1. A hasty escape

Olivia walked through the kitchen, the knife clutched tightly in her trembling hand.

She was still in her white hospital pajamas and barefoot, having dropped her slippers when she jumped, with great effort, over the short fence of her own house.

Olivia walked around the dimly lit room.

She knew the exact location of every piece of furniture, every lamp, every ornament.

This had been her home for nearly eight years, the home she had shared in a marriage she believed to be true and real, but which was as false as all the feelings "her dear husband" had professed for her.

The same man who was now upstairs, probably with another woman.

Olivia knew it, her sixth sense told her, just as she knew the day her older sister would die.

She cried and kicked to keep her from celebrating with her friends, but since she was only an eleven year old girl, no one paid any attention to her.

At midnight, her parents were notified that their teenage daughter had been stabbed and raped in a dark alley in the city.

She went up to the second floor and walked down the dimly lit hallway to her master bedroom at the end.

They hadn't even bothered to close the door properly, and through the crack, where excited moans crept in, she could see firsthand her husband, lying on the same bed they slept in every day, being ridden by a half-naked redhead who moaned in pleasure every time her buttocks rose and fell on the hard erection.

A thread called sanity snapped in Olivia's not-so-balanced mind.

While this son of a bitch was fucking his assistant in her own home, she was barely recovering from a salpingectomy that removed one fallopian tube and part of the other, making it almost impossible for her to conceive as a mother in the future.

She was mourning the loss of her unborn child, whom she had not even known existed until the fateful car accident that had kept her in the hospital all this time, and the father of her child and husband of 8 years was already looking for a surrogate.

Olivia stormed into the room like a madwoman and pushed the woman against the floor.

The woman fell to the floor screaming from the shock and sudden impact.

- What the hell is going on? - exclaimed Alexander, stunned, because one moment he was enjoying great sex and the next his wife, who was supposed to be recovering in the hospital, was standing in front of him like a madwoman with a knife in her hand, threatening him.

- Is this the important business you had abroad, why couldn't you stay in the hospital and take care of me? - Olivia asked him with a deadly coldness that chilled his blood.

- Olivia, let me explain ... - Alexander began to tell her, trying to cover his private parts with the sheet, because the sight of the wobbly knife in Olivia's hand worried him a little.

- I think the only thing that is certain is that you are leaving with your assistant - his wife interrupted him as if she were speaking in a monologue, she even pretended to be thoughtful.

Olivia was completely out of her mind, blinded by anger and extreme pain.

- Then those photos that were sent to me anonymously, and I thought they were just a montage, are more than true - she added, pulling a crumpled photo from her pajama pocket and throwing it on the bed, within Alexander's reach.

The man came closer and saw himself in the photo, kissing the same woman who was cowering on the floor, trying to pass for invisible, coming out of a hotel he had thought was discreet and secluded, but which was apparently not so much.

- Were you following me? - he asked impulsively, then regretted it when he saw the madness in his wife's eyes.

Actually, deep down, he thought she was just trying to scare him.

That the peaceful, even submissive Olivia would never do anything to hurt him, loved him too much, smothered him too much, and was just having a fit of spite and jealousy.

But sometimes he doubted his own assessment of his wife's character, he had never seen her like this, so determined, so willing to do whatever it took without measuring the consequences, and it made him a little nervous.

- I wasn't following you, I never thought there was any need for that, someone sent me those pictures and I, like a fool, desperately went to your company to ask you, only for you, like the damn liar you are, to tell me that someone wanted to hurt you, that it was just a trap and we would go back to pretending to be the happy family I thought we were! - she answered him with a sarcastic laugh as she walked to the side of the bed where the man was.

Alexander tensed, he never thought he would be a little afraid of his thin wife, but the butcher knife in her trembling hand was no joke.

However, he wasn't going to stand idly by while she stabbed him in a fit of spiteful rage.

He moved from his position, ready to run like the coward he was and get out of this trap.

- Do you know how I felt when they told me I had lost the only baby I would probably ever have in my life? - she said suddenly, standing very close to the bed and looking at him with infinite hatred and rancor

- Do you know what your damned infidelity has done to me?!- she shouted at him, remembering how she had felt a few days before, when those photos of her husband's infidelity had come into her hands.

