"How could you hit him!"
"Do you have any idea he's been at your bedside for seven days and seven nights, waiting for you to wake up?"
"He's the father of my child. My man. What right do you have to hit him? What right do you have to treat him like something you can take your anger out on!"
Something soft and aching flickered in Giles's eyes, and he pulled her into his arms.
That look. I knew it too well.
He used to look at me like that.
When I nearly died of alcohol poisoning trying to ransom him back from his enemies.
When I knelt on the ground and smashed my forehead bloody to keep the debt collectors from taking him.
So the tenderness I'd traded my life for could be replaced, just like that, by a single tear from someone else.
I pushed myself upright, looked at the two of them wrapped around each other, and laughed at myself.
"So I'm supposed to thank him?"
"Thank him for ripping out my uterus for the sake of your baby, and nearly killing me on the operating table?"
Lucinda's tears came harder.
She shoved Giles away, snatched the fruit knife off the bedside table, and aimed it at her own slightly rounded belly.
"It's all my fault! I'm the one who hurt you! Let me pay for it!"
"I'll cut my baby and my uterus out right now and give them to you. Is that enough?"
"Lucy!"
Giles's face went white. He locked his arms around her and wrenched the knife free.
The blade sliced across his palm, blood streaming down his fingers.
He didn't even glance at it. He just lifted his head and looked at me with eyes so cold they were barely human.
"Beulah. Is this what you wanted? Are you satisfied now?"
He scooped up Lucinda, who had fainted from the shock, and walked out without looking back.
At the doorway he stopped. His voice held no warmth at all.
"I've been too good to you."
"Since you refuse to behave, then it's time you tasted some real hardship."
Two bodyguards in black came in, faces blank, and hauled me up by the arms.
They dragged me out of the room and dumped me on the freezing hospital corridor floor like I was garbage.
"CEO Gilbert's orders. Starting today, every privilege you had as Mrs. Gilbert is revoked."
"You're no longer entitled to this VIP room."
They took my phone. My wallet. They stripped the expensive hospital gown off my body and left me in nothing but the thinnest cotton slip underneath.
Penniless, post-op, standing in a dark hospital corridor in the middle of the night. Like a joke.
Giles came in person to pick me up.
Not to take me home.
To punish me.
He shoved me into the car and drove all the way out to his private woodland estate on the edge of the city.
The forest outside the windows was pitch black. The cold wind cut straight through me and I couldn't stop trembling.
The door opened and he pushed me out, hard.
"Kneel. Apologize to Lucy."
I looked at him. My eyes were dead.
"Never."
One word, and it lit the fuse on everything left of his rage.
He grabbed my hair and forced my face into the mud, then wrenched my head back so I had to look up at him.
"Beulah, you think you still get to make demands?"
He let go. Stepped back. Closed the car door.
"Stay here and think about what you've done."
"When you've come to your senses, you can walk yourself out."
The engine roared to life. The headlights swept across my face, white and bloodless.
I watched that light shrink, smaller and smaller, until it vanished into the endless dark.
Damp. Cold. And the waves of sharp pain from the wound in my belly.
I lay facedown in the freezing mud, staring in the direction the taillights had disappeared.
The last remnant of something inside me, the thing I'd once called love, finally went out for good.
