Chapter4

My mother slid the fried eggs onto a plate.

"I had the strangest dream last night. There was this little boy, maybe three or four years old. He was absolutely gorgeous, with these striking blue eyes."

"What... what did he say to you?" My hands twisted together into tight knots beneath the table.

"He kept chasing me, calling me Grandma. I asked him whose child he was," she said, setting the plate on the table with a casual laugh, "and he said, 'I'm the one in your daughter's tummy.'"

Clatter. I shoved my chair back violently and bolted for my bedroom.

I dumped my duffel bag onto the mattress, tearing through my things until my fingers closed around the hospital lab report.

[Early Pregnancy Test: Negative. Ovulation Hormone Levels: Not pregnant.]

It was right there in black and white. And ever since the day I returned that five thousand dollars, I hadn’t even seen Liam, let alone been intimate with anyone.

It had to be a pure coincidence. My mother had just had an ordinary dream.

Yet, the very next morning, the moment I took a bite of chocolate, a violent wave of nausea hit me. I sprinted to the bathroom and threw up, my knuckles turning white as I gripped the sink.

A dark, creeping sense of dread settled in my chest.

Half an hour later, I was rushing into the family clinic on the edge of town. The old doctor walked in holding my requested follow-up lab results. He looked at me and let out a heavy sigh.

"Mia, I looked over your report from five days ago. There were absolutely no signs of pregnancy then."

He paused, sliding the new piece of paper across the desk toward me.

"But your current HCG levels are positive. You are, indeed, pregnant."

I snatched the paper, my entire body trembling. "That's impossible! I haven't been with a man since then, haven't slept with anyone!"

"Medical labs don't lie, Mia," the doctor frowned. "Early pregnancy hormone fluctuations sometimes don't show up immediately."

I didn't hear a single word he said after that. The piece of paper in my hand felt like a death warrant.

I was actually pregnant.

That night, I curled up under the covers, terrified to close my eyes. But sometime after midnight, exhaustion dragged me into a heavy, suffocating sleep.

When I opened my eyes again, my breath froze in my throat.

The little blond boy, who had been missing for days, was standing right beside my bed.

"Mommy," he said, grinning like a sly cat.

I scrambled backward on the bed. "Get away from me! I never agreed to this, and I never touched Liam!"

He burst into a fit of giggles. "But Daddy agreed!"

He tilted his head down, and his icy little hand pressed flat against my lower abdomen.

"So it doesn't matter if Mommy says yes or no anymore. I'm already inside!"

My eyes snapped open.

Outside the window, the sky was just barely turning gray. My bedsheets were soaked in a cold sweat. I gasped for air, my hand involuntarily pressing down on my stomach.

Those words were nailed permanently into my brain.

I couldn't just sit around and do nothing.

I reopened the webpage for that novel, clicked onto the author's profile, and shot her a direct message:

[Hi. I dreamed about that blond elf, too. I turned down the money three times, but then he went after the man closest to me.]

[Just yesterday, a doctor told me I'm pregnant.]

The message seemed to vanish into a void. It wasn't until that afternoon that she finally replied with just three words:

[Don't keep it.]

I replied instantly:

[What exactly happened to the real person this novel is based on? Please tell me. I need to meet you!]

There was no response for a long time. I left her my phone number and email address.

Before long, my phone rang.

"Did you really dream about the elf?"

"Yeah. Exactly the way you wrote it in your book."

"Then... did your boyfriend start coming into money, too?"

I froze. "How did you know?"

"Because that’s exactly what happened to my roommate."

Her roommate's name was Chloe—the protagonist of the novel. Three chances at sudden wealth, and she had rejected every single one. Later, when the elf offered to crawl into her womb to repay her kindness, she had refused that, too.

Chloe had thought the nightmare was over. But her boyfriend—just like Liam—figured that turning down free money was a fool's game.

"The first time he got three thousand bucks, he won it betting on a college football game. He bragged that he just had a good eye for it."

A chill ran down my spine. It was the exact same MO as Liam.

"After that, he kept pulling in more and more. At first, he claimed he was making a killing in crypto, that his luck had just turned. My roommate fought with him every single day, terrified it was going to cost someone their life. But when someone who’s been struggling their whole life suddenly doesn't have to anymore, do you really think they’d just walk away?"

Liam's manic, obsessed face flashed through my mind.

"Later on, my roommate did some digging in secret. She found out that every time he received money, somebody died. But who's going to believe something like that? Even I thought she was just having delusions back then. Right up until she died..."

Her voice choked with a sob.

My blood ran cold, and I pressed her: "How exactly did your roommate die?"