Chapter3

The front door was kicked open hard enough to crack the wall behind it.

Blake was back from the police station.

He came in like a cornered animal—which, in a way, he was—crumpling the newspaper in one fist as he charged through the entryway. The headline was last night's scandal at the hotel. The photo was blurry but more than enough to reduce the reputation he'd spent years manufacturing to rubble.

"You bitch! You destroyed me!"

He grabbed a fistful of my hair and threw me to the floor.

The back of my skull hit the tile. My vision went dark at the edges.

The blows came down in a storm—my back, my sides, his breathing ragged and violent, every curse drenched in something that tasted like blood:

"You ruined everything I had with Isabella! You jealous, selfish sow—you could never understand what we have!"

I curled in on myself, arms wrapped around my stomach, the sweet taste of iron rising in my throat. "Blake—the baby—"

He kept going. I ruined his life. I was jealous of Isabella. I didn't deserve to be his wife.

Then Isabella's voice, soft and artfully trembling: "Blake? Ella? Please don't fight—"

She came toward us, arms out like she meant to pull him back. "Stop it, both of you. Let's just talk—"

But I saw it—the half-second flash in her eyes just before she reached me.

She let herself stumble, pitching forward as though she'd lost her footing. The pointed heel of her stiletto came down deliberately, precisely, on the back of my right foot.

A sharp crack, the sound bone makes when it gives.

The pain detonated from my heel and swallowed everything. I screamed and went down, all balance gone.

Blood welled up from somewhere beneath me and spread across the floor, warm and fast.

I reached out and grabbed at nothing. My hand found something wet.

"Blood—oh God, Ella's bleeding!" Isabella's scream was perfectly pitched, and underneath the horror I could hear the satisfaction she couldn't quite contain.

Blake finally went still.

I lay on the floor, consciousness already starting to dissolve, the warmth draining out of me.

The ambulance siren reached me from far away and grew closer.

At some point—I couldn't say how long—the surgeon came out of the operating room, pulled his mask down, and looked at me with the expression doctors wear when there is no good news to deliver.

"Ms. Ella… we did everything we could. At seven months… the baby couldn't be saved."

The world stopped.

They wheeled me into a room.

My child never drew a first breath. That life was taken before it could begin.

Tears fell, one by one, without any sound. I reached up and pressed my hand against the flatness of my own stomach.

Something had been alive there. Something had kicked and moved and been a person. Now there was nothing.

A hollow where a heartbeat used to be.

Every other feeling—the grief, the pain, the despair—went quiet.

What was left was hate. Pure and permanent.

I stared at the lock screen photo on my phone. Blake smiling that soft smile, Isabella tucked against him. It looked like a family portrait.

I closed my hand into a fist, slowly, until my nails bit into my palm.

"Blake," I said inside the silence of my own mind. "Isabella. You killed my child. Every last thing you've taken from me—I will take back. One piece at a time. With my own hands."

I reached for my phone. My fingers were trembling as I dialed the number I had saved but never called in three years.

A low, authoritative voice picked up. "Ella?"

"Dad." My voice was ash. "I can't hold on anymore. I need to come home."

A few seconds of silence on the line. Then, with the steady coldness of a man who means every word:

"Come home. Every resource this family has is yours. Whoever touched my daughter—I will make sure they spend the rest of their lives wishing they hadn't."

I hung up. I looked out at the black night beyond the window.

From today, Ella is dead.

What is still breathing is something that wants revenge.