Chapter 3

The IVF procedure was a violation.

Cold instruments, impersonal doctors who wouldn' t meet my eyes.

Ethan was there, watching, ensuring I complied. Olivia was absent, but her presence felt like a suffocating blanket.

They implanted the embryo. Ethan' s child. A stranger' s egg.

A life forced upon me, a constant reminder of my losses, my imprisonment.

After the procedure, Ethan didn't take me back to our bedroom.

He led me to a disused wing of the Cole mansion.

Dust lay thick on everything. The air was stale, cold.

The windows were boarded up from the outside.

"You'll stay here," he said. "Until the baby is born. It's quieter. Better for the pregnancy."

It was a prison.

He locked the door from the outside.

The first few days were a blur of despair.

I barely ate the food he left on a tray outside the door.

The grief for Noah was a constant ache, a hollowness that consumed me.

One night, the despair became too much.

I found a shard of broken mirror in a dilapidated dressing table drawer.

If I couldn't escape, I could end this. End the pain.

I pressed the sharp edge to my wrist.

The door creaked open. Ethan.

He moved faster than I thought possible.

He wrenched the shard from my hand, his face contorted with fury.

"Do you want to kill this baby too?" he snarled, shaking me. "Is that what you want?"

He tied my wrists to the bedstead with strips of cloth.

"You won't get another chance," he said, his voice low and menacing.

He left me like that for hours.

When he returned, he untied me but his eyes were hard.

He took away anything I could use to harm myself.

The next day, Olivia came.

She glided into the dusty room, a picture of serene concern.

"Sarah, dear," she said, her voice dripping with false sympathy. "You mustn't upset yourself. Think of the baby. Our little Angel."

Angel. That's what she was calling it.

She brought a small, silver bell.

"Ring this if you need anything," she said. "Anything at all."

Her smile didn't reach her eyes.

She ran a hand over my still-flat stomach.

"You're doing such an important thing, Sarah. Atoning."

Her touch felt like a brand.

Ethan started bringing in medical equipment. A fetal monitor. Vitamins.

My health didn't matter. Only the health of "Angel."

He' d strap the monitor to my belly, listening. His face would soften slightly at the sound of the heartbeat.

Not for me. For the child I was forced to carry.

The isolation was profound. The only human contact was Ethan' s brief, functional visits, or Olivia' s occasional gloating appearances.

My body became a vessel, a thing to be managed.

The baby grew. A constant, alien presence within me.

I felt no connection to it. Only resentment and a deep, gnawing pain.

One day, Ethan brought a doctor. An old man with shifty eyes.

He checked my blood pressure, listened to my heart, then to the baby's.

"She's malnourished," the doctor told Ethan, not looking at me. "The stress isn't good."

Ethan' s jaw tightened. "She gets food. She just needs to eat it."

After the doctor left, Ethan forced me to eat, spooning bland, tasteless food into my mouth like I was an infant.

"You will not jeopardize this baby, Sarah," he said, his voice flat.

My voice was gone. Not literally. But I had nothing to say to them. No words left.

The baby was a parasite, feeding on my life, my grief.

Olivia would sometimes sit in the room, knitting tiny, delicate things.

She' d talk to my belly, telling "Angel" how much she was loved, how she was a gift.

Each word was a new torment.