My Husband Forced Me to Donate a Kidney to His Mistress

The ticker tape on the news crawl was still burning behind my eyelids: *Foster Enterprises Declares Insolvency.* The words were a neon slash across my vision, turning the gray Manhattan skyline into a blur of vertigo and rain. My phone had been vibrating against my hip for an hour—lawyers, creditors, panic—but I didn't answer. I only had one destination.

Zain.

He was the only solid thing left in a world that had liquefied beneath my feet this morning. I bypassed the doorman at the Obsidian Tower, my breath hitching in my throat as the elevator surged toward the penthouse. I needed his voice. I needed him to tell me that money was just paper, that my father wasn't going to prison, that we would survive this.

The penthouse door was unlatched. That should have been my first warning. Zain was meticulous about security; an open door was a fracture in his armor.

"Zain?" My voice cracked, swallowed by the cavernous, minimalist foyer. The air smelled of ozone and his signature sandalwood cologne, but there was an undercurrent of something else—something floral and cloying. *White lilies.* My stepmother's perfume.

I moved toward the master bedroom, my wet heels squeaking against the polished marble. The silence in the apartment wasn't peaceful; it was heavy, like the pressure drop before a storm.

The bedroom door was ajar. I pushed it open, my hand trembling, ready to collapse into his arms.

I didn't collapse. I froze. The blood in my veins turned to ice, then to acid.

Zain was there. But he wasn't alone.

The sheets were a tangled mess of charcoal silk, and rising from them was the pale, slender form of Edith Richardson. My stepmother. Her hair was disheveled, her lips swollen, the strap of her silk camisole slipping off a shoulder that I had seen my father kiss a thousand times.

Zain sat on the edge of the bed, buttoning his shirt. He didn't jump. He didn't scramble to cover himself. He looked up at me with eyes that were terrifyingly devoid of shock. They were cold. Clinical.

"Emelia," Edith gasped, pulling the sheet up to her neck, her eyes wide with a performance of distress that looked almost genuine. "You… you shouldn't be here. We were just—"

"Stop," I whispered. The word scraped my throat raw. "Zain?"

He stood up, smoothing the cuffs of his shirt. He looked at me like I was a stranger who had stumbled into a board meeting. "You’re hysterical, Emelia. Look at you. You’re dripping wet."

"You're sleeping with her?" The reality of it hit me like a physical blow to the sternum. "She's my father's wife. Zain, she's—"

"She is the only person who understands the pressure I am under," Zain said, his voice a low, dangerous rumble. He walked around the bed to stand beside Edith, placing a protective hand on her shoulder. "While you've been playing the spoiled heiress, Edith has been… here."

"Emelia!"

The shout came from the hallway behind me.