Chapter 3

Calla's POV

"My husband doesn't even know you! Why would you do this?!" I dug my nails into the armrest.

"Reeve?"

Silas let out a soft chuckle like he'd just heard a brilliant joke. He slowly pulled the gun back, his eyes darkening with a psychotic depth.

"No. The esteemed obstetrician is probably still talking himself up at his little round-table."

I froze. If it wasn't Reeve, who was dead upstairs?

"The person lying up there is my wife, Delphine Marsh." He leaned back, holding court like a priest at the altar.

I gasped, forcing out tears of pure horror. "You're insane... Why would you murder your own wife?"

"Because I loved her. I loved her too much!" Silas laced his fingers together, his voice so tender it made my skin crawl. "I fell in love at first sight at a gala. From that day on, I never let her out of my sight. I mapped out her routine, staged the perfect run-in, spilled a sugar-free oat latte on her, and brought my beautiful prize home."

I stared at him, bile rising in my throat. This was a textbook control freak dressing his obsession up as romance.

"I swear, I loved her down to my bones," his voice trembled with suffocating devotion. "In the winter, I pre-warmed her silk pajamas on the radiator. I tracked her menstrual cycles to accommodate her moods. To the rest of the world, we were the perfect couple."

"Stop..." I shook my head, hugging my chest. "I don't want to hear this."

"You're going to listen!" he roared, snapping the gun up at me. The tenderness completely vanished. "Because God decided to punish me for my perfection!"

I shrank into the furthest corner of the chair, not daring to breathe.

"We wanted a baby, but she could never keep them. Once, twice, three times..." Silas's facial muscles began to violently twitch. "You have no idea how it tortured me to watch her sweat through the pain."

"So she wouldn't feel guilty, I went to a fertility clinic behind her back to get tested."

He suddenly smiled. The broken, twitching smile of a ticking time bomb.

"Congenital azoospermia. The lab results told me I had a zero sperm count. I could never father a child in my life."

My nails dug deep into my palms. I could see the horrific twist coming.

"Was I devastated? No. The darkest punchline was—the exact same day I walked out of that clinic holding my diagnosis, she texted me. She was pregnant again." Silas’s eyes grew bloodshot. "She told me herself: Honey, we’re having another baby."

Dead silence in the living room.

"I thought it was a misdiagnosis. I prayed for a medical miracle," he ground out, syllable by syllable. "Until I checked her phone while she was in the shower. I saw the explicit texts with another man."

"She was carrying another man's bastard, soaking up my affection, playing me for an absolute fool!"

He shot up from the couch, lifting my chin with the freezing barrel of the gun. "Upstairs. Now."

"No... please..." I shook violently, tears streaming down my face. If Reeve came back and walked in on this lunatic, we were both dead.

"Move!"

With the gun jammed into my spine, I stumbled up to the second floor.

Right across from the master bedroom was the bathroom. The second he pushed the door open, the overpowering stench of copper hit me like a physical blow.

Lying inside the white porcelain clawfoot tub was a beautiful young woman.

The water was black with blood. There wasn't a single blunt-force injury on her naked body—but the insides of her arms and her inner thighs were completely littered with dozens of needle marks, each ringed with purple bruising.

As a medical examiner, I knew exactly what I was looking at. A massive uterine hemorrhage. He had pumped her full of oxytocin or labor-inducing meds, bleeding her out from the inside. He specifically avoided the major arteries so she would stay wide awake, feeling every single drop drain out of her.

Even though I’d seen a thousand corpses, pure self-preservation made me collapse onto the tile, violently dry-heaving.

Silas stared down at me coldly. "Find the biggest suitcase you have."

I shakily dragged out a big black hardshell suitcase and lined it with waterproof tarp.

What followed was fifty minutes of pure, agonizing horror.

Holding my breath and fighting back nausea, I helped this psychopath fold and snap the stiffening corpse into the luggage. My brain was firing on all cylinders—I had seen the crime scene, heard his motive, and become an accomplice. The moment I zipped this bag shut, there was zero chance he was letting me walk out alive.

Just as I locked the latches, a floorboard creaked out in the hallway.

I slumped onto the blood-slicked tiles, looking up at Silas, who was methodically wiping his fingers with a wet wipe.

With a hoarse voice and eyes full of desperate confusion, I asked the million-dollar question:

"Why did you have to kill her in my house?"

Silas paused his wiping.

He dropped the bloody wipe and looked down at me, a sickening, cruel smirk spreading across his once-calm face.

He leaned close to my ear, his voice dropping to a whisper like a curse:

"Great question, Mrs. Ashcroft. Because of your damn husband."