She, like a tormented fool, had gone out in her car, lost control and crashed into the obstacles of a half-built road, losing more as a result of an iron stuck in her belly than she could ever recover in this life.

Blinded by so many destructive and vengeful emotions, she climbed on the bed like a madwoman and started making wild movements with the knife to hurt Alexander.

She wanted him to suffer in his own flesh, all the pain she felt in her body and soul.

Of course, no one was going to stay locked in a room with a crazy woman waving a knife in the air.

The first to flee was the assistant, who had crawled to the doorway during Olivia's exchange with Alexander.

When she saw that things had come to a head, she got up naked, opened the door and ran out screaming.

Alexander still wanted to run away, but the room wasn't that big and there wasn't that much room to maneuver, his wife was pouncing on him like an unhinged Camicace, clearly intending to hurt him or worse, kill him.

He turned and tried to grab Olivia's hands and make her let go of the knife, they struggled a little, but Alexander did not understand where Olivia got so much strength to face him with that thin and weak body from the operation.

Olivia clutched the knife as if her life depended on it, and in the end he had no choice but to push her to the ground and run.

He would call the police, the asylum, wherever, to take the deranged woman away.

Olivia fell hard to the carpeted floor, moaning in pain.

It had only been a few days since her surgery, and although it was a minimal access laparoscopic procedure, her entire abdomen was still tender and recovering.

She got up from the floor as if possessed and ran after Alexander as fast as she could, screaming every curse she knew.

Alexander had already reached the stairs and seemed almost safe from Olivia's madness, but in a series of backward glances and missteps, he lost his balance and rolled trembling all the way down the high stairs to the living room floor, where he was knocked unconscious, blood pouring from his head.

- Oh, my God! - cried Olivia's best friend, Noah, as she put her hand to her mouth and looked at Alexander, unconscious or dead, lying face down on the floor in a strange posture, his head surrounded by a pool of blood, while her friend walked impassively down the stairs with a knife in her hand and an attitude of not caring whether her husband was alive or dead.

- John, make sure he's not dead and don't touch anything! - she suddenly said to her husband who was accompanying her, coming out of her stupor and approaching Olivia who was already on the last steps looking at Alexander's body.

- Olivia, my friend, look at me, I know you are in pain, but this is not right, Olivia, look me in the eye - she almost begged, gently reaching out to try to grab the knife from Olivia's pale hand.

She prayed it wouldn't suddenly attack her, her friend seemed gone, she didn't look like her, she was lost in her own self-destructive world.

- Noah .... Noah, he took my baby from me - she finally said, breaking down and tears streaming down her cheeks.

- I know, I know, but we are going to get through this Olivia, we are going to get through this together- she finally replied, hugging her and letting her friend cling to her and begin to cry inconsolably

- Olivia! - she suddenly cried out as she felt the woman's body soften in her arms and she lost her grip.

Olivia had fainted.

John immediately went over to help her and carried Olivia, princess style, to the car.

- The man is not dead - the burly man told her seriously.

- We can't leave her here, John, her husband is the son of an important lawyer and Olivia has no support, they will bury her in jail, we have to take her with us - Noah replied, making a decision on the spot.

If she left Olivia to her fate, she would never forgive herself, her friend would go completely crazy, they had to escape.

As usual, John didn't ask any more questions, he just nodded and they quickly left the house.

Luckily it was late at night and the houses in this residential area were separated for privacy, but when they arrived they saw a naked woman running desperately down the street looking for help.

The police would be there any minute, maybe a neighbor had already called.

- Do you know if they have security cameras? - John asked his wife, who had already settled into the back of the car with Olivia in her arms.

- No, Alexander doesn't like to be "watched" - she replied sarcastically, paraphrasing the words of Olivia's disgraced husband, who obviously didn't want to leave any evidence of his misdeeds in his own home.

Wasting no time, John climbed into the driver's seat, stepped on the gas, and sped off into the dark street.

Olivia fainted from the psychological impact, unable to imagine that she was driving away from everything she knew, to an unexpected and unbelievable new beginning.