened, my vital signs unstable. He insisted on immediate hospitalization.
I refused. My mother’s funeral came first.
She’d always dreamed of going home. So I brought her back, burying her under the peach tree in our backyard, the one she’d planted the day I was born.
I kept vigil at the fresh mound of earth for a long, slient time before finally forcing myself to walk back to our old family house.
The sight that greeted me stole the breath from my lungs
Dozens of yellow excavators were tearing it down!
Half the building was already reduced to a skeleton of splintered wood and shattered brick.
“Stop! How dare you demolish my home! I’ll call the police!” I screamed, rushing forward like a madwoman.
Sophia stepped out from behind a nearby tree, a vision of false concern.
She grabbed my arm.
“I’m sorry, Evelyn. Alex explained I misunderstood everything before. He really gave me a proper scolding.”
“Look!” she continued, her voice dripping with saccharine glee as she gestured at the collapsing ruin. “This is my apology gift! Do you like it?”
I shoved her away with a force I didn’t know I still possessed. She stumbled and fell dramatically onto the grass.
“Stop this! I never wanted your ‘gift’! This is the only thing my parents left me!”
Alexander emerged from a nearby car and rushed to catch Sophia, glaring furiously at me, “Don’t be ungrateful, Evelyn! Sophia worked tirelessly, pulling strings to get insignificant your property included in the new development zone! Its value has quadrupled!”
How laughable.
He was a billionaire. Sophia’s calls got things done.
I was his wife, yet I couldn’t even get him to drive me to the hospital to save my mother.
The pure, unadulterated disgust on my face seemed to sting Alexander. He looked momentarily stunned.
His tone softened, just a fraction. “Fine. If you don’t appreciate it, I’ll call them off.” He paused, as if offering a grand concession. “The amniocentesis results… the baby is mine.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have doubted you.”
I laughed, the sound brittle and bitter. Was this his idea of an apology?
But the baby was already gone. Flushed away in a tide of blood and betrayal.
I shook off the hand he tried to place on my shoulder, my voice laced with scorching scorn, “So what? Whether it was born or not… it was never yours to claim.”
Caught off guard by my defiance –I was usually so meek – Alexander frowned, dismissing it as a postpartum tantrum. “I’ve told you countless times, Sophia is just like family. Don’t take your issues with me out on an innocent child.”
I scoffed, the sound hollow. “You were worried about the baby? Were you worried the amniocentesis could cripple it? Cause a miscarriage?”
He could have counted the weeks. He knew it was his.
He just chose not to believe. Just as he had chosen not to believe Mom was dying in the ICU.
The excavators, on his command, rumbled away, leaving a gaping wound in the earth. Kneeling in the wreckage, I wept, my hands scraping against broken bricks and splintered wood, frantically trying to rebuild the ghost of my home with my bare hands.
Alexander couldn’t watch. He hauled me up roughly. “This was… an error in judgment on my part. I’ll hire a team to rebuild it perfectly. You’re carrying my child. You shouldn’t be doing manual labor.”
He seemed to think my world-shattering grief was still about the paternity test, offering this as a rare appeasement.
“Alexander Sterling,” I stated coldly, prying his fingers from my wrist one by one, “I want a divorce.”
His grip tightened like a vise. “I’m compromising! What more do you want? Do you think having my baby entitles you to control me?”
I laughed, sharp and mocking. “A baby could never control you, Mr. Sterling. Your heart, your loyalty, your very soul… they belong entirely to Sophia, don’t they?”
“I was a fool to believe your lies, degrading myself for scraps of your attention all these years.”
The first time I brought him home, Mom had taken me aside, ‘Marrying so far above your station only brings a world of pain. That man… he’s not right for you.’ At our wedding, after learning about Sophia, she had pulled me aside, her eyes full of fear, ‘Get out now, my darling, before you’re the one who ends up broken.’ I had trusted Alexander, dismissing her wise words as the worry of an overprotective mother.
Colleagues told me Mom’s last conscious words were tears of worry not for herself, but for me – ‘Tell Evelyn to protect yourself. Don’t give your whole heart away so foolishly.’
Tears I could no longer hold back streamed down my face, hot and silent.
Alexander ignored them, his voice dropping another degree colder. “Don’t think your tears will make me blame Sophia just to please you. It’s impossible.”
“Evelyn, I apologized. Must you cling to these petty grievances and destroy what little we have left?”
“Have?” I laughed, the sound choked and broken. “There’s nothing left.”
It had shattered, completely and irrevocably, in that cold morgue. The moment I saw my mother’s still face.
Turning my back on him, I walked away without another word, leaving him standing amidst the ruins of my past.
