heartbreak

Chapter Two

Kael doesn't come home that night.

I sit on the edge of our bed and I count the hours by the city lights flickering through the window. I tell myself he's at the hospital because something is wrong, that's all, something is wrong and he has to be there, and any moment now I'll hear the elevator chime.

I put my hand on my stomach. There's nothing to feel yet, not really, just the idea of a heartbeat under my palm. I don't know if I'm comforting myself or comforting the life inside me. Maybe both of us need it tonight.

Staff pass my door all evening. I hear them in the hallway, quick footsteps, low voices, a laugh cut short like someone remembered they weren't supposed to laugh near my room. Not one of them knocks. Not one of them asks if I've eaten. I almost laugh at that thought once it crosses my mind — the number of times I've been told, gently or otherwise, that I eat too much anyway. Tonight nobody in this house cares whether I eat at all.

I am an orphan who became a wife to the head of this family. I have no mother to call, no sister to sit with me, no blood of my own waiting somewhere to take my side. I built this penthouse into the only family I had, and tonight it's made very clear to me that the family was never mine to begin with.

I cry until there's nothing left, and at some point I slide off the bed onto the floor because it feels wrong to sleep in that bed alone in that dress, and I fall asleep right there with my back against the frame.

Noise wakes me. Not gentle, not gradual — the kind of loud, busy noise a house makes when a dozen people are moving furniture and nobody cares who they wake up.

I go down the hall still in yesterday's dress, my hair falling out of its pins, and I follow the sound straight to the nursery.

The room stops me in the doorway.

The crib I chose is gone. The little wolf mobile I hung above it, gone. The soft yellow curtains I sewed myself over three winters, gone, replaced with fabric the color of gunmetal. Staff carry armfuls of my things past me like I'm furniture too, like I'm just another thing to be moved out of the way.

Kael stands in the middle of it, and Freya stands close enough beside him that their shoulders touch.

"What is this?" My voice comes out flat because I don't have the strength left to make it sound like anything else.

Kael turns, and there's something almost apologetic in his face, which somehow makes it worse. "There was a problem with the baby last night. We were at the hospital until dawn." He says it like that explains the empty crib. Like that explains why my nursery is being carried out in pieces.

"For the baby's stability, she needs to stay close. She's moving in."

I feel the floor tilt under me even though I haven't moved an inch.

"This is our nursery, Kael. I built this with my own hands."

Freya doesn't even let him answer. "It's covered in dolls and soft yellow nonsense." She picks up the mobile off the stack of things by the door and turns it over like it's an insect she found in her food. "A future heir doesn't need to grow up in a nest. He needs a room that will make him strong."

"That's not your decision to make."

"Someone has to make it." She sets the mobile down hard enough that one of the little carved wolves snaps off. "You cry over curtains. I've stood beside him through things you can't imagine and I never once shed a tear." Her eyes drag over me, slow, deliberate, the kind of look that itemizes a person. "And you, a wife with no child and no discipline to show for it, you want to throw a fit over fabric? You can't even keep yourself in fighting shape, Wren. What exactly were you planning to protect this family with, if not your body or your bloodline?" She shakes her head like I'm something small and pitiful. "You were never fit to run this house."

I have heard versions of this my whole life here. I have swallowed the old men calling me broken, staff calling me lucky, his people looking through me at family dinners like I'm a chair Kael happens to sit next to, sizing up my plate before they size up my worth. I have swallowed all of it and smiled and worked twice as hard to be worth the space I take up.

I am done swallowing it from her.

"You slept with someone's husband and climbed into his bed like you had a right to it," I say, and my voice doesn't shake this time. "Don't stand in my house and lecture me about my body or what a wife should be. Get out."

Her mouth drops open, offended in that particular way people get when the truth lands somewhere real. "We're comrades. Nothing more. This," she gestures at her stomach, "was an accident. Don't be jealous just because I can give him what you can't, in more ways than one."

I'm shaking now, but not from tears. From something with teeth.

