His daughter screamed. The family portrait she'd painted at preschool slipped from her fingers, hitting the floor alongside her little bunny sippy cup.
She turned to run, but Rosalind snatched her up by the arm.
The child wailed, tears streaming down her face. Rosalind slapped her hard across the cheek.
"Shut up, you little brat!"
"You and your father are both useless garbage. If either of you had been worth a damn, your daddy wouldn't have had to go chasing after my husband!"
Rosalind's hand was brutal. A single blow knocked loose several of the baby teeth that had already been wobbling.
My soul screamed without sound. I threw myself at Rosalind, kicking and clawing in a frenzy of hysteria.
She'd killed me so fast. So fast that only now was the reality catching up to me.
"Let go! Let go of my daughter!"
"Warren and Tristan are the ones who sinned. What right do you have to take it out on me and my child?"
"Go kill them! Go kill THEM!"
The fury of my spirit actually stirred a faint cold breeze in the physical world.
Rosalind set the child down. The girl had clearly wet herself from terror. Rosalind smiled at me.
"Julian, I just thought of a much more interesting game."
She grabbed my daughter and bound her roughly to a dining room chair with rope. Then she took socks from the balcony drying rack and stuffed them into the child's mouth, layer after layer, until my little girl's face turned a deep, suffocating red and she couldn't make a single sound.
After that, Rosalind emptied the refrigerator. Every last scrap of food. Not a crumb left behind.
When she was finished, she picked up my phone again and typed out a text to Warren.
"Honey, Lily Abbott and I had something come up—heading back to my hometown! Won't be home for a week!"
"Don't bother coming back either! Go take care of whatever you need to! Come home Monday and I'll have a surprise waiting for you!"
Rosalind finished typing, then dangled the phone screen in front of my corpse's face.
"Julian, let's make a bet."
"Let's see if your husband reads this text and notices something's off. Rushes home to save your daughter."
"Or if he spends another week tangled up with mine, and comes back just in time to collect the bodies."
When Rosalind sent that message, a sliver of relief cut through my panic.
Because she'd made a fatal mistake.
I didn't have a hometown.
Warren and I had both grown up at St. Catherine's Orphanage until we were twelve. Then the Henson family found him, and he became an heir to a fortune overnight.
On our wedding day, so I wouldn't feel the sting of having no family, he'd hired an entire AI team to reconstruct the faces of parents I'd never met, based on my own features. He'd even used holographic projections to let them witness our ceremony.
My spirit drifted toward the window and looked down.
Warren's car had already pulled up to the front gate of the complex.
The moment he saw the word "hometown," he would know something was wrong. He'd come upstairs to check, at the very least. Even if he ran into Rosalind, even if there was a confrontation, my daughter would have a chance. She wouldn't be left to starve to death, tied to that chair.
But the second Warren read the text, he tapped the screen dark.
"Julian says he's taking the kid back to his hometown for a week." He hooked a finger under Tristan's chin and pulled him into a long, deep kiss. His eyes were still glazed with desire that hadn't cooled. "Guess this gorgeous body of mine is all yours this week."
He didn't stop to wonder where my "hometown" was.
He didn't stop to wonder why my messages had been so strange all day.
He just sent back a single, affectionate reply: "Baby, I'll miss you."
