Chapter 2 Callie

I stood paralyzed in the doorway, waiting for the frantic scramble. I waited for him to shove the woman away, to pull up his pants in horrified panic, to stammer out a desperate, tearful apology and swear it was all a massive mistake. I waited for the man I had just sold my body to save to show a single ounce of remorse.

But it never came.

Instead, the brief flash of surprise in his dark eyes instantly dissolved into cold, hard annoyance. He didn't scramble backward. He didn't even look ashamed. With agonizing slowness, he casually stepped away from the desk and reached down to pull up his pants, his movements entirely unbothered.

The brunette beneath him didn't scramble for her clothes either. She leaned back on her elbows, crossing her tanned legs, and let out a soft, mocking laugh.

"Well," the woman purred, her gaze raking over my terrified face with absolute disdain. "You didn't mention your little charity project was the clingy type, Tristan."

"She’s not usually," Tristan replied dryly. He zipped his pants and fastened his belt, finally turning to face me fully. The mask of the stressed, desperate, terrified husband he had worn for the last three weeks was completely gone. In its place was a chillingly arrogant stranger. "What are you doing here, Callista? You're supposed to be at the clinic."

My mouth opened, but no sound came out. The air in the room felt too thin to breathe. I looked down at the box on the floor, the silver watch I had sacrificed my own flesh and blood to buy him gleaming under the lights. Then, I looked back at his perfectly calm face.

"The...the loan sharks," I choked out, my voice trembling so violently it barely sounded like my own. My hands instinctively dropped to shield my lower stomach, where a dull, heavy cramp pulsed. "I paid them, Tristan. The wire cleared. I came to tell you we were safe."

Tristan stared at me for a long, silent second. And then, he laughed.

It wasn't a nervous laugh. It was a dark, genuine chuckle of pure amusement that sent a shard of ice straight through my heart.

"God, you are so incredibly gullible, Callie. There are no loan sharks. Nobody is coming to break my legs or kill me."

The room spun. My knees buckled slightly, but I caught myself on the wooden doorframe. "What? But...the debts...the eviction notices..."

"Manufactured," he cut me off smoothly. "I needed a quick injection of liquid cash to hold me over, and you were too stingy with your multiple little waitress paychecks. I knew if I pushed the right buttons, your pathetic savior complex would kick in. And look at that, it worked perfectly. Half a million dollars for nine months of your time? It was a solid return on investment."

My breath hitched. The physical pain in my pelvis was suddenly replaced by a suffocating, agonizing betrayal that felt like my chest was being cleaved open with a blunt axe.

"You made it up," I whispered, the horrifying reality crashing down on me in waves. "You made me sign a commercial surrogacy contract...you made me let strangers put a baby inside me...for a lie?"

"I made you do what you do best, Callista. Be useful," Tristan sneered. He walked around the desk and stopped a few feet in front of me, his dark eyes filled with absolute contempt. "I'm done playing this pathetic, poverty-stricken game with you. My 'exile' is over. My mother finally convinced the board to let me come home."

"Exile? Come home?" I shook my head. "Tristan, what are you talking about? Who are you?"

"My last name isn't Smith, Callie. It's Hawthorne. Tristan Hawthorne."

The name hit me like a blow. You couldn't live in New York and not know the Hawthornes. They owned half the real estate in Manhattan, a global sports franchise, and billions in offshore assets. They were practically royalty.

For three years, I had worked double shifts until my feet bled to pay for Tristan's food, his rent, and his server costs. I had destroyed my own credit score to keep his startup afloat. I had loved him with every fractured piece of my heart. And the entire time, he had been a billionaire’s heir, slumming it in my apartment like poverty was a fun little vacation.

Tristan held out a thick folder. "I was going to have my lawyers courier this to you on Monday, but since you're here, we might as well cut the dead weight now."

I stared blindly at the folder. "What is that?"

"Divorce papers," he stated coldly. "Fully drafted, thoroughly ironclad. You get nothing. Not that I have anything under the name you married me with anyway. Sign them, take your agency payout, and crawl back to whatever hole you came from. You are a pathetic, exhausting charity case, and frankly, Sloane here is much more my speed."

Sloane smiled triumphantly, stepping up beside him and threading her fingers through his.

A sob caught in my throat. I reached out, my trembling hand knocking the folder out of his grip. The papers scattered across the floor, covering the discarded silver watch.

"You're a monster," I breathed, tears finally spilling hot and fast down my cheeks. "You used me."

Tristan’s face hardened. He picked up his desk phone and hit a single button. "Security? I have a trespasser in my office. Yes, she's hostile. Remove her immediately."

"Tristan, no..."

Before I could even process the threat, heavy footsteps pounded down the hallway. Two massive security guards appeared behind me and without a word, grabbed me by the arms. The sheer force of their grip jarred my fragile, aching body. A sharp stab of pain shot through my uterus, making me cry out, but Tristan didn't even flinch.

He turned his back to me, wrapping his arm around Sloane's waist as the guards physically dragged me backward out of the office.

"Tristan!" I screamed, my heels dragging uselessly against the carpet as they hauled me through the lobby. "You can't do this!"

They didn't stop. They dragged me straight through the glass doors of the building and shoved me violently out onto the cold, unforgiving concrete of the sidewalk. I stumbled, my knees hitting the pavement hard, tearing the fabric of my cheap jeans and scraping my skin raw.

The security guards turned around, walking back inside and locking the glass doors behind them, leaving me completely alone on the street.

I stayed on my hands and knees for a long time, the freezing New York wind whipping my hair across my face. The sharp, persistent cramping in my lower stomach flared aggressively, a brutal reminder that while Tristan had completely erased me from his life, I was still carrying the physical consequences of his lies inside my body.

Numbness slowly began to overtake the panic. I forced myself to stand, my entire body shaking.

I didn't know where to go. I wandered the city streets for hours, moving like a ghost through the crowded sidewalks. The sky turned an ugly gray, matching the dead feeling inside my chest. I clung to one single, desperate thought: I needed to go home. Our tiny, moldy rental house in Queens wasn't much, but it was mine. I could pack my meager belongings, get into my warm bed, and figure out how to survive this nightmare tomorrow.

The sun was completely gone by the time I finally dragged my exhausted, aching body up the cracked walkway to our rental house.

I reached into my coat pocket for my keys, when my eyes lifted to the front porch, stopping me dead in my tracks.

The keys slipped from my frozen fingers, clattering onto the concrete.

Scattered carelessly across the overgrown front lawn were six heavy black trash bags. Several of them had been thrown with such force that the plastic had split open. Spilling out onto the damp grass were my clothes, shoes, and the few books I owned.

Sitting on top of the pile, completely exposed to the elements, was the small, wooden memory box I had managed to smuggle out of my parents' house five years ago. The lid was broken; the only surviving childhood photos I had of my grandmother scattered across the dirt.

A low rumble of thunder vibrated through the air, and a second later, the sky cracked open. As if mocking me, freezing rain began to fall, soaking my clothes in seconds and washing away the ink on my photographs.

I stood there in the pouring rain, staring at my discarded life, with absolutely nothing left but the clothes on my back and a stranger's baby growing inside my womb.