Chapter 2

Kalea White POV:

Lying on the cold marble, I looked up at the two faces twisted with a hatred so profound it seemed to suck the very air from the room. A primal terror, cold and sharp, seized me. It wasn't for myself. It was for the tiny, fluttering life inside me. My baby.

"The baby... is Angus's," I choked out, the words tasting of blood and fear. "Kaden, you have to listen to me-"

He didn't let me finish. He stalked over to the grand entryway table, grabbed a heavy crystal vase-a gift from Angus-and smashed it on the floor. Shards of glass exploded across the marble like deadly confetti.

"Don't you dare speak his name," Kaden roared, his chest heaving. He scooped up a handful of the larger, jagged pieces. "Do you have any idea what we've been through? Eating rotten food, living in a one-room apartment with rats, while you were here, sleeping on silk sheets!"

He crouched down, forcing my chin up with one hand while the other brought the sharp glass to my mouth. "You want to talk? Fine. Eat this."

He shoved the glass into my mouth.

The world dissolved into a cacophony of pain. The razor-sharp edges sliced my lips, my tongue, the inside of my cheeks. A wave of nausea rose in my throat, but I couldn't vomit, couldn't breathe. The coppery taste of my own blood filled my senses.

I tried to raise a hand, to claw at his face, to push him away, but it was like moving through water. My limbs were heavy, useless.

Then, a new, excruciating pain. Chelsey's red-soled stiletto heel came down hard on my outstretched hand, pinning it to the floor. I heard a sickening crunch, and a white-hot agony shot up my arm.

A scream built in my throat, but it was trapped, silenced by the glass and the blood. Tears streamed down my face, blurring their demonic faces into a grotesque tableau.

Kaden finally pulled his hand away, a look of grim satisfaction on his face. He spat on the floor beside my head. "That's what whores who lie get."

My entire body trembled with a pain so immense it felt like I was breaking apart. But then, my gaze fell on Chelsey. She was slowly, deliberately, moving her foot. The sharp, pointed heel of her shoe hovered directly over the curve of my belly.

A new kind of terror, an arctic blast of dread, froze the very blood in my veins.

"No," the word was a mangled, bloody whisper. "Please... not the baby."

With a strength I didn't know I possessed, I lunged, my crushed hand forgotten. I wrapped my fingers around her slender ankle, my grip a desperate, iron vise. I would die before I let her hurt my child.

This baby wasn't just a wish. It was three years of quiet hope and crushing disappointment. Three years of invasive tests, painful procedures, and hushed conversations with specialists who all said the same thing: Angus's accident had left his chances of fathering a child at nearly zero. This pregnancy was a miracle. A one-in-a-million shot that had brought a light into Angus's guarded eyes I had never seen before. This baby was our everything.

Chelsey sneered down at me, her lip curled in disgust. "Look at you. Like a bitch protecting her pups. It's pathetic."

"Get it over with, Chelsey," Kaden said impatiently, wiping his bloody hand on his trousers. "I don't want anyone finding out a White gave birth to a bastard while living under the Manning roof. It's humiliating."

The command was explicit. The intention, monstrous.

"Get rid of it."

My head whipped back and forth, a frantic, useless gesture. Blood and saliva dribbled from my chin, mixing with the debris on the floor. I tried to speak, to scream, to make them understand the catastrophic mistake they were making.

Finally, with a gut-wrenching heave, I managed to spit out the shards of glass. The relief was instantly replaced by a desperate need to make them hear me.

"Angus," I sobbed, the name tearing from my raw throat. "The baby is Angus's! He's the father!"

I looked from Kaden's disbelieving scowl to Chelsey's mocking smirk, my heart sinking with each beat. "I'm telling you the truth. It's his son. Your nephew."

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