Chapter 7

His voice was cold as a poisoned blade.

"Where I go is none of your business."

I didn't want to tangle with him, but Cyril yanked my car door open and dragged me into his Cayenne.

"What is wrong with you? Let me out!"

He ignored me, floored the gas, and headed straight for Weiss Memorial Hospital.

"Just because you can't have children, you'd destroy Melanie and her baby? How can you be so vicious?"

"If I hadn't gotten there in time, her whole life would have been ruined!"

He hauled me into the hospital room.

Melanie lay on the bed, white as a sheet. The moment she saw me she scrambled off the bed, dropped to her knees in front of me, and kept knocking her forehead to the floor.

"It was my fault, sis. Punish me however you want, just please spare my baby, please."

Listening to her, the numbness started in my fingertips and spread through my whole body.

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

Cyril seemed to have expected the denial. His voice came hard and cold. "The kidnappers confessed. You're the one who ordered them to take Melanie, told them to do whatever they wanted to her, to get rid of the baby. And you're still lying?"

He pulled Melanie up off the floor into his arms and gently kissed away her tears.

"Don't be scared. I'm here. I'll get justice for you."

From inside his embrace, Melanie shot me a sidelong glance, her eyes full of malice and triumph.

Another act she'd written and staged herself.

I didn't waste my breath. I grabbed her wrist.

"If you say you were kidnapped, then let's go to the police and file a report. The truth will come out on its own."

Melanie shrank back into Cyril's arms in terror, tears pouring harder, her whole body shaking. "Cyril, I'm scared..."

His face darkened and he knocked my hand away.

"Melanie was nearly violated, and you want to make her relive it in front of everyone?!"

"Julie, apologize. And swear you'll never hurt Melanie again."

I screamed at the two of them, shaking with rage. "Apologize to her? She isn't worth it!"

Crack!

Cyril slapped me with all his strength.

He looked at Melanie's red, swollen eyes, and when his gaze swung back to me it was vicious beyond anything.

"Not a shred of remorse. Take her. Lock my wife in the morgue—let her think hard about what she's done."

The bodyguards dragged me off at once and threw me into the hospital morgue.

The door slammed shut. The freezing air rushed at me, and I shook all over with the cold.

There was a time when, if I so much as scraped my skin, he would panic.

Now, not long after a miscarriage, with the wound he'd caused still in my belly and my leg festering, he locked me in this place full of the dead.

I curled up on the icy floor and remembered seven years ago, my adoptive mother holding my hand as she warned me:

"Sweetheart, always love yourself first. Never pin your hopes on a man."

Back then I didn't understand.

Now, nearly frozen, my mind drifting, that one sentence came clearer than it ever had.

On the morning of the third day, the bodyguards finally opened the door.

I dragged my body, heavy as iron, out of the hospital and went back to that house to get my things.

The master bedroom door stood ajar. From inside came the violent rocking of the bed, and a woman's high moans. The sound pierced my eardrums and rang through my skull, and I almost threw up.