ARIA'S POV
I don't remember getting out of that room.
One second I was pinned to the leather couch, his cock still buried inside me, my question hanging in the dark like a live grenade. The next second I was moving. Scrambling. My ripped dress clutched to my chest.
My heels abandoned on the floor.
The stranger didn't chase me.
Didn't say a word.
I felt his stillness in the darkness. The weight of his silence. Then the door slammed behind me and I was in the hallway, naked from the waist down, slick running down my inner thighs in hot, shameful streaks.
I made it to the stairwell before I vomited.
Nothing came up. Just bile and shaking and the aftershock of an orgasm my body had enjoyed without knowing any better.
Room 906.
Not 806.
I'd opened the wrong door. Offered myself to the wrong man. Begged him to come inside me using my boyfriend's name while he fucked me into a leather couch.
My hand was still sticky. Still smelled like him. Cedar and whiskey and something darker underneath.
I stumbled down eight flights of stairs and found a staff bathroom on the ground floor. Scrubbed myself raw with paper towels and industrial soap. The mirror showed a woman I didn't recognize. Her mascara was a crime scene. Her neck was a bruise garden. Her eyes—my eyes—had the glassy, skittish look of someone who'd seen a ghost and let it rail her into next week.
I didn't go to room 806.
I didn't look for Liam.
I went home. Sat in the shower until the water ran cold. Stared at the tile and tried to convince myself it hadn't happened.
But my hips ached. My thighs ached. There was a tenderness between my legs that had nothing to do with romance and everything to do with being fucked within an inch of my life by a man whose face I never saw.
Splortch.
I could still hear it. Still feel it. The stretch. The fullness. The wet, obscene sounds my body made around him.
Shlick-shlick-slosh.
My pussy clenched at the memory and I wanted to die.
---
Dawn came too fast.
I dragged myself to work because calling in sick meant sitting alone with my brain, and my brain was not a safe neighborhood right now.
The employee break room on the third floor was empty when I arrived. I poured burnt coffee into a styrofoam cup and stood at the window, watching the city wake up, trying to remember how normal people breathed.
Then I heard it.
A giggle.
From the supply closet.
The door was cracked. Three inches. Enough to see. Enough to destroy whatever was left of my morning.
Chloe.
My director. The woman who'd spent three years making my life a slow, bureaucratic hell. The woman who took credit for my event logistics and blamed me for her budget overruns.
She was pressed against a shelf of printer paper, skirt hiked up, legs wrapped around a man's waist.
The man was Liam.
My Liam.
The Liam who'd texted me to meet in 806. Who apparently had a backup plan when I didn't show.
"You're such a bad boy," Chloe was cooing. "Standing up your little girlfriend."
"Please." Liam's voice. Liam's sneer. "She's not my girlfriend. She's a situation. Something I inherited from college that won't stop clinging."
My coffee cup crumpled. Hot liquid spilled over my knuckles. I didn't feel it.
"Tell me more," Chloe purred, grinding against him. "Tell me why you're trading down."
"Trading up. Trust me." He kissed her neck. The same way I'd imagined he was kissing mine last night.
"Aria's boring. She's a fucking nun. Three years together and she treats sex like a hostage negotiation. Never initiates. Never gets wet. Just lies there waiting for it to be over."
Schlrrrp.
The sound of his mouth on Chloe's throat.
The same sound the stranger made on mine.
"She's also broke," Liam continued, and his voice was light, conversational, like he was discussing a stock portfolio instead of eviscerating the woman he'd asked to discuss his future. "Student loans up to her eyeballs. Always hinting about moving in together so she can split rent. I'm not an ATM, Chloe. I'm a man with needs."
"Mm. And what do you need?"
"A woman who actually likes fucking. Not some starfish who makes me feel like a rapist every time I want something other than missionary."
I couldn't move.
Couldn't breathe.
Couldn't unhear the casual cruelty in his voice. The way he described me—starfish, nun, hostage negotiation
—like I was a problem to be managed. A burden. A joke.
I'd saved myself for him.
Three years of saying "not yet." Three years of wanting it to be special. Three years of believing that when I finally said yes, he'd understand why I waited.
And now—
Now my first time belonged to a stranger with a scar and a growl. And my boyfriend was in a supply closet with my boss, describing my sexual inadequacy while she humped him against office supplies.
"You're terrible," Chloe giggled.
"I'm honest. She's a dead fish in bed and a leech in my wallet. I was going to dump her last night. She didn't even show up." He snorted. "Probably for the best. Let her figure it out on her own."
Something in my chest cracked.
Not metaphorically.
I felt it. A physical snap. A clean break somewhere between my ribs.
I backed away from the door. Silent. Slow. My hand was shaking so badly the coffee cup slipped and hit the floor. Splat. Brown liquid everywhere.
They didn't notice.
I ran.
---
Four weeks passed.
I didn't confront Liam. Didn't confront Chloe. Didn't make a scene. What was there to say? You broke my heart, so I let a total stranger rail me senseless and now I can't stop thinking about his abs?
No.
I swallowed it. Buried it. Went to work and did my job and ignored the way Chloe smirked at me in meetings.
