"What have I ever done to betray you?..." - Read Full Novel
The nurse's hand was cold on my arm.
"Mrs. Blackwood, I need you to sign here."
I stared at the surgical consent form, my fingers trembling over the dotted line. The words blurred together—"termination," "risks," "complications." They meant nothing compared to the truth I'd been choking on for three months.
Julian had stood in our living room, his arm wrapped around Sophia's trembling shoulders, and told the world I was a whore.
"Evelyn's family is strict," he'd said, as if that justified everything. "She can't bear the scandal."
But *I* could bear it. I could bear the whispers at every social event. The way his friends looked at my swollen belly with disgust. The way my own husband flinched when I walked into a room.
Because Julian knew the truth. He'd always known.
The baby in my womb was his. Every kick, every flutter, every silent conversation I'd had with this tiny life belonged to *us*.
But Sophia's child—conceived with a stranger she couldn't even name—needed protection. And my husband, the man who had sworn to love me until death, had chosen to destroy me instead.
"You can't abort our child," he'd said, locking me inside our villa like a prisoner.
The irony burned. He couldn't let me end *our* baby's life, but he could let the world believe I'd conceived it in someone else's bed.
My palm pressed against my stomach. The baby kicked back.
The operating table was freezing. The lights above me were too bright, too sterile. I closed my eyes and thought of Julian's face—the way he'd looked at Sophia when she'd faked a stomachache at my birthday party. The way he'd fed her pills, held her hand, whispered reassurances.
While I sat alone in the corner of that room, invisible.
*This is your birthday party,* he'd said. *Tough it out.*
I'd toughed it out for seven years.
The anesthesia began to pull me under. My tears slid sideways into my ears, hot and useless.
Somewhere across the city, Julian was at the airport with Sophia. They were boarding a plane to Europe, where she would give birth to another man's baby under the protection of his name.
"Goodbye, Julian," I whispered into the darkness.
The last thing I heard was the monitor flatlining my consciousness.
But in another part of the city, a phone rang.
"Congratulations, man!" Marcus's voice crackled through the speaker. "Looks like you're finally free of that deadweight."
Julian's hand tightened on his boarding pass. "What are you talking about?"
"Valerie. She's at the hospital right now. Getting an abortion."
The words hit him like a physical blow. His blood turned to ice.
The plane was boarding. Sophia was calling his name.
But Julian was already running.
He burst through the airport doors, his heart hammering against his ribs.
By the time he reached the hospital, the operating room doors were closed.
I woke to the sound of a ceiling fan clicking in slow, irregular circles.
The recovery room smelled like antiseptic and wilted flowers, a combination so sterile it made my bones ache. Every breath I took felt borrowed, like my lungs were reminding me they still worked even though a part of me had died on that operating table. The nurse had given me morphine, but the hollow space inside my chest was beyond any drug's reach.
The door opened without a knock.
Margaret Blackwood stood in the doorway, her pearl necklace catching the fluorescent light like a row of tiny, judgmental moons. She wore black, as if she were already in mourning. Her eyes were dry, but her hands trembled around the handle of her designer handbag.
She didn't stop. She pulled a chair beside my bed, the metal legs screeching against the tile floor like an animal in pain. The sound made my teeth grind together. Margaret sat down, folded her hands in her lap, and stared at the IV tube dripping saline into my arm.
"Julian called me," she said. "He was hysterical."
I laughed. It came out broken, a rasping sound that scraped my throat raw. "Good."
"He told me what he did. The lock-up. The accusations. The public statement." She paused, her voice cracking for the first time. "Everything."
I turned my head away from her. The window showed a gray sky, heavy with clouds that refused to rain. "Why are you here, Margaret? To offer me tea and sympathy?"
She reached into her handbag and pulled out a burner phone, still in its packaging, and a small envelope. She placed them on the bedside table like offerings at an altar.
"You're going to need these."
I stared at the phone. "I don't want your money."
"That's not money." She pushed the envelope closer. "That's a bank card with thirty thousand dollars in an account under a false name. Untraceable. Untouchable. My husband set it up years ago, in case we ever needed to disappear."
Margaret's face was a fortress of restraint, but I saw the cracks—the slight tremor in her jaw, the way her fingers kept gripping and releasing the strap of her bag. She was afraid. Not of me. Of what I might do next.
"I've known about Sophia for two years," she said. "I found receipts. Hotel bookings. A necklace Julian bought her for Christmas while you were cooking dinner in his mother's kitchen." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "I tried to tell you. I left an unsigned note in your coat pocket at the anniversary gala. You never found it."
The memory surfaced like a corpse rising from a lake. That gala. The note I'd mistaken for a shopping list. I'd thrown it away.
"I knew." She leaned forward, her voice hardening into steel. "And I did nothing. Because I was afraid of losing my son. Afraid of the scandal. Afraid of what people would say if the perfect Blackwood marriage fell apart." She grabbed my hand, her grip surprisingly strong. "I will never make that mistake again."
"So what do you want from me? Forgiveness?"
The word hung in the air between us, dark and electric. I felt something stir in the hollow space where my baby had been. Not hope. Not rage. Something colder. Sharper.
"I want you to destroy him," Margaret said. "Not just Julian. Sophia too. I want them to feel every ounce of pain they've caused you. I want them to lose everything—their reputation, their money, their future." She looked me directly in the eyes. "And I want to help you do it."