Watching my retreating figure, Alexander felt an inexplicable, sharp pang in his chest, a feeling he couldn’t name and quickly suppressed. He called his assistant. “Find out where Evelyn went after leaving the estate. And contact the world’s top neuro-oncologists – get them on a plane to treat her mother immediately.”
I needed to see my mother. It was a physical ache, a pull toward the only place I had left to feel close to her. But as I approached, my steps faltered, then stopped dead.
From a distance, I saw it. The peach tree—the one she’d planted for me, the one she now rested beneath—had been hacked down, its branches splintered and raw. And there, where her grave should have been, the earth was torn open. Her urn was exposed.
Tubby, Sophia’s massive, spoiled dog, was squatting over it, defecating into the sacred vessel that held my mother’s ashes. Sophia’s nanny stood by, watching with an indulgent smile.
The world dissolved into a roaring, red haze in my ears. I didn’t think. I lunged, shoving the nanny away with a force that sent her sprawling.
The woman scrambled up, slapping me hard across the face.
“Shut up! You scared Tubby! Your worthless life couldn’t repay the shock you’ve given him!”
“Ungrateful wretch! So what if he relieves himself here? It’s just a dirt hill! At the estate, Tubby uses imported litter that costs a thousand dollars a bag!”
She thought my mother’s final resting place, her ashes, were… a dirt hill?
Tubby , a hulking breed, had filled the square ceramic urn with his filth.
A darkness, thick and suffocating, swam at the edges of my vision. The next thing I knew, my hands had closed around a broken branch from the felled peach tree. I brought it down on the nanny, the thwacking sound a poor outlet for the inferno inside me.
“Help! Murder!” she screeched, cowering.
Blind with a rage I had never known, I was on her, my fists flying, each impact a feeble attempt to punish a world that would allow this desecration.
Suddenly, an iron grip seized my wrist, yanking me backward.
Alexander’s furious voice boomed in my ear, “Evelyn! What new madness is this now?”
“Yes, I’m mad!” I screamed, whirling on him, my face a mess of tears and dirt. “My mother is dead! Why can’t you just let her be?! Why must you desecrate her?! I’ll make you all pay!”
Pure, undiluted hatred surged through my veins. I somehow wrenched my arm free from his shock-loosened grip.
I saw Sophia standing there, a look of smug victory barely concealed.
I crossed the distance in two strides and slapped her with every ounce of strength my broken body possessed. The crack echoed in the violated silence of the yard.
Before I could strike again, Alexander shoved me back so violently I stumbled and fell.
“If you keep this up,” he snarled, standing over me, “even carrying my child won’t save you from the consequences!”
His guards, pinning me to the ground. My face was ground into the cold, wet earth. Silent, hopeless tears soaked into the ground.
“Child?” I choked out, the words muffled by the dirt. “That child is already—”
Sophia’s theatrical wail cut me off. “Alex! My face! It hurts so much! Will I be scarred?”
She tilted her delicate, perfectly made-up face toward him – a vivid, perfect handprint was already blooming on her cheek, a trickle of blood marring her lip.
I’d used every ounce of strength.
I only regretted I hadn’t hit her harder.
Alexander trembled with a cold, towering anger. “Apologize to Sophia! Now!”
I spat a mouthful of blood and dirt onto the grass. “Never!”
No victim apologizes to their tormentor. Not for this.
Alexander stared, his will pressing down on me, expecting the submission he was so used to. “Evelyn, you carry my child. I will overlook your assault on the nanny. But hurting Sophia? You will apologize.”
He tried another lever, the one that had always worked. “I have contacted the world’s best neuro-oncologist. Apologize, and I’ll arrange the consultation this afternoon.”
But my mother was dead. He had nothing left to threaten me with.
Seeing my silence, unyielding silence, Alexander’s patience finally snapped. “Last chance! Apologize!”
Sophia clung to his arm, whispering intimately, “Alex, it’s okay, I’m fine. Maybe Evelyn is just so upset… because you promised her backyard to me for my new pig farm?”
“Pig farm?” The words were a dull, disbelieving echo.
My face, already deathly pale, lost all remaining color. They wanted to turn my mother’s garden, her final resting place, into a sty for Sophia’s amusement?
I tried to scream, but the guards’ hold on me tightened, stifling the sound.
“You touch that backyard,” I hissed instead, my voice a low, venomous promise, “and I swear on my mother’s soul, I will end you all.”
“Still no remorse? Fine. You leave me no choice!” Alexander pulled out his phone, dialing angrily, “Delay that specialist consultation! Indefinitely!”
The reply from his assistant, audible even from where I lay, struck him with the force of a physical blow, “Sir… her mother passed away a week ago. The records show Dr. Evans returned home to perform the emergency surgery herself…”
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