Chapter 1 - THE PENTHOUSE PRISON
The tires screamed before Grace hit the pavement, but that terrifying moment was born days earlier inside the pristine, cold quiet of a thirty-fourth-floor penthouse on Lake Shore Drive. Grace awoke to the quiet click of a cuff link closing, her husband Derek standing against floor-to-ceiling windows framed by the pale gold morning light over Lake Michigan. At seven months pregnant, Grace’s life had become an endless negotiation of aching joints and swollen ankles, yet her first instinct each morning was pure love for the daughter growing inside her.
Derek, immaculate in a charcoal suit and polished shoes, turned to her with that chilling precision she once mistook for safety. "I took your laptop to the office," he said smoothly. When Grace questioned him, he masked his controlling dominance as concern for her blood pressure, citing a psychiatrist friend who deemed her reading material stressful. Grace sat up carefully, realizing with a cold jolt that her husband wasn't protecting her—he was building a digital and physical cage around her, cutting off her connection to the outside world while she carried his child.