"Enough." Kael's voice cuts between us, sharp enough that even Freya straightens. He turns to her first. "Watch how you speak to my wife." Then he turns to me, and his voice softens into the register he thinks fixes everything. "It's just a room. I'll have another one built for you, whatever you want. The baby needs to be close to its father right now, that's all this is. Once she delivers safely, she'll move out."

He says it like a peace offering. Like I should thank him for it.

I pick up what's left of my things — the broken mobile, an armful of yellow fabric — and I walk past both of them to my room without another word, because if I open my mouth again I don't know what will come out of it.

Kael follows me in a few minutes later and shuts the door.

"What is actually wrong with you." He says it tired, like I'm the exhausting one. "I come home from closing a deal that nearly cost me everything and all you've done since is fight with me."

Something inside me finally snaps loose.

"You broke our bond." My voice comes out louder than I mean it to. "You got another woman pregnant and now you're letting her take the room I built for our child, and you're asking me what's wrong with me? Is my bedroom next? My name on the accounts? Are you going to hand her all of it, piece by piece, until there's nothing left of me in this house at all?"

His jaw tightens. "You've been my wife for five years with no heir. My father's men see that as a failure of my house, not just yours. Freya is an enforcer. Her child will be strong. That's a good thing for this family, whether you want to hear it or not."

"I'm pregnant too."

The words leave me before I decide to say them.

Kael goes very still. "Don't joke with me right now, Wren. We tried for years. Nothing. Are you certain?"

I don't reach for the box on the nightstand. I don't hand him the proof sitting right there. Instead I ask him the only question that actually matters to me.

"If I am. Will you send her away?"

He doesn't answer right away, and that tells me everything before he opens his mouth.

"No." His voice is quiet but it doesn't waver. "Her child is still mine to protect."

Something in my chest goes cold and stays cold. Even with my own child growing inside me, I would still share this house, this man, this name, with the woman who is trying to erase me from both. It was never about whether I could get pregnant at all. It was never even just about my body, though God knows this family has made sure I question every inch of it. It was always about what I am. Ordinary. Expendable the second something better walks through the door.

"Then divorce me." The words come out steady, steadier than I feel. "If you won't send her away, let me go."

His whole body goes rigid, and I feel it in the air, something ancient and furious rising off him that has nothing to do with the man and everything to do with the wolf underneath. "No." One word, flat, final. "You will always be my wife. There is no divorce."

"I don't want to be your wife anymore, Kael. I want out."

A knock cuts through the room before he can answer. His father's man has arrived, someone says through the door, asking for Kael, something about Freya and the baby.

Kael looks at me for a long moment, and then he does something he has never done in five years of marriage.

He locks the door from the outside.

"Stay here. Calm down. We'll finish this when I get back." His voice comes through the wood, already walking away before he finishes the sentence. "Don't say the word divorce again."

I wait for him to come back.

He doesn't.

An hour passes, then another, and the light through the window shifts from morning to afternoon and I'm still locked in this room like something dangerous, like a problem to be contained until it's convenient to deal with. I bang on the door until my hands hurt. I call for water. I call for anyone.

A guard finally answers, and I almost sag with relief until I hear what he says through the door.

"A wife who defies her husband and can't even give this family an heir doesn't get to waste our resources." A pause, and then, quieter, meant for whoever's standing next to him but not quiet enough that I miss it. "Probably for the best. Save the kitchen the trouble." His footsteps walk away without a second glance.

I sink down against the door, my throat raw, my stomach hollow, my head starting to swim in a way that scares me more than anything Freya said today.

I think of every year I spent making myself smaller for these people, in every sense of that word. Every apology I gave for things that were never my fault, for a body that was never anyone's business but mine, for a womb that took its own time. Every time I let Kael's soft voice patch over something that should have broken us completely.

I am done letting them have their way with me.

The room tips sideways, and the last thing I feel before the floor rushes up to meet me is my own hand, still pressed flat against my stomach, still trying to protect something no one else in this house has bothered to ask about.