I found them around the corner in the VIP wing. It was a tableau of twisted devotion. Ciera was sitting on an examination table, whimpering, while Hilton held a cotton ball to the microscopic scratch on her arm as if he were performing life-saving surgery.
My presence was a stone dropped into a still pond. Hilton looked up, his expression instantly hardening into annoyance.
"Aleta? What the hell are you doing here? Are you following me now?" he sneered, his voice dripping with disdain. "Have you no shame?"
Shame. The word was so absurd, so utterly disconnected from the reality of what he had done, that I almost laughed.
"Hilton," I said, my voice raspy. "We need to talk." I took a step forward, my hand instinctively going to my stomach. "I was pregnant."
The words fell into the silence, heavy and final.
Ciera' s head snapped up, her eyes wide with shock, then narrowing with fury. She looked at Hilton. "Pregnant? You told me you never sleep with her! You lied to me, Hilty!"
She burst into tears, real this time, fueled by jealousy and the fear of losing her golden goose. "I can't do this! I can't be with a man who has a baby with another woman! We're over!"
Hilton panicked. All his cool arrogance evaporated. "No, Cici, baby, wait!" He grabbed her hands, his eyes pleading. "She's lying! It's a trick! She's trying to break us up!"
He turned to me, his face a mask of pure hatred. "You're disgusting," he spat, his voice loud enough for the gathering crowd of nurses and onlookers to hear. "Making up a pregnancy to trap me? How low can you go?"
He wrapped his arms around Ciera, stroking her hair. "Shhh, it's okay. It's not mine. I would never. You know how she is. Cold. Untouchable. We haven't been together like that in months. You're the only one I want, Cici. The only one I've ever really wanted."
Each word was a nail in my coffin. He was disowning our child, our history, my very humanity, all to soothe the crocodile tears of his mistress.
The whispers started around us.
"That's his wife, right? The Owen heiress."
"Wow, faking a pregnancy? That's desperate."
"You can't blame him. Look how much he loves Ciera. He'd never cheat on her."
I stood there, exposed, judged, and condemned by a jury of strangers who saw only the carefully constructed drama Hilton and Ciera had staged. My body was an empty vessel, my child was gone, and my husband was publicly branding me a liar and a lunatic.
The world tilted on its axis. The pain was so immense it looped back on itself and became a strange, terrifying calm.
Ciera, sensing her victory, slid off the table. She walked towards me, her face a mask of faux sympathy. "Look, Aleta," she said, her voice cloyingly sweet. "I feel for you, I really do. But you have to see that he doesn't love you. It's time to let go. For everyone's sake."
She leaned in closer, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "He belongs to me now. A man like Hilton needs passion. He needs fire. Not… whatever it is you are."
She smiled, a triumphant, vicious little smirk. Then, she did something that shattered the last vestiges of my composure.
She casually pulled down the collar of her hospital gown, revealing the delicate line of her collarbone. There, tattooed in elegant, looping script, was a single word: Hilton.
"He gave this to me for our one-month anniversary," she purred. "It's so he anoints me in public."
As if that wasn't enough, she reached over and tugged at the waistband of Hilton' s designer trousers, which were hanging low on his hips. Just above his hip bone, I saw it. A mirror image of her tattoo, only this one was a delicate, blooming rose. His mark of ownership.
"He says it's my brand on him," she whispered, her eyes glittering with malice. "So everyone knows who he belongs to."
The tattoos were absurd. Juvenile. And they were the most painful thing I had ever seen. The grand, all-consuming passion I had yearned for, the devotion I had dreamed of, he had given it all to this girl. He had literally branded himself for her, a willing slave to her whims.
And it was a love so profound, so all-encompassing, that it had no room for me. Not for my love, not for my loyalty, and not for our child.
My long-dead love for him had been a joke. A pathetic, one-sided fantasy.
