All Chapters of The Surrogate Virgin : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

The house felt wrong without Nova, too quiet and still. Every corner seemed to echo with her absence, like we’d carved out the heart of the place just to keep it beating a little longer.I found myself drifting into her room before we started. Her stuffed animals lined the bed in a crooked parade, the doll she never slept without missing from the lineup because she’d clutched it to Frank’s house. The sight of it all twisted something sharp in my chest.“We’re doing the right thing,” Noah said from the doorway, his voice low.I nodded but didn’t answer. I didn’t trust my voice not to crack.We cleared the dining table, sweeping the fragments of medical records into a neat stack and tucking them into a folder. That would stay locked in the house for now, carrying them into a trap was exactly what Vivienne wanted.Instead, we gathered everything else we could think of, Noah laid out two flashlights, a small toolkit, a lock pick set he admitted to having casually that he’d used before, an

Her silhouette filled the doorway, framed by the swinging lightbulb above. Vivienne Bennett stepped forward slowly, her heels clicking against the concrete as if she had all the time in the world.I’d seen her face in old portraits, in the foundation’s glossy newsletters with her frozen smiles, soft curls, a mother immortalized in charity pamphlets but seeing her in the flesh was different and sharper. She looks more dangerous and her beauty hadn’t faded, it had hardened, sharpened into something cold and precise.Noah’s knuckles whitened on the gun. “Mother.”The word sounded foreign on his lips.Vivienne’s smile curved, but it didn’t touch her eyes. “So you do still recognize me. For a while, I wondered if Desmond had scrubbed me from your memory entirely.”Noah’s chest rose and fell, tight. “You were supposed to be dead.”“Oh, darling.” She tilted her head, eyes glinting. “That’s the trick with death, it only works if you stay buried.”Her gaze slid to me, and for a moment, I swore

The phone rang just after midnight. Sleep hadn’t come. I sat on the bed with the medical file open across my lap, the pages soft from too much handling. The words inside blurred from repetition: twin gestation, term discrepancy, discharge note. Every time I looked at them, my stomach wound tighter.Noah couldn’t stay still. He walked the same strip of carpet back and forth, hands in his hair until it stuck up in wild spikes. The room felt ready to crack.Then his phone buzzed.We both jumped up.The screen lit his face in harsh lines. He looked at me, then back at the name. “Thomas.” His thumb hovered, like he wanted to refuse the call then he answered. “Bennett.”Static filled the silence before a man’s voice came through, rough, low. “You asked about her. Vivienne.”Her name hit me so hard it felt like a cut to the ribs.Noah went still. “Say it.”The man let out a breath, slow. “She never died. The funeral, the casket, the flowers, it was all a performance. She left because she wan

The car’s headlights carved a thin tunnel through the dark, the world beyond swallowed by night. I gripped the passenger door handle tighter than I realized, my knuckles aching, while Noah’s hands rested steady on the wheel. His jaw was set, that quiet determination etched so deep into him it looked like it might crack stone.The dashboard clock glowed: 11:06 PM.Less than an hour until Vivienne’s deadline.The silence in the car wasn’t empty, it was loud with everything unsaid. The papers, the twin, my mother. And above it all, the one thought neither of us wanted to voice: if we failed tonight, there would be no second chance.Noah finally broke the silence, his voice low, like he didn’t want the night itself to overhear.“Once we’re there, we don’t hand over the documents first. We get proof of your mom alive, breathing then we negotiate.”“And if they don’t let me see her?” I asked, my throat tight.His hands tightened on the wheel. “Then we make them.”I swallowed hard, trying no

The night after my mother’s death was a hollow thing. I didn’t remember the drive back. I didn’t remember Noah pulling me into the car, the way my legs dragged like dead weight, or the way the city lights streaked past the windows in fractured colors. My body had moved, but my soul hadn’t followed.The blood on my hands, and hers clung to me no matter how many times I scrubbed. The sink was raw from where I’d clawed at the soap dispenser, red running down the drain until I couldn’t tell if it was hers or mine. I still felt the recoil of the gunshot vibrating in my bones, even though it wasn’t my hand that had pulled the trigger.When the world finally caught up with me, I was on the living room floor, curled against the rug, my chest heaving. The taste of iron and salt filled my mouth.I could still see her, my mother’s body collapsing like a puppet whose strings had been cut, her eyes wide in shock, her mouth opening like she wanted to call my name but never got the chance, and over