Chapter 3

Clarice's POV

He pinned both of my wrists above my head. He was completely hammered, deaf to every word I said. His calloused hand groped blindly for the lower half of my face and clamped down, the pressure forcing my eyes open.

"Shut up." He stared down at me, a mocking sneer twisting his lips. "Clarice never says no. That woman spreads her legs for me every single time."

The words came down on my pride like a sledgehammer, and something inside me splintered. Before I could fight back, he tore my nightgown apart. The silk gave with a thin, obscene sound.

A tearing, agonizing pain instantly ripped through my lower abdomen.

I thrashed wildly, my nails dragging bloody furrows down his back, but I couldn't move him an inch. He was a wall built out of muscle and whiskey.

It wasn't until warm blood snaked down my inner thighs and soaked the white sheets a sickening crimson that the thick stench of iron finally cut through his drunken haze.

Darius went still. He looked down at the blinding pool of dark red spreading beneath me. The alcohol drained out of him in a single breath. His face went ashen.

"Clarice... No. Impossible. Doctor! Get a doctor!" He scrambled for his phone, his hands shaking so violently he couldn't even swipe the screen.

I stared blankly at the ceiling. Somewhere under that excruciating pain, a fragile little life was slipping away, and there was nothing I could do to hold on to it. Nine weeks. I had been saving the news for his birthday.

No tears. No hysterical screaming. I just looked at this man who claimed to love me, this man who had personally murdered our child, and felt nothing in my chest but dead, gray ash.

"Darius," I said, my voice entirely devoid of emotion. "You disgust me."

When I opened my eyes again, Darius was sitting by the hospital bed with his hands buried in his hair. He was sober now. His gaze kept drifting to the blood-stained sheets discarded in the corner, and the ruthless Don of Calder City was trembling like a broken man.

"Clarice, I'm so sorry... I don't know what happened, I drank too much." He seized my hand, his eyes bloodshot, his tone pathetic. "We'll have another baby. Whatever you want, I'll give it to you to make it up. Okay?"

Watching that deep, affectionate performance only made my stomach churn. My heart had already died in that pool of blood on the bed, and no amount of penance was going to warm it back to life.

I coldly pulled my hand back, picked up my phone, and texted my lawyer, Callum Reed.

"Draft a divorce agreement. Immediately."

A nurse, Beatrix, pushed the door open. "Mr. Harlow, please step outside and sign the post-op D&C consent forms."

Darius nodded frantically and followed her out, his shoulders bent like a man twice his age.

The second the door clicked shut, the bathroom door inside the clinic snicked open. Milo stepped out like a ghost, a bakery box balanced in his hands, the ribbon on it tied with insulting care.

"Clarice, you look terrible," he said, his eyes swimming with pity. "I brought you your favorite fig tart. God, why did you have to go through another miscarriage? He clearly can't protect you!"

"I'm allergic to figs. Paloma is the one who likes them." I looked at him the way you look at a clown who has forgotten his own routine.

Milo froze. The color went out of his face by degrees. The box slipped out of his hands and hit the floor, the pastries flattening into the tile.

"Stop playing the devoted lover, Milo." My face was stone. "That sex tape back at Sedgwick wasn't an accidental leak. You recorded it, and you hand-delivered it to Paloma. Didn't you?"