Switched

At nineteen, Sienna had two choices: become a rich man's mistress to pay off her stepfather's gambling debts, or disappear. She chose to disappear — but not before walking into a fertility clinic with a desperate plan. Get pregnant. Make herself worthless to the men who'd bought her. Start over.

What she didn't know was that the clinic had swapped her donor sample. The sperm she received didn't belong to some anonymous stranger — it belonged to Kalendra Elson, the cold, untouchable leader of the Black Lotus syndicate, a widower who had ordered every trace of his genetic legacy destroyed after his wife's death.

Five years later, Sienna returns to Jakarta with her daughter Rayna — a pint-sized hurricane with a speech impediment, zero fear, and an opinion about everything. Across the city, Kalendra is raising Rayden, a quiet, germaphobic boy who is Rayna's mirror image and her biological twin, separated at birth by the same illegal swap that created them both.

When the twins collide by chance in a crowded restaurant, the fallout is immediate. Kalendra wants answers. Sienna wants to protect her daughter. And the children — loud, stubborn, brilliant Rayna and careful, wounded Rayden — want what neither parent planned to give them: a family.

What follows is a battle of wills disguised as a love story. Kalendra proposes a marriage of convenience; Sienna flees at two in the morning. He publicly claims her as his wife to shield her from a stalker; she calls him "darling" as a tactical weapon and watches him short-circuit. Their daughter calls him "Daddy" before Sienna calls him anything at all.

But the danger is real. Sienna's predatory ex-husband Mahesa hasn't stopped hunting her. Her manipulative stepsister Aluna is feeding him information. Kalendra's late wife's mother wages a campaign of cruelty against the woman she sees as a replacement. And lurking behind it all, the Black Lotus syndicate's obligations will eventually demand that Kalendra take his family across the ocean — away from every fragile connection the children have built.

Switched is a story about two people who became parents before they learned how to love, and two children who refuse to let the adults in their lives settle for anything less than whole. It is fierce, funny, occasionally brutal, and anchored by a seven-year-old girl who will lie, scheme, adopt a rooster, trick a woman onto a plane to Africa, and fistfight anyone who threatens her family — all while mispronouncing every R in the English language.

NovelToon got authorization from Mom Ilaa to publish this work, the content is the author's own point of view, and does not represent the stand of NovelToon.