"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.

The wound across my abdomen split wider with every breath, blood soaking through the thin fabric of my pants in a spreading stain.

I kept my head bowed like a puppet with nothing left inside, repeating the same hollow apologies on loop.

"I'm sorry."

"I shouldn't have made you angry."

"I shouldn't have hurt you."

Lucinda savored every second of my humiliation, ordering the servants around like she was showing off a new toy.

"Go get Mrs. Gilbert's favorite jewelry set. I want to try it on."

"And that limited-edition bag. I want that too."

Giles stood there, cold-eyed, and let it happen.

He thought he'd won.

He thought he'd snapped the last bone of my pride.

No one noticed that beneath my lowered lashes, my gaze was locked on the second-floor study.

Giles, you think this is the cage that breaks me. You just opened the door to your own hell.

He looked at me—at the dead, hollow thing I'd become—and something clawed at him, something he couldn't name. I was already slipping out of reach, and he could feel it.

After the apology, Giles had me confined to the master bedroom.

Lucinda paraded around the living room like she owned the place, bossing every servant in the villa.

I shut the door and sealed out every sound.

I needed to rest. I needed to wait for my chance.

It came the next night.

An emergency at the company pulled Giles out of the villa in the middle of the night.

The moment I was sure he was gone, I dragged myself out of bed.

Every step sent a dull blade of pain through my abdomen, the wound pulling open a little more with each one.

But I couldn't afford to care.

I made my way to the second-floor study.

Everything was exactly as I'd left it.

I moved the bookshelf panel aside with practiced hands, revealing the hidden compartment and the safe behind it.

The combination was our wedding anniversary.

How fitting.

At the very bottom of the safe, a brown paper envelope lay waiting.

My hands were shaking as I pulled out what was inside.

A medical report from five years ago.

Three lines, printed black on white, that could ruin him:

*Giles Gilbert — congenital infertility — no known cure.*

My trump card was finally back in my hands.

Five years collapsed in on me at once.

The day I first held that report, my whole body went numb. I couldn't fathom what it would do to a man like Giles—that proud, that certain of himself—to learn the truth about his own body. I was terrified it would hollow him out, terrified his competitors would smell blood and use it to tear him apart. So I went to Rex Delgado, my closest friend and one of the top urologists in the country, and I begged him to bury the secret. Then I walked into a hospital alone and had an IUD put in, and I told everyone—Giles, his mother, the whole Gilbert family—that I was simply too afraid of the pain, that I didn't want children. For five years I swallowed every name they called me—the barren wife, the hen that couldn't lay eggs—and I carried the weight of the entire Gilbert family's contempt on my back without a word.

I thought I was protecting our love and his dignity.

Now I see it for what it was—one long, cruel joke.

I was about to leave the study when the door behind me opened.

Giles stood in the doorway, eyes dark and cold.

"What are you doing in my study this late?"

"Stealing trade secrets? Who are you running to for help?"

He closed the distance step by step, the pressure of him so suffocating I could barely breathe.

I forced myself to stay calm.

I pulled open the drawer and took out the only photograph we'd ever had together, then held it up in front of him and tore it apart, piece by slow piece.

I let the fragments fall at his feet, and when I spoke, my voice carried nothing at all—no anger, no grief, not even the memory of love.