CHAPTER 2

ELENA

“WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY BABY?”

Daniel went still beside the bed, one hand frozen on the sash of the bathrobe he'd yanked around himself half a second too late. Sofia hadn't even managed that much….she sat against the headboard with the sheet clutched to her chest, her hair falling loose over her shoulders.

I should have been screaming. I should have been throwing something, breaking something, giving this moment the violence it deserved.

Instead I just stood there, looking between them, waiting for one of them to tell me I was wrong.

"Elena." Daniel found his voice first. "You need to calm down."

"Don't." My own voice came out low, and stranger than I expected. "Don't you dare tell me to calm down."

"You're not thinking clearly. It must be the pregnancy…"

"I heard you." I took a step into the room. "Both of you. I heard every word."

That landed. I watched it land … watched the careful concern drain out of his face and something colder take its place.

Sofia didn't flinch. She didn't reach for an explanation, didn't even bother pretending to be caught. She watched me like a child throwing a tantrum.

"You knew," I said to her. "You knew what he did to my baby."

She said nothing. But her mouth curved, just slightly, and that small, involuntary smile told me more than a confession would have.

Daniel exhaled, and something in his shoulders loosened, like a man setting down a weight he was tired of carrying.

"There's no point hiding it now, is there." He said it to Sofia, not to me, as if I were an audience rather than his wife. Then he looked at me properly for the first time since I'd opened that door. "You want the truth, Elena? Fine. I'll give it to you."

I made myself hold still.

"I was your father's secretary for six years before I married you. Long enough to know exactly what he was worth. His companies. His holdings. What would come to you when he was gone." He said it plainly, the way another man might recite an old address. "And long enough to know what you were worth, too."

"No!! You're saying…"

"I'm saying I did the math long before I ever asked I proposed to you."

Something cold moved through me, a suspicion I didn't want to look at directly yet. "What do you mean, before?"

Daniel's mouth curved, and that, more than anything he'd said so far, made my stomach drop.

"Three months," he repeated. "Give or take."

"Daniel?"

"You still haven't asked me the right question." He tilted his head, almost gently, like he was disappointed in me for missing it. "You asked what I did to your son. You haven't asked what I did to your parents."

The room seemed to lose all its air at once.

"No." I heard my own voice from somewhere far away. "The accident. It was an accident. The brakes…."

"The brakes were exactly what I paid a mechanic to make them." He said it the way he might correct a figure on a spreadsheet. "Your father was careful with everything except who he trusted with his car."

I couldn't feel my hands.

"You killed them."

"I made an opportunity." He shrugged, as if the distinction mattered to him. "You were always going to inherit everything eventually. I simply decided eventually was inconvenient. An orphaned heiress, grieving and alone, needed someone to lean on." His eyes flicked over me, almost fond. "I made sure I was standing exactly where you'd fall."

Eight years of memories flash-flooded my mind…every gift, every soft word, every time he held me while I cried over my parents’ graves. All of it engineered. All of it a cage

"Every kindness," I said slowly, "every single thing you did for me that year…."

"Was calculated. Yes." No hesitation. No apology in it at all. "You cried on my shoulder for eleven months before I asked you to be my wife. I let you take your time. I'm not a monster, Elena ….I'm patient."

"You are a monster! I loved you for God's sake!"

“And loving me was the biggest mistake you ever made."

I turned to Sofia, needing to look at something that wasn't his face. "Did you know? About my parents?"

"Not then." She examined her nails, bored, as if this were the least interesting part of the conversation. "He told me later. After we started."

"And that didn't matter to you."

"Why would it?" Her eyes met mine, flat and untroubled. "It happened to you. Not to me."

I turned back to Daniel, my whole body shaking now with something too large to name. "And the baby. Our son."

His expression didn't change, and somehow that was worse than if it had.

"A child changes things," he said, exactly as calmly as he'd described murdering my father. "Custody. Inheritance disputes if you ever came to your senses and left. A son especially.... you'd have built your whole life around protecting his claim to everything, and I'd have spent the rest of mine managing you instead of the company." He said it like a man listing line items. "I couldn't allow that kind of risk."

"So you killed him too."

"We were careful." For the first time, something like defensiveness entered his voice, as though I should credit him for the method. "Something slow. Enough to end things without ending them all at once. Your body never knew the difference. There was no reason for you to suspect anything."

"So I kept feeling pregnant." My voice had gone hollow. "I kept talking to him. Choosing names. Standing in his nursery at midnight because I couldn't sleep without checking on a room that didn't have a crib in it yet."

He looked away from me for the first time.

"You let me love a son you already knew was dead. The same way you let me love a father you already knew you'd killed."

"Elena don't be dramatic"

"Dramatic?." I backed toward the door, putting distance between us before I did something I couldn't take back. "You took everything away from me!!!!"

Sofia rolled her eyes, pulling the sheet tighter. "This is exhausting."

"Do you feel anything?" I asked her. "Anything at all?"

"No." No hesitation. No performance of remorse for my benefit. "I don't."

Something in me went very still and very cold, the way water goes right before it turns to ice.

I looked at Daniel one last time.... at the face I'd memorized across eight years of breakfasts and arguments and nights I'd thought were real, at the hand that had steadied me at my parents' graves...and felt nothing where love used to live. Only the shape of where it had been, and everything he'd built inside that shape.

"I hate you," I said, and meant it more completely than I had ever meant anything in my life.

He moved toward me. "The feeling is mutual darling, I hate every second I spent with you"

"Don't touch me."

He reached for my arm anyway, and I wrenched away from him, my shoulder catching the doorframe.

"Don't you think about telling anyone about this, It's not like they're going to believe you. I have the power to make you disappear, so continue being the dumb and loyal wife that you are" he said in a low and terrifying voice

"Take your hands off me."

He didn't. His fingers closed around my wrist, and I shoved against his chest with everything I had left.

He shoved back.

I didn't see the floor coming so much as feel it....the jolt through my hip, my shoulder, and then the pain, sharp and low and wrong, tearing through my abdomen in a way that had nothing to do with falling.

I curled around myself on the floor, gasping, waiting... some small, stupid, still-hopeful part of me waiting... for him to kneel down. To reach for me. To be, for one second, the man I'd thought I married.

He didn't move.

Sofia slid out of bed, wrapping the sheet around herself like a woman late for an appointment. "Come on, Daniel."

He looked down at me once more... not with concern, not even with cruelty, just with the mild inconvenience of a man stepping around a piece of thrash and then he followed her out.

I heard them laughing before I heard the front door close.

I lay there for a long moment, listening to the silence they'd left behind, my hand pressed to my stomach as if I could still protect what was already gone. My parents. My son. Eight years I'd have sworn on anything were real.

All of it, engineered. All of it, mine to grieve alone.

Then I made myself move. Made myself find the wall, then my feet, then the strength to walk out of a house that had never once belonged to anyone I recognized.

Whatever came next, I would face it without him.

He had to pay for everything he’s done to me.