The moment the hotel lost power, I was being pulled into a fire escape by a woman. Her hair was disheveled, her fingers icy, and she carried a faint scent of cooking oil—like she'd just fled from the kitchen. "Please," she whispered in my ear, breath trembling, "don't let them catch me. They say I'm an illegal immigrant... but I'm not. I swear, I'm not." Alarm bells echoed through the corridor. I frowned, about to push her away, when I heard distant footsteps—polished shoes striking the floor in unison, methodical, hunting. Then she suddenly looked up. A streetlamp shone through the window, illuminating her eyes—dark, defiant, like a wild cat trapped but refusing to yield. We locked eyes for three seconds. Then she rose on her toes and kissed me. In that instant, it felt as if electricity surged back to life. I saw her again in my company’s conference room. She stood among a crowd of graduates from elite universities, wearing a faded business suit that marked her as an outsider. "Miss Lin," the HR director sneered, flipping through her resume, "you said you worked in a restaurant? Cutting vegetables, serving dishes?" She didn’t answer. She simply placed her folder on the table. From behind the glass wall, seated in the CEO's chair, I stared at her silhouette—my heartbeat suddenly erratic. "I’ll hire her." I pressed the intercom, cutting short the meeting. Gasps filled the room. She turned, stunned. I spoke calmly: "My secretary doesn’t need others to define her qualifications." But she didn’t know that that night, I had checked her identity. In the system, she was “Shen Nian”—abducted at eighteen and sold to a southern town, escaped three years later, surviving by washing dishes in restaurant kitchens. No degree, no background, only a single page stamped by the police: a certified record of a rescued missing person. And no one knew the truth—that the people chasing her that night weren’t after an undocumented immigrant. They were sent by my half-brother, scouring the city for a woman who “shouldn’t exist”—the mother of his illegitimate child. She became my secretary. And the eye of the storm. Colleagues mocked her behind her back as “kitchen trash,” someone deliberately spilled coffee on her desk, and anonymous reports accused her of forging her identity. She never fought back. Just silently wiped the table clean, picked up fallen fruit one by one, and tossed them into the bin. Until one day, I found her vomiting in the break room. A pregnancy test lay by the sink—two red lines burned into my vision. "The child," she finally said, her voice eerily calm, "is not yours." I clenched my fists, coldly laughing. "Then whose is it?" She looked at me, tears spilling over. "Your brother’s. But I’ve never touched him… They forced it—used my eggs, combined with his DNA. An experiment—to create a ‘legitimate heir.’" The air froze. She wasn’t an illegal immigrant. She was erased existence—the darkest secret buried in a wealthy family’s hidden chamber. I pulled her into my arms, jaw tight with fury: "From this moment on, you are my wife." "I don’t care if the law recognizes it. I don’t care about bloodlines or origins." "If you have no home, I will burn down the towers to build you a nest." The elevator plunged again, just like that night. But this time, I kissed her, whispering like a vow: "Welcome home, Shen Nian." And in the boardroom on the top floor, a birth certificate sealed for eighteen years quietly burned.