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Chapter 7: Building in the Dark
publish date:
2026-05-13 14:18:22
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Married For Revenge, Pregnant With His Regret Chapter 17: Sofia Goes to War
My best friend is terrifying when she loves you.I had known this since we were nineteen years old and a professor had marked my thesis down for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of the work and everything to do with the fact that I had disagreed with him publicly in a seminar the week before. Sofia had found out on a Thursday. By the following Monday, the professor had received a formal academic misconduct inquiry, three of his previous students had come forward with documented complaints, and I had a revised grade sitting in my university portal that was exactly what the work deserved.Sofia had never mentioned it. She had simply shown up at my door that Thursday evening with wine and takeout and the calm, satisfied expression of a woman who had handled something and did not require acknowledgment for having handled it. That was who she was. That was who she had always been.So when she filed the first of the legal motions, I was not surprised by the fact of it. I was
Married For Revenge, Pregnant With His Regret Chapter 16: Charlie and Lila's Reunion
She was everything he remembered. He should have noticed that she was too perfect.I know what happened that evening because Marcus told me later, in the careful, precise way he reported things, without editorializing, without the particular coloring that guilt sometimes adds to memory. He told me the facts of it and I assembled the picture from them the way you assemble something from pieces that were never meant to come apart in the first place, recognizing the shape before you have finished putting it together.Lila arrived at seven.Charlie had arranged dinner at the penthouse. Not a restaurant, not a public space, not anywhere with cameras and witnesses and the ambient noise of other people's lives pressing in from all sides. The penthouse, which was private and controlled and exactly the kind of environment where a man who needed to feel in command of something could arrange a meeting on his own terms. Marcus had taken the evening off. The household staff had been given instruct
Married For Revenge, Pregnant With His Regret Chapter 15: Gone by Morning
I left before sunrise. New York was still dark. So was everything else.The alarm I had set for four forty-five was unnecessary. I had not slept. I had lain in the dark after the window, after the grief, after letting myself feel everything I had been holding back for four months, and I had stared at the ceiling and listened to the penthouse breathe around me and waited for the city outside to begin its slow shift from black to grey. Sleep had not been available. I had not particularly wanted it. There was a specific, exhausted clarity that came from a night of not sleeping that was almost useful, the way extreme cold is almost useful, stripping everything back to the essential, the necessary, the true.What was true: the suitcase was by the door.What was true: Sofia was already downstairs, engine running, in the dark grey sedan she had hired specifically because it was not a car anyone connected to either of our lives would recognize.What was true: I was sixteen weeks pregnant, new
Married For Revenge, Pregnant With His Regret Chapter 14: The Last Night
I should not have let him see me cry. But it was dark, and I thought I was alone.I had been methodical about the packing. That was how I handled the things that were too large to feel directly, I made them procedural, I gave them a sequence and a checklist and I moved through the sequence without allowing myself to stop and register what the sequence meant. One suitcase. Only what was mine. Nothing that belonged to the penthouse, nothing that had been provided or selected or arranged by anyone connected to the Kingsley name. My clothes. My notebooks. The small photograph of my mother I had kept in the nightstand drawer because it was the one thing I had brought from my old life that I could not leave behind even when leaving behind everything else felt necessary.I packed slowly. Not because I was reluctant. Because I was sixteen weeks pregnant and the suitcase was heavy and I was being careful, the way I had been careful about everything physical since the bathroom floor, since the
Married For Revenge, Pregnant With His Regret Chapter 13: The Divorce Trigger
Lila came back walking in Louboutins and a smile that said: your time is up.I found out the way I found out most things that happened in Charlie's world, not from Charlie, but from the particular shift in the penthouse's atmosphere, the way a house changes when the person who owns it changes. He had taken a call in his study the previous evening with the door closed, which was not unusual, but the quality of the silence afterward was. I had been in the east wing with the coat-lining notebook and I had heard nothing, no footsteps, no movement, just the specific stillness of a man sitting very quietly with something he had not yet decided how to hold.I had written two lines in the notebook and then stopped and listened to that silence for a long time.The next morning he was different. Not visibly. Not in any way that would have registered to someone who had not spent four months learning the precise vocabulary of his moods through walls and closed doors and mandatory dinners. But I h
Married For Revenge, Pregnant With His Regret Chapter 12: What Marcus Knows
He sat across from me at the table and I could see the guilt in the set of his shoulders. He knew. He had always known.Marcus Hale did not arrive with information. That was the first thing I understood about the meeting, reading it correctly before he had finished settling into the chair across from mine in the small, unremarkable café I had chosen on the basis that it was the kind of place where nobody looked twice at anyone. He arrived with a question. And in my experience, a man who arrives with a question rather than an answer is either more careful than you expected or more frightened than he is willing to show.With Marcus, I suspected both.He ordered coffee he did not drink. He set his hands flat on the table in the deliberate, conscious way of someone who has decided in advance to appear unthreatening, and he looked at me with the expression I had catalogued on the night of the gala and filed away without fully understanding: the specific, weighted look of a man carrying som
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