I went to the hospital to get my IUD swapped out—and found my husband in the prenatal wing, standing beside a girl whose belly was just beginning to show.

I opened my mouth, but he spoke first, perfectly calm:

"Since you've seen it, I might as well come clean."

"Lucinda's a college girl I've been keeping on the side. She's a month along."

"Relax. She's a sweet girl—she doesn't want your position, and she's not coming for your family."

"But I'm not letting my firstborn grow up a bastard."

I stood frozen over my IUD replacement form, my voice shaking beyond my control:

"So you're going to divorce me and marry her?"

He wiped the tears from my face, smiling as he spoke:

"What are you talking about? I told you when I married you, you'd be my only wife for the rest of my life. Besides, you're an orphan. Where would you even go without me?"

"I'm just saying—since you can't have children, we adopt Lucinda's baby."

"Five years you've had that IUD in. Five years you wouldn't give me a child. So I found someone who would. Can you really blame me for wanting to carry on the family line?"

He tore the replacement form out of my hand, expression unchanged:

"One child is enough for me. Just have the IUD taken out."

"Be good. I promise, you'll still be the lady of this family. No one will ever rank above you."

I looked at him for a long time, then did as he wanted and changed the procedure from a replacement to a removal.

"Don't bother."

"Giles, I hope you never regret what you've decided today."

What he didn't know was that the IUD I'd worn for five years was the last shred of dignity I'd preserved for him, covering up his congenital infertility.

……

I woke seven days later.

Something low in my abdomen screamed with a pain I'd never felt before—raw, gutted, *empty*.

I reached for it instinctively, but ice-cold handcuffs bit into my wrists and jerked me short.

Outside the door, Giles's calm voice carried through. He was on the phone.

"It's done. The uterus is out."

"Mm. For the adoption of Lucinda's child, it had to be done."

"Her? What's she going to do when she wakes up? She's an orphan. She can't exactly turn the world upside down."

Everything went white. Just a high-pitched buzz and nothing behind it.

My uterus… gone?

How could he.

I fought the cuffs until they cut—thrashing, wrenching, the metal biting deep enough to leave blood smeared across both wrists.

The door opened.

Giles walked in, saw the blood soaking the sheets, and didn't so much as frown.

He just undid the handcuffs, calm as ever, a thread of impatience in his voice.

"You heard?"

"My hands were tied. I promised Lucinda there'd only ever be one child—hers and mine. Taking your uterus out solves that for good. Cleaner for everyone."

I stared at him, shaking from head to toe, unable to force out a single word.

Tears spilled down without stopping.

He reached out to wipe them away.

"What's the big deal? It's one organ. You never wanted to have children anyway."

I used every ounce of strength I had left to turn my face away.

"Don't touch me!"

"Giles Gilbert, you animal!"

I swung with everything in me and slapped him hard across the face.

That single slap drained almost everything I had.

My palm went numb, and the pain in my chest felt like it was splitting open.

His head snapped to the side, five red finger marks rising sharp against his skin.

He hadn't dodged. The flush spread fast.

He didn't lose his temper. He just caught my hand. "If hitting me helps, go ahead. Hit me all you want. But once you're done, that's enough."

I opened my mouth, about to speak.

A small figure burst through the doorway with a shriek.

A crack rang out, and a harder slap landed across my face.

I fell back onto the bed, ears ringing, vision going black.

Lucinda Lambert planted herself in front of Giles, tears spilling down her face in that perfect, practiced way.

"How could you hit him!"

"Do you have any idea he's been at your bedside for seven days and seven nights, waiting for you to wake up?"

"He's the father of my child. My man. What right do you have to hit him? What right do you have to treat him like something you can take your anger out on!"

Something soft and aching flickered in Giles's eyes, and he pulled her into his arms.

That look. I knew it too well.

He used to look at me like that.

When I nearly died of alcohol poisoning trying to ransom him back from his enemies.

When I knelt on the ground and smashed my forehead bloody to keep the debt collectors from taking him.

So the tenderness I'd traded my life for could be replaced, just like that, by a single tear from someone else.

I pushed myself upright, looked at the two of them wrapped around each other, and laughed at myself.

"So I'm supposed to thank him?"

"Thank him for ripping out my uterus for the sake of your baby, and nearly killing me on the operating table?"

Lucinda's tears came harder.

She shoved Giles away, snatched the fruit knife off the bedside table, and aimed it at her own slightly rounded belly.

"It's all my fault! I'm the one who hurt you! Let me pay for it!"

"I'll cut my baby and my uterus out right now and give them to you. Is that enough?"

"Lucy!"

Giles's face went white. He locked his arms around her and wrenched the knife free.

The blade sliced across his palm, blood streaming down his fingers.

He didn't even glance at it. He just lifted his head and looked at me with eyes so cold they were barely human.

"Beulah. Is this what you wanted? Are you satisfied now?"

He scooped up Lucinda, who had fainted from the shock, and walked out without looking back.

At the doorway he stopped. His voice held no warmth at all.

"I've been too good to you."

