The year I turned eighteen, a gang of thugs jumped my brother. After stabbing one of them, he took off, abandoning me to them. When they couldn't catch him, those bastards made me their punching bag. They severed my ankle tendons and took turns torturing me for hours. By the time my parents arrived with the police, I was half-dead, my lower body broken and bleeding. Each gang member got twenty years behind bars. Two months later, I discovered I was carrying one of their children. My mother took me to the hospital for a forced abortion. The doctor's verdict was clear: I'd never conceive again. My parents wept day and night. Everything changed when my brother showed up with a girl my age and a DNA report—proof I was just a country girl's child, swapped at birth. It was like a weight had been lifted off their shoulders. On the day their precious real daughter, Sierra, got into a famous university, my old wounds flared up again. Alone at home with no painkillers left, white-hot agony shot through me. As I dragged myself toward the door, begging my brother to get me medicine, I overheard his conversation with his friend Zachary. "Harrison, are you really going to keep that fake paternity test from your parents forever?" Harrison's voice oozed irritation, "I forged Sierra's DNA results so Mother and Father wouldn't spend their lives drowning in guilt over Maisie." "If they believe she's not theirs, they'll let go of the past," he continued, "they'll stop blaming themselves... and me for what happened." Ice flooded my veins as the truth hit me.