"Yes." She stood up, smoothing down her dress with deliberate precision. "And I have spent forty years watching that family destroy women like you. My husband. His father. My son." She walked toward the door, then stopped. "Today, I choose to be a woman instead."
The door clicked shut behind her.
I sat in the silence for a long time, counting the ceiling fan's rotations. One. Two. Three. Each turn brought me further away from the woman I had been. Further toward something I couldn't name yet.
My hand reached for the burner phone.
A single number was already saved in the contacts: *The Ashes.*
I didn't ask what it meant. I already knew.
And ash could be anything.
Three days later, I checked into a cheap apartment in the industrial district, where the windows were permanently fogged with exhaust and the neighbors never asked questions. The walls were thin, the radiator coughed like a dying smoker, and the only furniture was a mattress on the floor and a folding chair I'd stolen from a laundromat.
I sat in that chair for hours, staring at my reflection in the cracked screen of my old phone.
I made a list in my head.
*Julian's business secrets.* I knew the passwords to his private server. The names of his offshore accounts. The dates of his unreported meetings with competitors.
*Sophia's loose ends.* I had memorized her phone number the day Julian introduced her as his "friend." I had seen the prescription bottle she'd dropped in my garden—prenatal vitamins with a doctor's name I'd never forgotten.
*The servants.* Maria, the maid who had found me crying in the pantry. Thomas, the groundskeeper who had heard Julian shouting at his lawyer. Henri, the chef who despised Sophia for her cruelty to the kitchen staff.
None of them owed Julian anything.
I picked up the burner phone and dialed the first number Maria had whispered to me weeks ago, before the lockdown, before the betrayal.
The voice on the other end hesitated, then spoke in a low murmur. "What kind of favor?"
"The kind that ends with Julian Blackwood on his knees."
I smiled for the first time in days.
The campaign began quietly.
An anonymous tip to Julian's largest competitor about an unreported tax discrepancy. A screenshot of Sophia's online shopping spree—three thousand dollars on a single handbag, charged to Julian's corporate card—sent to the gossip columnist who had once called me "the phantom bride."
Within forty-eight hours, Julian's stock dipped three points. The newspaper ran a story about a "mysterious mistress draining a prominent businessman's accounts." Sophia's Instagram comments filled with questions she couldn't answer.
I watched from my folding chair, the glow of my laptop illuminating my face like a ghost.
*This is only the beginning.*
A text from an unknown number: *You're making noise. Keep it up. —M.*
I typed back: *Plan B is ready.*
The reply came instantly: *Go.*
I closed the laptop and looked at the ceiling.
The fan was still clicking.
But for the first time, I didn't hear emptiness.
Julian's face appeared on my phone screen at 3:47 AM.
He was standing outside my apartment building, rain plastering his hair to his forehead, his suit jacket soaked through. His eyes were wild, bloodshot, desperate in a way I had never seen before.
"Elara." His voice cracked. "I know you're in there. Please. Just talk to me."
I remained motionless in the dark, watching him through the blinds.
"I know you did this. The stock. The article. I know it's you."
"Valerie, I'm sorry. I am so, so sorry. I was wrong. I was weak. She manipulated me, she—" He stopped, choking on his own words. "I lost our baby. I lost *you*. Please. Give me a chance to fix this."
Julian's face lit up with relief, hope, something that looked almost like love.
I opened the door two inches.
"I hope she was worth it."
The next morning, I received a video file from an unknown sender.
Sophia was sitting in a hospital bed, a doctor beside her, her face pale and dramatic. "I'm losing the baby," she whispered. "I need Julian. Please. Tell him I need him."
The camera panned to the doctor, who was checking his watch, clearly annoyed.
Then the video cut to a different angle—hidden, phone-in-pocket quality—showing Sophia laughing with the same doctor thirty minutes later, her hand waving dismissively.
"She's fine," the doctor said. "Just a little gas. Her vitals are perfect."
I texted the file to Julian with one message:
*Your princess is fine. Check your priorities.*
Two hours later, I heard through Maria that Julian had not visited the hospital.
Sophia was calling his phone forty-seven times.
The walls of my apartment were closing in, but I didn't mind.
And every soldier I recruited was one more nail in their coffin.
Maria passed me a voice recording of Sophia threatening a maid. Thomas sent me photographs of Julian's secret meeting notes, left carelessly on his desk. Henri provided a list of every restaurant Sophia had dined at while claiming to be "too ill to attend Julian's events."
Piece by piece, I was building a bomb.
And when I was ready, I would detonate it in the middle of their perfect, fragile lives.
Four days later, the burner phone rang.
I recognized the voice immediately.
"Please." He was crying. Actually crying. "I'm begging you. Stop. Whatever you're planning, just—stop. I'll give you anything. Money. A house. A divorce. Anything."
"Yes. Just tell me what you want."
I looked at the folder on my lap.
Inside was a letter from a fake DNA testing lab, a lie I had crafted with Margaret's help, a fiction designed to shatter his last illusion.
Read the words I had written.
*"The unborn child does not share a paternal blood match with the alleged father."*
"I want you to tell Sophia goodbye. I want you to watch her face when she realizes she's lost everything. I want you to kneel in front of me and beg for a forgiveness I will never give you."
"But first—" I stood up, my reflection staring back at me from the foggy window. "I'm going to make you choose."
I held the folder in front of the camera.
I smiled into the darkness.
And the screen went black.
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