บททั้งหมดของ One Night with My Ex-Fiancé’s Ruthless Brother: บทที่ 11 - บทที่ 20

(Keyla POV) The email was still there in the morning. I had half-expected it to disappear overnight, which was stupid. Emails didn’t disappear just because I was too tired to decide what to do with them. Still, for one second after I opened the laptop, I wished the inbox would be empty— It wasn’t. D. Churchill was still there. Same subject. Same three words. Are you safe? My stomach tightened before I even clicked it. I opened it before I could talk myself out of it. The message was short enough to read in one breath. Are you safe? I will not ask you to come back. But if Adrian reaches you, call this number. A phone number sat under the message in international format. I should have closed the laptop right there, but my hand stayed on the trackpad while I read the digits again. I read it once, then again, then a third time because apparently my brain wanted to make sure the words had not changed when I wasn’t looking. I set the laptop beside me, but I didn’t close it. The scr

(Keyla POV)“Father’s name?”The nurse balanced a clipboard against her hip, pen already moving before my answer had fully landed. She had the kind of efficiency that came from asking the same questions all day and surviving them by not thinking too hard.“Leave it blank,” I said.She noted it without comment, moved to the next field. I watched her hand move down the form and thought about how much a blank space could say if the wrong person cared enough to read it. It could mean unknown, absent, refused, or dangerous. Mine was the last one. The nurse didn’t need to know which one applied here, and I wasn’t going to explain.The appointment should have been routine. Blood pressure first, then weight, then the ultrasound that took longer because the baby had turned himself into a difficult little tenant and the technician needed another angle. The gel was cold enough to make my stomach tighten, and the probe moved in slow, careful arcs while I stared at the ceiling and pretended my bre

(Keyla POV) Nobody looked at me when I landed. Two weeks earlier, that would not have meant anything to me, but after two weeks of being the Churchill wedding scandal — the unstable bride, the missing woman, the cautionary headline — walking through an arrivals hall where nobody recognized me felt strange enough that I kept waiting for someone to point. The customs officer barely gave me more than a glance before stamping the passport and waving me through. The woman behind me in line was already impatient. Everyone already had somewhere else to be.. I took a bus instead of a taxi because the fare difference mattered now, and checked into the room Nora’s contact had arranged — third floor of a building that smelled like old wood and someone else’s cooking, a single window that faced a wall, a keycard that stuck slightly before releasing. The room was small enough that I could see most of it from the doorway: bed, desk, a bathroom with a showerhead that had some opinions about wat

(Keyla POV) I’d been blaming the nausea on stress for eleven days before I ran out of that explanation. Honestly, stress would have made perfect sense. I was sleeping badly in an unfamiliar room, eating inconsistently, running three freelance projects simultaneously on a laptop that overheated if I had more than four tabs open. My body had plenty of reasons to complain, and lately it had been taking full advantage of them. But after eleven days, even I was running out of ways to explain it away. What finally stopped sounding like stress was the timing— showing up every morning at almost the exact same hour, then fading by noon — was starting to feel less like anxiety and more like something that had a schedule. The pharmacy near the building had self-checkout machines, and I headed for them automatically. I bought the cheapest test on the shelf, a single-use brand with packaging that was slightly battered from being at the front of the display, and I tapped my card, grabbed the pa

(Keyla POV) I almost cancelled it twice. The night before, I opened the clinic confirmation email three separate times and still never made it past the address line, when I’d opened the clinic’s confirmation email to check the address and closed the laptop before I could finish reading it. The second was the morning of, standing in the bathroom with my toothbrush, trying to come up with a believable excuse for not going. Nora knocked on the bathroom door at eight forty-five. “We leave in fifteen minutes.” I spat toothpaste into the sink. “I’m aware. I’m trying not to fake my own disappearance before breakfast.” “I’m telling you anyway.” She just said it and walked back to the kitchenette before I could argue with her — just said it and went back to making tea, which was how she operated most mornings now. By now the room carried obvious signs that two people were living in it whether it had space for that or not. Everything had been shoved into practical systems because otherw