He married the daughter everyone called “the ugliest” in one of the country’s most powerful families, and he married her for the money.

But on their wedding night, he found blood beneath her gown.

She whispered only four words: “My father did this.”

Chapter 1 — The Bride Who Showed Her Face

“Emmett paid that man to marry his daughter because no other man could stand to look at her,” a woman whispered from the front row.

The words carried through the Cathedral of Saint Jude in Minneapolis like a struck match, catching every ear in the room.

Rosalie Durham heard them from the entrance, surrounded by white flowers, flashing cameras, and two hundred guests who hadn’t come to wish her happiness — they’d come to see whether the cruel rumors were true.

At twenty-nine, Rosalie was tall and strongly built, with a steady gaze that refused to drop.

A deep wine-colored mark covered part of her left cheek and ran down her neck, and near her temple her hair grew thin.

Since childhood she’d worn the nicknames her own father never once silenced — monster, disgrace, the daughter no one would choose.

That was exactly why she walked down the aisle without a veil, showing her face to the whole room.

Waiting at the altar was Manuel Nelson, sole heir to a family business recently gutted by a financial scandal.

His father had died after being falsely accused of embezzling company funds, leaving Nelson Enterprises frozen and his younger sister forced to drop out of university.