Chapter Four: Consequences & Repercussions

The blood drained from my face. For a second, my heart went completely still.

She’d told them the truth.

There was a pounding in my head, which grew louder with each passing minute.

“Can’t you speak?” she hissed, “I said who is the scumbag who got you pregnant!”

I couldn’t say a word. What was there to say? That I didn’t know him? That it was no more than a stranger I’d met at the club?

“Please tell me it’s some respectable gentleman who’d be willing to wed you and save us from this shame,” my mother pleaded, tears filling her eyes, but I remained silent.

A respectable gentleman wouldn’t be at a club, partying and having flings with random, desperate girls. A respectable man wouldn’t have abandoned me in a hotel, without even a note to tell me he was gone.

One thing was clear, my faceless stranger was anything but respectable.

“I told you,” My father said to Grace, “We should have gotten rid of her when we had the chance.”

His words cut through me like daggers. I wasn’t unaware that my parents couldn’t wait to be rid of me, that was exactly why I’d been promised to the first available person. Still, they’d never once said the words right to my face, never. Not until now.

Rage built up in my chest. So I made a mistake and ended up pregnant, but the only reason I’d gone to that club was because I’d felt the need to prove something to myself; for the first time in my life, I wanted to be everything they believed me to be.

This was all as much their faults as it was mine.

Burning with anger, there was only one person I could direct it on.

My gaze met Rosalia, and I closed the distance between us.

“How could you be so heartless?” I asked, my stare burning into her. “How could you be this so…cruel?”

I’d begged her for a little more time, I’d even agreed to her stupid request, all so she could keep this a secret.

I should have known better. I should have known Rosalia was never planning to keep to her words.

“Bella, you know more than anyone else how much I love you—I only did this for you,” she said, her eyes filled with false emotion. “I knew on your own you’d never be able to muster the courage to tell them, so I did the hard part for you.”

“You bitch!” I gritted out with all the anger I could muster, and she flinched like I’d hit her; tears trailed her cheeks. If I didn’t know her well enough, I would have fallen for her act.

“Bellatrix!” my father called warningly. “Don’t you dare speak to your elder sister with such disrespect.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you, really,” Rosalia was saying, “I only did what I thought was right.”

“Oh please, quit the pretense,” I sneered.

“I will not warn you again,” my father threatened.

“Could you for once open your eyes and see the monster you all call daughter. Every kind gesture from her is nothing but a lie, she is a fake—”

Pain exploded on my face from the punch I’d just received from my father. Blood dripped down my now broken nose, and I spat out a bloodied tooth.

“She isn’t the one who got knocked up by a stranger, nor is she the one constantly bringing shame to this family!” my father bellowed.

“You tried to snatch your own sister’s finance, yet you still can’t see that you’re nothing but a rotten egg—you can’t see that you’re the problem,” my mother spat.

I wondered if they’d think their daughter so innocent, if they knew that the perfect Rosalia had lost her virginity at thirteen, to a pack soldier who’d at that time been five years older than she was.

Or maybe, even then, they’d choose to turn a blind eye to that too.

“You’re not so innocent either—none of you are!” I cried out, “If you weren’t both shitty parents none of this would have happened in the first place—”

For the second time, pain seared through my cheek. This time though, it was my mother.

For such a small woman, my mother possessed such strange strength.

“Say one more word,” she threatened, “And I swear to you, you’d spend the next months in the dungeons.”

She meant it.

I could see it on her face.

“We’ll have to fix this—and fast,” she said, “Your marriage to General Martins is in a month, we’ll have to shift the date.”

“What?”

“You’ll be eighteen in two weeks,” she went on, like I hadn’t spoken, “I don’t see the need to delay the marriage two weeks longer.

While the preparations are being put in place, you cannot let Martins know of the pregnancy. You must be intimate with him as soon as you get married, this way, he won’t have any reason to question the child not being his, got it?”

“But we can’t—”

“I’m this close,” she whispered, “Just this close, to making you disappear from our lives forever. Don’t test me.

You’ll do as you're told, Bellatrix, with no questions.”