Chapter2

Dante shifted his gaze from his phone screen and gave me a passing glance.

"Hmm?"

I opened my mouth, but his phone rang first.

"Got it. I'll be right there."

He hung up the phone and grabbed his jacket off the back of the chair.

"They need me at the hospital."

"Go back to your room. Don't wander around the hallways."

The door clicked shut behind him.

I leaned against the desk to stand up; the hem of my dress beneath my coat was already soaked through.

Without calling for a driver, I slipped out through the servants' passageway. A single light was still on in the underground clinic at the back of the estate.

The on-call doctor finished the ultrasound and moved the probe away from my stomach.

"Ma'am, the fetal heartbeat stopped."

"Between the prolonged binding and the severe shock..."

I didn't catch the rest of his words.

I only understood one thing.

I was the one who strangled him to death, layer by suffocating layer.

"We need to perform a D&C immediately," the doctor paused. "General anesthesia requires the boss's signature."

If he signed, Dante would know.

With the Caruso heir gone, who would he make pay with their life?

I thought of Noah's slack hands in the pool.

"No anesthesia."

The moment the cold metal instruments invaded my body, I bit down hard on my lip.

Scrape by scrape.

It felt like someone took a spoon and hollowly carved out the softest piece of flesh inside me, bit by agonizing bit.

I bit through my lip, and blood pooled in my mouth.

I didn't make a single sound.

Over the past month, I had long since learned how to stay completely silent.

When it was over, the nurse carefully moved me to a folding cot in the back room. She took one look at my mangled, bloody lips, sighed, and placed two white pills into my palm.

Before I could even swallow the pills, my phone lit up.

It was Marco. Dante's most trusted second-in-command, and Valeria's childhood lackey.

[The boss told me not to bother you. But I think there are some things you should see for yourself.]

The photos popped up on my screen, one after another.

Beside an ICU bed, Dante leaned over, pressing Valeria's gauze-wrapped wrist intimately against his cheek.

In the next photo, he lowered his head and kissed her on the lips.

[The nurses say that every time the boss sits with her like this, the numbers on her monitor spike.]

[If it weren't for that video, she wouldn't have been lying here for a month.]

That newly hollowed-out space in my lower abdomen cramped viciously again.

He left the estate every night after settling the tab at midnight, only returning at dawn.

So this was how he spent those hours.

I stared at that photo, suddenly remembering a specific folder on the family's encrypted network.

[The Caruso Heir].

Dante created it himself. He saved the ultrasound image from every single one of my checkups in there, always leaving a short comment underneath.

"He grew a nose."

"He's sucking his thumb."

"He looks like you."

The last comment stopped three months ago.

And in the access logs, his most visited page this entire month was titled [Valeria - Medical Records].

I propped myself up against the bed, scanned my D&C surgical record into the system, and saved it at the very bottom of that heir folder.

No one would see it.

Just like how no one had opened this folder in three months.

The estate was dead empty.

I buckled the monitoring belt back onto my body, curled up under the covers, and sank into a heavy sleep the moment I closed my eyes.

It had been a month, and for the first time, I didn't wake up in a sheer panic in the middle of the night, reaching out to feel the band across my stomach.

It would never move again.

At midnight the next night, Dante returned with the family doctor.

"Settle up."

He only said those two words.

The doctor unbuckled the monitoring belt and hooked it up to a tablet.

I looked at Dante.

"Marco sent me photos."

"The one of you kissing her in the ICU."

Dante's jaw clenched for a fractured second. Before he could speak, the doctor stared at the tablet, his face suddenly draining of color.

"Boss, yesterday's fetal movement... totaled seven minutes and twelve seconds."

I looked down at my now-flat stomach.

It was completely empty inside now.

How could an empty space move for seven minutes?

"That machine is broken"

"Chloe."

Dante cut me off, his eyes entirely devoid of warmth.

"You were pinned down right here just the day before yesterday, and you've already forgotten?"

"Seven minutes and twelve seconds. Say one more word, and I'll add a minute."

My whole body went ice cold.

His phone vibrated again.

He only listened for two seconds before his entire expression shifted.

"Her fingers moved? ... I'm heading there now."

He strode out the door, dropping a ruthless command as he walked past the bodyguards.

"Submerge him on time. I want to watch the live feed in the car."

I stumbled past the guards and chased after him, grabbing hold of his cuff.

"Dante, it won't move again, it's already—"

"Enough."

He pried my fingers off his sleeve one by one, exactly like he did that first day.

"To keep Noah out of the water for a few less minutes, you'd even go so far as to curse your own unborn child."

"Chloe, you absolutely disgust me."