Chapter 2

Elena's POV

I didn't burst into the room. I didn't scream. I didn't give them the satisfaction of seeing me shatter.

Instead, I turned and walked away, my heels silent on the rubber mats of the arena tunnels.

Every step felt like a mile and every breath felt like inhaling shards of ice. The laughter behind that heavy metal door, that cruel, harmonious sound, echoed in my skull, mocking every "I love you" Liam had ever whispered into my ear.

I didn't remember reaching the parking lot. I didn't remember starting the engine.

The next thing I knew, I was gripping the steering wheel of my Audi so hard my knuckles turned white, the massive structure of the Glaciers' arena looming over me in the rearview mirror. A place I used to call my second home. A place that was now nothing more than a monument to a year-long lie.

My phone buzzed on the passenger seat. A text from Sophia.

Sophia: “Good luck with the interview, sweetie! Let us know when you get the Green Card. Liam is so worried about you staying in the country!”

The hypocrisy was a physical blow. I wanted to scream until my lungs gave out. Liam wasn't worried about my visa; he was worried about losing his free nanny. He wasn't protecting me from "crazy fans"; he was protecting his real marriage.

I was the "smart one." The best surgeon in the league. I knew how to identify necrotic tissue. I knew when a limb was too far gone to be saved.

And Liam Sterling was a cancer.

"If they want to play a game," I thought, staring at my reflection in the glass, "I'll play. But they forgot that without the doctor, the team dies on the table."

But then, fate decided to play its own cruel joke on me.

The bathroom floor was cold.

I sat on the tiles of our master bathroom, staring at the small plastic stick in my hand.

The silence in the house was deafening, heavy with the ghosts of a marriage that never existed. This house, bought with my savings, titled in his name "for tax purposes." Another lie. Everything was a lie.

Five minutes. The box said to wait five minutes.

I bought the test because the nausea I'd felt in the car wasn't just grief. As a doctor, I knew my body. I knew the subtle swelling of my breasts and the fatigue I'd blamed on the playoffs.

Liam had spent months telling me I was "broken."

“It's okay, El,” he would say, his voice dripping with fake sympathy after every negative test. “My swimmers are Olympic level. The problem must be your stress. Your body is just too tense to carry my baby.”

He had made me feel like a defective woman. He had gaslighted me about my own biology to pave the way for his mistress's child.

I looked down at the stick.

Two pink lines. Bold. Unmistakable. Pregnant.

A hysterical laugh bubbled up in my throat, choking me until it turned into a jagged sob. I covered my mouth, tears scalding my cheeks. I wasn't infertile. I wasn't broken. I was carrying the child of a man who was currently planning to use me as a pawn to raise his bastard.

The cruelty of it was absolute. He probably knew I could conceive. He just didn't want my child.

"You bastard," I whispered to the empty, expensive room. "You absolute bastard."

My hand moved to my stomach. A life. A part of me. But also, a part of the monster who had destroyed me.

The phone on the bath mat buzzed again, vibrating against the tile. It hadn't stopped for twenty minutes. Seven missed calls from Liam. Three from Sophia.

And now, a new name flashed on the screen.

Marcus Kane.

The owner of the Glaciers. The man who held my career, and my future, in his hands.

The vibration felt like a countdown. I closed my eyes for a single second, letting the heartbroken girl die and the surgeon take over. It was time to cut out the rot.