Chapter 3

And now here he was with another child on the way. He'd do anything to keep it.

Every word out of his mouth felt like a razor drawn across my skin.

He knew the baby was the wound that never healed. And he was asking me, here, now, to swallow my dignity for his child with her.

I screamed at him.

"Julian, you have no soul. If you let them touch me, I will hate you for the rest of my life. You can't do this to me. You don't have the right."

Chloe's voice, bored: "Are you two done with your domestic dispute?"

Julian was out of patience. He gave the doctors a flat order.

"Give her a sedative."

Then, almost tenderly: "Just for a few minutes. It won't hurt you. Be good. Try to understand where I am."

I kept fighting. One of the doctors approached with a long metal instrument and started to pull at my pants. Pure terror flooded me.

Another one slid a needle into my arm.

Everything went dark.

When I drifted back toward the surface of consciousness, still blurry, I realized the video call was still open. The phone was sitting near my ear.

The exam was still happening.

Julian's voice came through the speaker, strained and low.

"You're pregnant. We can't. Be good. I'll make it up to you after the baby comes."

"No. I don't want you holding back. Just go easy. Pregnant or not, twelve a month. That was the deal."

Her baby-talk voice made my skin crawl.

Then she asked, carefully casual, "You always say you love me. So what about her? Why can't you bring yourself to divorce her?"

I wanted the answer to that one too. I strained to hear through the fog.

Julian's voice didn't change.

"Don't be stupid. A divorce would cost me half my fortune. I haven't touched her in years. There's no difference. I'm a businessman. Every decision is a calculation."

He was so good at managing her.

Money. That was his story. The truth was that every dollar he'd earned had already been transferred into my personal accounts. Notarized. Ironclad. All mine, legally.

A while back, out of pure spite, I'd leaked some of Sterling Group's confidential strategies to a competitor. The damages ran into the hundreds of millions. Sterling Group nearly collapsed.

Even then—even after that—he wouldn't divorce me. He didn't even raise his voice. He just came home and comforted me.

That was when I finally saw him clearly. He genuinely loved me. He also genuinely loved her. He couldn't bear to lose either of us.

He was greedy. He wanted one at home, one on the side.

The doctor finished, picked up the phone, and reported to Chloe.

"Miss Whitmore, we examined Mrs. Sterling thoroughly. Not only has there been no recent activity—there's been no activity at all. For at least four years."

Chloe sounded giddy. "Thank you so much. I'll send a nice bonus your way."

They gathered their things and left.

As the sedative wore off, the pain arrived in a wave that stole my breath.

The air reeked of blood. I tried to shift my body and nearly blacked out.

I was bleeding. Badly. Between my thighs, down my legs.

This hadn't been a medical exam. This had been torture.

A hatred deeper than anything I'd ever felt rolled through me. In those minutes, I was drenched in cold sweat.

And somewhere in the middle of all that pain, an idea started to form. A beautiful, catastrophic idea.

A few hours later, when I could finally stand, I dragged my ruined body through the house.

And I set fire to the $150 million mansion Julian had built for me. The one he'd called "Cinderella's castle."

The flames climbed gold and orange into the night. I stood at the edge of the lawn and watched it burn, and at some point, I started to laugh.

I laughed at ten years of marriage that had been a joke.

I laughed at the Cinderella whose prince had thrown away her glass slipper himself.

I laughed because tonight I was going to burn the whole thing down and come out the other side as someone new.

Julian didn't get the news until the estate was a blackened skeleton.

It was also the morning of our divorce hearing. My attorney represented me in court.

He found out about the hearing from a panicked phone call from her on the drive home. He erupted.

"Why the hell am I just hearing about this now?"

The lawyer stammered. "Mr. Sterling, we assumed you knew."

He hadn't known.

He'd thought I was pacified. After the first divorce attempt years ago—the one he'd bought off—he thought money had kept me in place.

He hadn't known I'd filed again. Citing his infidelity and our two-year separation.

He hung up on his attorney and tried to call me. The line just rang.

When he finally got to the estate and saw what was left of it, his knees buckled. He went down on the grass.

Firefighters were still working the scene. He forced himself back to his feet and started toward the wreckage.

A firefighter stopped him. "Sir, you can't go in there."

He kept going. "My wife is inside."

"We've checked. There's no one in the house. Just property damage."

The relief hit him so hard he almost laughed. He stood there with his hands on his knees.

"Thank God. She's okay. She's okay."