Ignored the way Liam's contact photo disappeared from my phone after he finally sent the "it's over" text.
But my body wouldn't let me forget.
The nausea started week two.
Morning sickness—except it wasn't just mornings. It was elevators and coffee smells and the sight of Chloe's smug face across the conference table.
Gllrk.
I spent half my shifts ducking into bathrooms, dry-heaving into toilets, pressing cold paper towels to the back of my neck.
My breasts swelled. Ached. The shower spray hurt. My bras stopped fitting. I bought cheap sports bras two sizes up and tried not to think about what it meant.
The exhaustion was biblical. I fell asleep on the subway. Fell asleep at my desk. Fell asleep sitting upright in the break room while my tea went cold.
Week four brought the corporate dinner.
A delegation from a German investment firm. Billion-euro portfolios. The kind of money that made even
Chloe's lizard brain sit up and pay attention.
She assigned me to serve wine to the "special guests."
Not waitstaff. Not catering. Me. The event manager with three years of experience and a degree in hospitality logistics.
"Just keep their glasses full," Chloe said, smiling her snake smile. "And maybe loosen a button or two. Herr
Meissner appreciates... hospitality."
Herr Meissner was seventy-two with breath like a distillery and hands that didn't understand the concept of personal space.
The first time his palm found my ass, I sidestepped.
The second time, he cornered me against the dessert table. His fingers crawled up my thigh. His wedding ring was cold against my skin. His colleagues watched and chuckled like this was dinner theater.
"Excuse me," I said, voice tight. "I need to—"
"Don't be rude, Aria."
Chloe's voice, right behind me.
Her hand between my shoulder blades.
The shove came hard and sudden. I stumbled forward, right into Herr Meissner's lap, his erection pressing against my hip through expensive wool trousers, his delighted "Ach!" ringing in my ear.
The room spun.
My stomach lurched.
The cramping in my abdomen—the dull, persistent ache I'd been ignoring for days—exploded.
Not a cramp.
A rupture.
Something warm gushed between my legs. Not the slick of arousal this time. Something thicker. Hotter. Wet blood soaking through my skirt, streaking down my thighs in crimson rivers.
Splrrrt.
The sound of my body betraying me.
"Mein Gott—"
"Someone call—"
"She's bleeding—"
I hit the floor face-first. The carpet tasted like champagne and metal. The world went gray, then black, and the last thing I heard before consciousness fled was Chloe's voice, cold and clipped, saying: "God, she's so dramatic."
---
Beeping.
Soft sheets.
The antiseptic smell of a private clinic.
I surfaced slowly. My mouth tasted like cotton. There was an IV in my arm and a catheter somewhere I didn't want to think about.
The VIP wing of the corporate medical center. I recognized the dove-gray walls. The expensive silence. This was where the execs got their Botox and their discreet STD treatments.
A doctor stood beside my bed.
Dr. Nazari. Silver hair. Kind eyes. Holding a tablet with my ultrasound results.
"Aria," she said quietly. "You're awake."
"What—" My voice came out sandpaper. "What happened?"
"You collapsed at the corporate dinner. Hemorrhaging. We almost lost you."
The cramping. The blood. Splrrrt. The sound came back in a rush and I flinched.
"Was it... my period? I've been irregular—"
"No." Dr. Nazari's face did something complicated. "Aria, you're pregnant. Approximately six weeks along.
The bleeding was a subchorionic hematoma—a tear in the uterine lining. The fetus is still viable, but barely.
You're very lucky to be alive."
Pregnant.
The word didn't compute.
Six weeks.
I counted backward. Counted forward. Hit the night in room 906 like a brick wall.
Gonna fill this tight little pussy. Gonna pump you so full you'll taste it.
The stranger's voice. The stranger's promise. The stranger's consequence, now growing inside me like a ticking bomb.
"No," I whispered. "No. That's not—I didn't—"
"The ultrasound shows a healthy gestational sac. Strong heartbeat."
Heartbeat.
His heartbeat. Some faceless, nameless man's genetic material had latched onto my uterine wall and started building a person while I'd been dry-heaving into toilets and thinking I had food poisoning.
"I need pills." I grabbed Dr. Nazari's wrist. My fingers were bone-white and shaking. "Abortion pills.
Whatever you have. I can't—you don't understand—I don't even know who—"
Dr. Nazari opened her mouth.
The clinic door opened faster.
Not slid. Not swung.
BANG.
Splintered. Broken off its hinges. Kicked inward by a force that made the walls tremble.
A silhouette filled the doorway.
Tall. Shoulders like a cliff face. Hair thick and dark, disheveled, like he'd run his hands through it a hundred times on the way here.
And his voice.
The growl I'd heard in the dark. The rasp that had told me to say his name. The voice I'd been trying to forget for four weeks straight.
"Where is she?"
Dr. Nazari stepped back. "Sir, you can't—visiting hours—security—"
"Where. Is. She."
His eyes found the bed.
Found me.
Gray eyes. Storm-colored. Wild.
And I knew—
I knew exactly who had kicked down the door.
I just didn't know his name.
