Chapter 1: They thought I was weak

Calanthe>

Three days before my wedding, I walked into our bedroom and found my fiancé fucking our maid in our bed while telling her she fucked him better than I ever had, and I was eleven weeks pregnant with his child while he said it.

I should have screamed, but I stood in the doorway with my keys digging into my palm and listened to the headboard strike the wall.

I had left work two hours early because the bakery called about the wedding cake samples. Rafe had complained that I was making too many decisions without him, so I planned to surprise him with the final three flavors and spend one evening pretending we were still excited about planning our wedding together. The bakery box was downstairs on the entry table while upstairs, the woman who changed our sheets was on her hands and knees in the middle of them.

Her gray skirt was pushed over her hips. Rafe knelt behind her with one fist buried in her hair and the other gripping her hip while he drove into her.

“That’s it,” he said between hard breaths. “Fuck, you take me better than she does.”

The maid moaned against him. “Harder, Sir.”

My stomach lurched, though it had nothing to do with the pregnancy nausea I had been hiding for weeks. My mind searched for anything that could make what I was seeing less real, but there was no mistaking the man whose wedding envelopes I had addressed until two in the morning or the voice I had listened to every day for years.

Then Rafe buried himself against her and groaned into her shoulder, destroying whatever denial I had left.

Instinctively, I had started a voice memo downstairs when the first moan drifted from upstairs, and the phone was still recording inside my pocket when I stepped farther into the bedroom. “Was the wedding bed really the best place you could find?”

Rafe jerked his head toward me. The maid scrambled across the mattress and dragged her skirt down while the color drained from her face, but Rafe showed none of her shame. He pulled his trousers up and fastened them, annoyance written across his face like he had been interrupted rather than been caught betraying the woman he was supposed to marry.

“You’re early,” he said.

“I live here.”

The maid tried to move past me with her eyes lowered. I stepped aside because the anger I had for her was nothing beside what I had for the man who had promised to marry me.

Rafe rubbed one hand over his hair. “Calanthe, don’t turn this into a disaster. It was just sex.”

“In our bed, three days before our wedding?”

“So?”

I stared at him, waiting for any sign that he understood how insane he sounded, but all I saw was impatience.

“She’s better in bed,” he said. “That doesn’t change who I’m marrying.”

Rage pushed through the numbness that had kept me standing there.

Rafe sighed before speaking to me with the same patronizing patience he used whenever he thought I was too stupid to understand him. “You’re my fiancée. You get the house, the family name, the life you wanted. I’m still a man, Calanthe, and marriage doesn’t mean I spend the rest of my life pretending one woman is all I’ll ever want.”

“You’re a nutcase.”

His mouth twisted. “Just like your dead father.”

My palm struck his face with all the strength I had, snapping his head aside, but he recovered almost immediately and grabbed my throat before driving me backward into the dresser.

Perfume bottles and jewelry boxes crashed onto the floor while I clawed at his wrist.

“You do not hit me,” he said through his teeth. “How dare you?”

His fist struck my mouth before I could respond, and pain burst across my face while blood spread over my tongue. I swung blindly and caught his shoulder, which only made him angrier. His next blow struck my stomach and folded me over myself.

I dropped toward the floor, but Rafe kicked me twice before I could protect my abdomen. The first kick struck my ribs, while the second hit lower and sent a violent cramp through my body.

Warmth soaked the inside of my jeans.

I looked down and saw blood spreading through the denim, and the sight dragged a broken sound from me.

My hands covered my stomach while another cramp bent me forward. The ultrasound photograph inside my handbag downstairs filled my thoughts, along with the tiny figure I had stared at on the screen only days earlier. 

Footsteps rushed up the stairs before Victoria—Rafe’s mother entered the bedroom with Tristan—his brother, and Helen—their aunt, behind her. I had not known they were downstairs, but none of them reacted to the maid pulling her clothes into place or Rafe fastening his trousers.

Victoria glanced at the blood on the carpet before directing her attention to her son. “What happened?”

“She hit me,” Rafe said.

Helen glanced at my split lip and moved her eyes elsewhere. “Calanthe has always been emotional.”

Tristan leaned against the doorframe and laughed under his breath. “Maybe she finally figured out she isn’t good in bed.”

Another cramp twisted through me while I stared at all three of them. “You knew he was sleeping with her.”

Nobody denied it.

I used the dresser to pull myself upright while Victoria adjusted one pearl at her throat.

“Men have needs, Calanthe,” she said. “A sensible woman understands the difference between sex and marriage.”

“You’re talking about his needs while I’m bleeding.”

Her eyes dropped toward my stomach, and the smugness in her face weakened.

A laugh escaped me and split my lip wider. “He may have just killed his own child, and you’re worried about whether I embarrassed him.”

