My husband left me to face labor alone because of a work pitch. A week later, he burst in demanding to see his child. I stared at him with ice in my veins and asked, "What baby?"

It was a rainy Tuesday when the lawsuit arrived.

I was sitting in the Sterling kitchen, feeding Lily her morning bottle, when Marcus walked in with a grim expression. He tossed a thick legal binder onto the marble counter.

"What is that?" Arthur asked, looking up from his newspaper.

"Richard," Marcus sneered in disgust. "He just filed an emergency petition for custody in family court."

I nearly dropped the bottle. "Custody? Of Lily? He knows she isn't his! He literally took a six-million dollar payout to abandon her!"

"It's a shakedown," Arthur said, his eyes narrowing as he quickly scanned the front page of the document. "He’s drowning in legal debt and facing criminal charges. He knows I love this child. He’s filing for parental rights under the presumption of marriage—since she was born while you were legally married, the state automatically listed him as the father before the DNA results were finalized."

"He wants us to pay him off to drop the suit," Marcus agreed. "He’s demanding ten million dollars this time."

My blood boiled. After everything he had put me through, after leaving me on the floor while my water broke, he had the audacity to use this innocent baby as leverage.

"Can he win?" I asked, my voice trembling.

"Absolutely not," Marcus assured me. "But he can drag this out in court for months. He can force Lily to undergo court-ordered visitations. He can make this a media circus."

Victoria walked into the kitchen, having overheard the conversation. Her face was pale, but her jaw was set with fierce determination.

"We are not giving that monster a single dime," Victoria stated. "And he is never coming near our daughter."

"I have an idea," Marcus said, tapping his fingers against the granite counter. "But it requires playing Richard's game. We need to lure him into a trap where he officially implicates himself in extortion on the record."