1

Elena's Pov

I doubled up, clutching my stomach as it hurt and as though I had been slicing dozens of razors through it. I would think people would suspect I was in heat, but no, I was suffering due to another man's error. My husband was bedding another woman right before my eyes. Without any consideration whether I shall live or perish.

Tears flowed from my eyes as I stood and viewed them, their bodies entangled together on our bed. My knees trembled beneath me, about to give way at any time. The hallway whirled around me as another wave of agony swept over my stomach.

"James," I whispered, speaking so softly I barely heard my own voice.

My husband rolled his head leisurely, his eyes catching mine in the doorway. Instead of shock or shame, his face displayed no more than irritable discomfort, as though I had caught up with him midway through an unexciting phone call and not while he was betraying our marriage vows.

"Elena." With a sigh, he made no secret of it. "You're back early."

She moved under him, and I felt as if I'd been afforded another heartache when I saw my sister's face. Sophia's lips twitched into a small, pleased smile.

"Oh, Elle," she warbled, feigning concern, but triumph twinkled in the sheen of her eyes. "You weren't ever supposed to see this."

My hands scraped against the doorframe as I clutched at it, and another contraction gripped me. My legs collapsed beneath me and I fell upon the floor, the maternity dress I was wearing riding up high around my thighs.

"The baby" I gasped as the heat and wetness seeped between my thighs. "Something's happening to the baby."

James let out another sigh and rolled over from Sophia, grasping his own forgotten jeans in slow motion. "You always did have good timing," he grumbled, as though my pregnancy complications were an annoying distraction and an emergency.

Sophia sat up on the bed, tugging the silk robe—the birthday present she had given me—around her naked body. The robe I had envisioned as one of sisterhood now converted to another way of inserting herself in my house, in my life.

"Shall I call an ambulance?" she asked James, and not me, as though she were doing something dull.

My body stiffened as another contraction gripped me. I doubled up, forehead clashing against the icy-hard wood. The baby within me—the miracle that had taken three years of attempting to conceive and give birth to—struggled, strained. Like me.

"Please," I implored, loathing the quaver in my voice, loathing the fact that even now I was dependent upon them. "The baby."

James pulled his shirt over his head and glanced at his wrist. "We can get here. It's faster than calling an ambulance."

Sophia knelt beside me, beside my mangled form. She rested one of her hands on my shoulder in a gesture that would be comforting were I unaware, but one from which she extracted sparks and sharp slivers of pain as she dug her fingers deep into the flesh.

"Poor Elle," she said softly, so I alone heard her. "So fine. No wonder then that he made his way to me first?"

A cry rent from between my lips, as much from the heartache as from the agony swelling within me. My hands clutched at my belly, feeling the wild flailing of my child against them.

"Stop lying there theatrically," he said, now properly attired and keys clinking between his fingers. "If you really are experiencing complications, we are taking you to the hospital."

I tried to hoist myself, but my arms failed me too, too weak to hold up even the minimal weight of my body. Dark at the edges closed in, spots dancing in my line of vision.

"I can't," I whispered. "I'm frozen in place."

Sophia rose, pulling on my robe theatrically. "James, I believe she is. Look at the floor."

For the first time, I witnessed the horror in my husband's eyes as he watched the darkening pool under me. It was not amniotic fluid, but blood. So much blood.

"Shit," he swore, finally getting up. Kneeling beside me, he hesitated, his hands hovering above me. "Sophia, call 911."

My sister walked across to the bedside table and lifted up my phone. She dialed deliberately, her eyes never leaving mine as she made the emergency call in a detached clinical voice.

"My sister is pregnant and bleeding," she told the dispatcher, a voice suddenly strangled with plausible alarm. "Come quick, please."

The masquerade—the months of falsely pretended sisterhood, the congratulatory hug when I'd shared the pregnancy news, the offers to help paint the nursery—all lay around me in pieces of incredulity. Everything from any smile, any reassurance, any time I'd counted on her had been pointing us toward this deception.

There was another contraction, one even more powerful than the first one, and it stole my breath and surged through me as flames. My sight vanished, and the room disintegrated into blurry masses of color.

"Don't you faint!" I ordered, smacking you hard on the cheek. "An ambulance is on its way. Stay awake!"

Wish I had been able to laugh at the irony now that he was worried about whether I lived or not, now that witnesses might arrive at any moment. But the pain filled the room, with no room remaining.

Sophia was again standing beside me, now hastily wearing the attire that I had recognized she had brought along "in case she had to overnight" to help with baby preparations.

"I've always wondered what kind of mother you would be," she thought, stroking through my hair as though it were hers. "It looks as though we shall never know now."

The toughness of her voice pierced even my haze of misery. There was another cascade of tears running down my cheeks, combined with the cold sweat that wetted my cheeks.

Far-off sirens wailed, their volume increasing by the second. James paced back and forth around the room, raking his hands through his mussed hair.

They would question them, he complained to Sophia. "Come along after me."

"Always" she replied, and the intimacy of the word said as much about the depth and scope of their treachery.

My body twisted once more, and this time the agony was so extreme that the scream was torn from my heart. Something primal inside me moved—a ghastly release, an irrevocableness.

"Baby mine," I whispered, my voice quavering on the words. "Please save my baby."

They burst through the front door, driven by the screams of James. They swarmed around me, their voices blending together as they cried out medical terminology that I recognized not. They picked me up, moved me around, and attached monitors to my body.

Along the way, I caught sight of James and Sophia shoulder to shoulder, hands locked together when they thought no one was looking.

"BP falling!" another cried. "She's slipping!" Blackness on the edge of sight swept in, taking sound and color and agony. Awareness brought one and one thought alone: I had lost everything else that was important.