Helen whispered my name, but I lifted one hand before she could say anything else. Whatever sympathy she had discovered was useless to me now.

I walked into the closet on legs that barely supported me and pulled my old duffel from the top shelf. I packed the clothes that had been mine before Rafe, my boots, identification papers, the cash I kept hidden for emergencies, and my grandmother’s turquoise necklace.

Rafe stayed near the closet entrance. “You’re being ridiculous. The wedding is in three days.”

I zipped the bag and faced him. “There is no wedding.”

His eyes narrowed. “Everything is paid for.”

“I don’t care.”

“You walk out and you leave with nothing.”

Victoria moved beside him. “He’s right. The apartment you had before Rafe is gone, your job barely pays anything, and everyone who matters knows this family because of us. Think before you destroy your own life.”

For two years, words like those had kept me bending around their expectations. I had changed work schedules for their events, missed holidays with my own relatives, handled Victoria’s charity paperwork, helped Tristan when his debts became embarrassing, remembered Helen’s appointments, and convinced myself that all the sacrifice would mean more once I became part of their family.

Now I was bleeding through my jeans while they explained why I should be grateful. Whatever power those threats once had over me was gone.

I pulled the phone from my pocket and stopped the voice memo.

Rafe frowned. “What are you doing?”

“I recorded everything.”

Victoria moved toward me immediately. “Calanthe.”

I saved the file and opened it where they could see the recording. It contained everything damn thing they had done to me a few minutes back. Enough evidence to destroy everything they had built as a family if any outsider set an eye on this.

Victoria stared at the screen. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“I already did.”

I sent a copy to my private email before anyone could take the phone, then forwarded the recording to the wedding planning group, the shareholders group of their company, and two business contacts who had repeatedly asked me to cover for Rafe whenever he abandoned meetings.

Their phones began buzzing one after another.

Victoria stared at hers. “Delete it.”

“Make me do it.”

Rafe lunged toward me, but I moved behind the closet island and lifted the phone where he could see it. “Touch me again, and this time, it’s straight to the police.”

His feet stopped.

For the first time since I had entered the bedroom, he looked at the blood on my clothes without contempt.

I picked up the duffel. Nobody tried to stop me when I walked past them.

The maid stood near the stairs with tears running down her face and both hands pressed together. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

I paused only briefly before continuing downstairs because I had nothing left to give her guilt.

Outside, the evening air touched my swollen mouth. I tried emergency services before I got to the gate, but the call failed, and a second attempt stalled without connecting.

Near the end of the driveway, another cramp tore through my abdomen so powerful that I dropped to one knee and grabbed the duffel for support. Blood had soaked down my jeans, and the hospital was less than fifteen minutes away by car, but I had forgotten my keys inside the house.

I would rather crawl there than ask Rafe for help.

I forced myself upright and headed toward the main road just as every streetlight in the neighborhood went out.

Car alarms began screaming from different directions while phones chimed inside nearby houses. I stopped beside a dead streetlamp and stared toward the horizon as red light spread across the sky.

At first I thought there was a fire beyond the city, but the color climbed too fast and covered too much. Within moments, the clouds, rooftops, asphalt, and blood on my hands were washed in the same unnatural red.

A woman screamed somewhere behind me, and another voice cried out farther along the street before both stopped so abruptly that my skin prickled.

My phone vibrated hard inside my hand.

Emergency alerts filled the screen, vanished before I could open them, then returned as static mixed with symbols I had never seen before.

A car swerved across the road and struck a parked SUV. A man stumbled from the driver’s side shouting a woman’s name before rushing around the vehicle and pulling open the passenger door.

The woman inside sagged against the seat belt without moving.

Across the street, another woman collapsed beside a bus stop while a teenage girl dropped her shopping bag and folded onto the pavement before the oranges rolling around her shoes had stopped.

Men shouted for help and rushed toward them, while others knelt beside bodies and tried phones that no longer connected.

I glanced down at myself because an irrational part of me expected whatever had taken those women to take me too, but my legs remained under me while the red sky glowed above the city and more screams broke out around me.

I lost all sense of how long it lasted.

I stood in the middle of the road with the duffel digging into my shoulder, blood drying across my mouth, more blood soaking my jeans, and no idea whether I was losing my child while the world around me was losing something larger.

When the red finally faded from the clouds, the street almost resembled itself again until I noticed how many people were no longer moving.

The woman beside the bus stop remained motionless, another woman was still slumped inside the wrecked car, and two female neighbors lay near their open gate while a man knelt between them begging someone to help.

Farther along the road, everybody I could see lost their lives was female.

I remained standing among them with blood on my clothes and no idea why whatever had taken those women had left me alive.