They called me “defective” long before I fully understood what the word meant.Three doctors. Three identical verdicts. At nineteen, I—Thomas Bowmont Callahan—was officially declared useless in the one measure that Mississippi’s planter elite believed defined a man: the ability to produce an heir. The only son of an eight-thousand-acre cotton empire… incapable of continuing the Callahan bloodline.My father refused to accept it.He was a judge. A plantation master. A man accustomed to bending circumstances—and people—to his will. And when one prominent family after another quietly withdrew their daughters from consideration, he began searching for what he called a “practical solution.”A solution that forced me, for the first time, to look directly at the brutality that sustained the white mansion on the bluff.Delilah.She was not a debutante in silk gloves. She was an enslaved field hand—tall, strong, worth “three ordinary laborers” according to the overseer. But in my father’s calculations, she was worth even more than that: a womb. A body that could be arranged, documented, and legally maneuvered into producing heirs under his careful design.When he said, “I’m giving her to you,” I realized I was standing at a line that could never be uncrossed.I could remain silent and inherit everything.Or I could betray the very foundation of the world that raised me.That night, I walked down to the quarters to warn Delilah. And when she looked at me—not with fear, but with a steady, measured clarity—she asked the question that nearly stopped my heart:“You’re willing to lose everything… just to save me?”I answered her.Two nights later, at the stroke of midnight, we stood in the darkened stable. Behind us, an empire slept—unaware that its future was slipping quietly into the road north.But there was one thing I did not yet understand.My father had already prepared his final move.