"Since you refuse to behave, then it's time you tasted some real hardship."

Two bodyguards in black came in, faces blank, and hauled me up by the arms.

They dragged me out of the room and dumped me on the freezing hospital corridor floor like I was garbage.

"CEO Gilbert's orders. Starting today, every privilege you had as Mrs. Gilbert is revoked."

"You're no longer entitled to this VIP room."

They took my phone. My wallet. They stripped the expensive hospital gown off my body and left me in nothing but the thinnest cotton slip underneath.

Penniless, post-op, standing in a dark hospital corridor in the middle of the night. Like a joke.

Giles came in person to pick me up.

Not to take me home.

To punish me.

He shoved me into the car and drove all the way out to his private woodland estate on the edge of the city.

The forest outside the windows was pitch black. The cold wind cut straight through me and I couldn't stop trembling.

The door opened and he pushed me out, hard.

"Kneel. Apologize to Lucy."

I looked at him. My eyes were dead.

"Never."

One word, and it lit the fuse on everything left of his rage.

He grabbed my hair and forced my face into the mud, then wrenched my head back so I had to look up at him.

"Beulah, you think you still get to make demands?"

He let go. Stepped back. Closed the car door.

"Stay here and think about what you've done."

"When you've come to your senses, you can walk yourself out."

The engine roared to life. The headlights swept across my face, white and bloodless.

I watched that light shrink, smaller and smaller, until it vanished into the endless dark.

Damp. Cold. And the waves of sharp pain from the wound in my belly.

I lay facedown in the freezing mud, staring in the direction the taillights had disappeared.

The last remnant of something inside me, the thing I'd once called love, finally went out for good.

I lay curled beneath a massive exposed root, cold sweat soaking through the thin hospital gown.

The wound across my abdomen screamed with every movement, each shift tearing it open all over again.

When I was little, the bullies at the orphanage used to lock me in a pitch-black closet. That fear never left me.

I couldn't breathe. My heart hammered so hard it felt like it would burst out of my throat.

Giles knew. He knew all of it. He used to carry me on his back even on dark roads so I wouldn't be afraid.

I laughed—suddenly, out of nowhere—and the tears came while I was still laughing.

The man who once swore he'd spoil me for the rest of my life, who promised I'd never suffer—that man was dead. The years had killed him.

I couldn't stay here. There was one thing I still had to do.

I clenched my teeth, braced my elbows against the ground, and dragged myself forward inch by inch.

Dirt, gravel, snapped twigs. They carved bloody lines across my body, still raw from surgery.

I didn't know how long I crawled before I finally saw the edge of the woodland.

There was light.

I threw everything I had left into reaching it, but two tall figures stepped into my path.

Giles's bodyguards.

They looked down at me. Nothing but contempt and amusement in their eyes.

"Mrs. Gilbert, CEO Gilbert says if you won't apologize, you're never stepping out of these woods."

"Bathroom, sleep—you do it right here on the ground."

One of them delivered it without inflection.

"Honestly, Mrs. Gilbert, just apologize already. You know what kind of money CEO Gilbert's got? There's women lined up out the door waiting for him to keep them. You're an orphan—latching onto a man like him is more luck than you deserved in ten lifetimes. And you won't even give him a kid because you're scared it'll hurt…"

"You won't do it, plenty of others will. You think CEO Gilbert really wants to hang around waiting on you? He hasn't divorced you yet—that's already more than you deserve. So what are you making a fuss about? Just sit there, be a rich wife, and shut up."

"Think it over. When you've come to your senses, call for us."

My fingers clawed into the mud.

Nails cracked from the force, blood mixing with dirt, the pain boring straight to the bone.

"Wait."

I lifted my head and forced sound through a throat so raw it barely obeyed.

"Tell Giles."

"I'll apologize."

"I'm going back for one thing. Once I have it, I'm gone."

"I will never set foot in the Gilbert house again."

The two guards exchanged a glance, then one of them made the call.

Before long, a blinding set of high beams sliced through the dark.

Giles had come himself.

He got out, walked over, and stood above me, looking down at the mud and filth covering every inch of me.

Something shifted behind his eyes, too fast for me to read.

Then it was gone, replaced by open mockery.

"Beulah. So your pride was worth exactly one night in the dark?"

"Could've spared yourself the trouble."

He reached down to haul me off the ground.

The instant his warm palm touched my frozen arm, my body betrayed me with a shiver, some old reflex left over from years of needing him.

But the next second, a violent wave of nausea surged up from my stomach.

I wrenched his hand away and collapsed forward, retching against the dirt.

Giles's expression turned ugly.

He grabbed me roughly off the ground, shoved me into the car.

Neither of us spoke on the drive back.

At the villa, Lucinda was draped across the sofa looking delicate and pampered, a servant attending to her every need.

The moment she saw me, a smile of pure satisfaction spread across her face.

Giles pushed me in front of her and clamped both hands down on my shoulders.

"Kneel."

Cold. Not a voice—just ice shaped into a word.

I didn't fight it.

My knees struck the cold marble floor with a dull, heavy crack.