4: 4
4.
When I woke again, I was in a nursing facility I'd never seen before.
My hand went for my phone on instinct, but Jude was leaning in the doorway, dangling it at me.
"Looking for this?"
"Doctor's orders, big brother. You're not well. No phones for you."
"And it gets better. All these tantrums you've been throwing have made the bleeding in your brain spread fast. A week left, tops."
A week.
They wouldn't even wait one extra day.
They were going to bleed me dry and call it a wedding gift.
My hands clenched into fists. I fought down the urge to cross the room and drive one into Jude's face, and asked him instead.
"You do this, and you're not afraid of what people will say? One of you killing off her fiancé for money, the other one coveting his own brother's wife?"
Jude let out a scornful laugh.
"What people say? Does that measure up to your billion-dollar fortune?"
"Besides, you'll be dead. Even if the whole world takes your side, what exactly are they going to do about it?"
"And for the record, Flora was mine to begin with. We just borrowed her out to you for a couple of days. Don't tell me you actually believed the two of you were madly in love."
I caught the key word.
Borrowed.
In his own roundabout way, Jude had just admitted it. Flora was never my fiancée.
The child in her belly wasn't mine either.
I didn't rise to it. I just asked.
"Where are my wife and my child?"
Jude's face shifted. He didn't answer. He only said,
"You're tired, big brother. Time to rest."
Then he called the doctor in, and they pushed a syringe of something into me.
For the next two days I drifted in and out.
The few times I surfaced, it was to the sight of Flora and Jude being affectionate right in front of me.
Maybe because they knew my time was almost up, the careful pretense was gone.
I couldn't stop any of it. I could only lie there and watch them do as they pleased in front of me.
Seven days later, the wedding arrived, and my body had grown so weak I couldn't even find the strength to open my eyes.
Flora and Jude insisted on bringing me to the ceremony anyway.
"After all, big brother, this is your wedding," they said. "It just wouldn't feel complete without you there."
I knew what this was. They wanted to humiliate me, and they wanted the whole world to witness how the doting little brother and his wife grieved for their dying elder brother the moment I died.
Groundwork, so that later my estate and my "posthumous child" would fall into their hands without a single question.
The wedding went off without a hitch. My mother even produced a forged share-transfer document and read it aloud to everyone.
Proof of how grateful their paralyzed elder brother was to the younger brother caring for his wife and child.
Soon it was time for the couple to exchange rings.
Just as the two were about to slide them home, a sharp woman's voice cut clean through the ceremony.
"Wait! Flora is not Darren's wife! And the child in her belly is not Darren's either!"
