LOGINIt's all about to get spicy 🔥💘
(Richard’s POV)The Vermont house looked the same from the outside. That was the first thing that felt wrong. Porch light still off. Curtains still half-drawn the way we had left them. There was no broken glass. No forced door. The quiet of the place was so complete that for one stupid second I let myself hope she had simply fallen asleep with her phone dead.Then I unlocked the door and stepped inside.“Millie?”My voice moved through the rooms and came back unanswered. Adrianna followed behind me, still clutching the bag of documents like it was the only solid object left in her life. I moved through the ground floor fast to the kitchen, living room, the small hallway bathroom. A mug sat half-full on the counter. Her sweater was missing from the chair where she had left it. The bag she kept packed near the door was gone.She hadn’t been taken from the house. She had left it.I took the stairs two at a time, ribs still protesting from the fight in the woods, and shoved open the bedro
(Richard’s POV)The private clinic took Vivienne without questions because I paid enough to buy silence for the night. Two attendants met us at the side entrance, transferred her onto a stretcher, and disappeared down a pale corridor with the efficient indifference of people who had been paid not to remember faces. Adrianna stood beside me in the concrete bay with her bag clutched to her chest and blood dried dark brown along the edges of her fingers. She looked smaller under the fluorescent lights. Not softer. Just reduced by the reality of what she had done.“She’ll talk,” Adrianna said.“Eventually.” I checked my phone again. “Everyone talks when the advantage shifts.”Millie had messaged twenty minutes earlier.Millie:Got delayed. Phone signal is bad. I’ll call within the hour. Don’t worry.The words were right. The timing was almost right. Something about the flatness of it still sat wrong in my chest, but the night was already full of emergencies and I forced myself to take the
(Millie POV)The structure was a cabin, older than I expected and better maintained than it first appeared from the road. Henry unlocked the door and motioned me inside without touching me. That detail mattered more than it should have. He was still performing control, not frenzy. The main room was one open space: a low couch, a table, heavy curtains already drawn, a kitchenette along the far wall. One lamp burned in the corner. The air smelled faintly of dust and recent cleaning, as if the place had been prepared without being lived in.I stopped a few steps from the door.“If this is about money, Richard will pay.”Henry closed the door and turned the lock with a soft, final click. “It isn’t about money.”“Then what?”He removed the cap and set it on the table. Without it, he looked fully himself again, composed, intelligent, and colder than the version of him Henrietta used to defend. My phone remained in his pocket. The car keys disappeared into a drawer he shut with his hip.“Sit
(Millie POV)The sound of the locks re-engaging was quieter than my heartbeat. For a second I simply stared at the rearview mirror, at the eyes that were no longer pretending to belong to a stranger. Henry. With cap low, posture relaxed, one hand steady on the wheel as if this were an ordinary drive and I had not just realized I was in the wrong car with the wrong man on the wrong road.“Stop the car,” My voice rose above than usual.“No.”My hand lunged for the door handle anyway. It didn’t open. I hit the unlock button. Nothing changed. Child locks. Or something he had already controlled. The window switch was dead under my fingers too.“Henry.” My voice came out harder than I felt. “Stop the car and let me out.”He glanced at me in the mirror, then returned his attention to the dark road. “You’re pregnant. And you’re scared at the same time. And right now Richard is occupied with your mother and a bleeding ex-wife. Getting out of a moving car on an empty road is a bad idea. You sho
(Millie POV)The house felt wrong the moment the call ended. Richard’s voice was still in my ear controlled, firm way, telling me to stay, telling me he was handling it, telling me not to come. He had said Vivienne was injured. He had said my mother was involved. He had said he would explain everything when he got back.And he had said it from her apartment.I stood in the middle of the living room with the phone clutched in my hand and the baby shifting restlessly under my ribs, as if even they could feel the spike of fear and anger moving through me. The curtains were half drawn. The locks were turned. None of it felt like safety. It felt like being left behind inside someone else’s decision again. I tried to sit. But I lasted less than a minute. If my mother and Vivienne had gotten into a violent confrontation, if Richard was there containing blood and secrets, then waiting passively in a quiet house while the people who shaped my life collided without me was impossible. I had done
(Richard’s POV)I heard the blood before I saw it. Not literally, but the second Adrianna opened Vivienne’s door, the smell of it mixed with perfume and panic told me how bad the night had already become. She stood there with a stained cloth in one hand and her phone in the other, eyes too wide, face pale under the hallway light. Behind her, Vivienne was on the floor near the console, propped awkwardly against it, a dark smear matting the hair above her temple.“She’s awake,” Adrianna said hoarsely. “She tried to get up.”I moved past her and shut the door hard behind me. The lock clicked. For a moment the only sound was Vivienne’s uneven breathing and the distant city noise through the windows. Vivienne’s eyes found me. They were glassy, unfocused at first, then sharp with recognition and pain. A thin, bloody smile pulled at one corner of her mouth.“Of course,” she rasped. “The hero arrives.”“Don’t talk.” I crouched beside her and carefully checked the wound. The bleeding had slowe







