Chapter3

The shrieking siren of the ambulance ripped through the night sky.

A violent wave of contractions tore through me. In the back of the rig, I twisted Nate’s tie around my fist and backed him into a corner with desperate, unadulterated fury. "Why? Weren't there enough luxury hotels out there for you to blow your money on? Why the hell did you have to screw that kind of trash in our home? On my territory!"

Nate let me choke him. His eyes were rimmed with bloodshot red, but he couldn’t muster a single word in his defense.

He paced outside the emergency room of that premier Manhattan private hospital for the entire night. But by sunrise, when his PR machine marched in the foreign press to snap photos and stabilize the company's plummeting stock, our hands never touched again.

I lay on the hospital bed, hooked up to an IV cocktail of anti-contraction fluids, and delivered my final ultimatum with ice in my veins. "Nate, you either send a doctor to terminate Oksana's pregnancy right now, or you sign the divorce papers immediately and walk away with absolutely nothing."

Nate lowered those slate-blue eyes that had once pulled me completely under. He chose silence.

The days that followed dissolved into a suffocating stalemate. I rapidly wasted away in that VIP suite while Nate grew haggard, a dark shadow of stubble claiming his jawline. Yet, he still deployed top-tier executive security to fiercely guard the fetus growing inside Oksana, protecting it like it was his own damn life.

The breaking point came one afternoon when, with Nate's tacit approval, Oksana stepped into my room. Her swollen body dropped to the floor beside my bed with a heavy thud. Crying and butchering the English language, she begged, "Ma'am, please... have mercy. Let the baby in my belly live, please..."

Right behind her trailed Nate’s parents—dripping with self-righteous, Ivy League, old-money arrogance. His mother stared down at me from her invisible pedestal. "Be the bigger person here, Elena. Your body is weak and keeping this pregnancy is a struggle. The family desperately needs more bloodlines to stabilize the recently crashing stock prices. It doesn’t matter who gives birth to it; the child will call you mother from now on."

The entire world seemed to tilt on a psychotic axis. Everyone lined up to lecture me on the 'bigger picture,' telling me to be kind, to practice charity and embrace this pathetic Eastern European immigrant’s child.

A violent tremor wracked my body. Cradling the belly I had fought so hard to protect, tears streamed down my face as I glared at this circle of people, desperately asking, "So I’m the unreasonable sinner in this scenario, right?"

Right at that moment, taking advantage of the open door, sixteen-year-old Mila charged into the room like a rabid dog. Before anyone could even react, she whipped out a small knife with her bare hands and, with bloodshot eyes, violently drove it straight into my stomach.

"You want my baby brother dead? You die instead!"

Accompanied by her most vicious curse, an obliterating agony instantly shredded my nerve endings. The room went black, and I collapsed into a pool of my own blood. Just like that, the child I’d nurtured inside me for five months was completely gone.

The doctor delivered the grave notice to Nate: "We need to perform a D&C surgery."

Chaos and pure madness reigned outside the trauma bays. Oksana scrambled for a jagged shard of broken glass from the floor and pressed it against her thick wrist. "I failed the Madam! Let my life pay for hers!" she wailed. Nate lunged forward like a madman, wresting the glass from her grip and pulling the woman tight against his chest, murmuring frantic consolations.

Only after he had settled Oksana did he bother to turn back toward me. He looked at my emaciated frame, gutted by the D&C procedure and drowning in pain. "Elle, let it go. Mila is just a kid from the slums. She doesn't know any better..."

I didn't know where I found the strength, but I yanked the IV needle right out of the back of my hand. Running on my very last ounce of energy, I slapped him across the face with everything I had left.

Nate let his head snap to the side, allowing the red welt to bloom freely across his cheek before he spat out the most shameless sentence in the world: "Elle, this is the only child I have left now."

I bit my bloodless lip so hard it nearly broke the skin, enunciating every single syllable. "I'm calling the police. I'm pressing murder charges against her."

Nate turned his head back, watching me with the cold, ruthlessly rational gaze of a capitalist predator. "I already had my people delete the hospital security footage. As for the department staff, they heard and saw absolutely nothing. After all, money is omnipotent sometimes. You don't have a single shred of evidence."

His fleet of highly-paid, top-tier attorneys was already on standby out in the hallway, making sure every witness and piece of evidence was watertight, protecting that murderer in an impenetrable fortress. That was raw power, and it was the protective umbrella he had thrown right over them.

I lay paralyzed on those stark white hospital sheets, looking at him through a blur of tears, like I had never truly known him at all.