Chapter 2

My fingers opened the route history before my brain caught up.

For three months, every day at noon, he drove to that address and stayed for two hours.

The morning sickness had hollowed me out. Fifteen pounds gone in three months, and the only food I could keep down was whatever Dominic cooked.

He ran the whole operation and still came home every day to make me lunch, up until two or three in the morning handling business.

I told him to stop. To rest. We fought.

He said he'd rather die than let me eat alone.

I had to fake feeling better before he finally agreed to stay out through lunch.

Except he hadn't stayed out. Every day, for three months, he'd been two doors down with someone else.

A message came in.

"Dom, I left a pair of panties at your place. She didn't find them, did it? I left them on purpose. Unwashed. Bring them for my birthday?"

I tapped the profile picture.

Bianca.

My father's bastard. The girl whose mother destroyed mine, who moved into my house before my mother's grave had settled. She spent her whole life grabbing everything I had—my clothes, my father's love.

Even Killian. I found them in our bed. That was the crack Dominic walked through. He didn't comfort me. He collected me.

He held me and said it to my face, slow enough that I'd remember every word:

"I will never want anyone but you. I don't care what she does, what she tries. She doesn't exist to me."

And he'd proven it.

When Bianca sent him nudes, he forwarded them to the police. She got seven days in holding and he made sure her university expelled her. Career over before it started.

I thought leaving that wreckage and finding Dominic was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me.

So why her.

Why was it always her.

I opened their messages like pressing a finger into a wound.

Dominic calling her *babe*.

Bianca threatening to tell me everything, and Dominic shutting her down, blocking her, punishing her—then taking the punishment to bed.

Me in the hospital, crying over a bad prenatal result. And the two of them in the room I'd decorated with my own hands, Bianca wearing my robe.

Behind me, the bed shifted.

"Sera?"

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