From the very first day, there'd been a three-year-old boy wrapped around my legs, calling me Mama. A violent brute who called himself my husband, who beat me and used me whenever the mood struck. And a mother-in-law who was anything but kind, who treated me like a thorn in her side, an enemy under her own roof.

I thought I'd crossed into another world. Slipped into some parallel dimension where nothing made sense.

But before I could even begin to process it, the real nightmare began.

I screamed at them until my throat was raw.

"Let me go! I'm the Henson heiress! However much money you want, I can give it to you!"

Kathy Jennings spat at my feet.

"You've already been thrown away like garbage. And you still think you're going back?" She let out a harsh laugh. "Keep dreaming."

I tried everything I could think of to reach Jacob. Every method, every angle.

Every single message I sent disappeared into the void. Not one reply. Not ever.

"You really are spectacularly stupid, Marina."

Jacob tilted my chin up with one finger, forcing me to meet his gaze. His eyes were filled with nothing but contempt.

"Can you honestly not tell? I arranged all of this."

"Only someone as impossibly naive as you could miss it."

"Three years you sat here waiting for me. Three years you kept begging me to save you." A cold smile tugged at his lips. "What a joke."

His eyes narrowed as they traveled over my face, and disgust crept into his expression.

"Look at you. Sun-scorched. Rough as sandpaper." He tilted his head, appraising me like damaged goods. "You can't hold a candle to Rebecca now. Not even close."

"Then again, maybe this is what you deserve. You always did lord that pretty face over everyone else."

I kept my head down. I couldn't even manage a bitter smile.

Three years of wind and sun. Three years of relentless abuse.

When I caught my reflection in a mirror now, I barely recognized the woman staring back.

Is that really me?

Every winter, my fingers cracked and swelled until they looked like raw sausages. And the face I'd once spent a fortune maintaining? It was mapped with fine lines and dark spots, weathered beyond recognition.

I looked no different from any village farmwife.

Jacob stroked Rebecca's smooth cheek with sickening tenderness.

"See, Rebecca? Clothes make the woman. These days, you're every bit the heiress Marina used to be. No difference at all."