Ficorpio
Chapter 1
Chapter 1
London’s first snow came without warning. Frozen sleet stung my face like tiny needles. I pulled my designer camel coat tighter around myself and rested a hand on the slight swell of my stomach as I stepped out of the hospital doors.
Then I felt it.
A gaze I knew down to the marrow of my bones pinned me in place from the floor-to-ceiling windows of the building across the street.
Adrian Sterling.
We had been apart for three months, and he still looked exactly like a man who believed he controlled everything. His black tailored suit sharpened the straight, commanding line of his body. His features were cold enough to seem carved from ice. From above, he stared down at me as if he were assessing something he had once lost and now found again—something that belonged to him, only now stained by dust.
A moment later, a man in a black suit and gold-rimmed glasses crossed the street toward me. Assistant Hale. He had been at Adrian’s side for eight years.
“Ms. Bennett.” His smile was professionally polite as he held out a black premium card. “Mr. Sterling asked me to pass this along. There’s enough on this card to ensure you’ll never have to worry about money again. He hopes you’ll behave sensibly and terminate the pregnancy as soon as possible. Mr. Sterling will not be manipulated by any child, and the Sterling family certainly won’t open its doors to some child of unknown origin.”
I looked at the card, its black surface gleaming coldly in the snowlight.
Then I laughed.
My fingertips brushed my belly, and when I spoke, my voice was calm and perfectly flat. “Assistant Hale, you’re mistaken. This isn’t Mr. Sterling’s child. It’s mine and my husband’s. We got married two months ago. This has nothing to do with him.”
Behind his lenses, his eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly. His gaze dropped to my stomach, measuring, evaluating, but his tone remained outwardly respectful.
“Is that so? That’s a little too convenient, don’t you think, Ms. Bennett?”
He had spent too many years beside Adrian not to have mastered the art of reading people. He had probably seen countless women try to get close to Adrian by any means necessary.
Clearly, he had placed me in the same category.
“The timeline of your leaving Mr. Sterling and the number of weeks you’ve been pregnant match up exactly,” he said gently, with the kind of pressure that left no room for argument. “Mr. Sterling has always been particularly sensitive about the matter of an illegitimate heir. I’m sure you understand the consequences.”
I lowered my eyes and pulled up a wedding photo on my phone. In it, Ethan and I stood side by side outside the church, smiling—nothing flashy, just steady and real.
Assistant Hale lifted a hand and cut me off with polished courtesy. “That doesn’t prove anything.”
Chapter 2
Chapter 2
“Ms. Bennett.” His voice cooled, and the threat beneath it stopped pretending to hide. “Mr. Sterling said he wouldn’t mind seeing you on an operating table for a second time. Some mistakes only need to happen once.”
My fingers locked around the phone.
I looked up instinctively.
Across the street, Adrian was still standing by the glass. His eyes were dark and bottomless, like a winter lake at midnight. He was watching me with the faintest trace of mockery, as if he were certain I would do what I had always done before—panic, beg, or go pale and give in.
He was used to being the one in control.
Used to me obeying him.
And my pregnancy had clearly crossed one of his lines again.
The snow kept falling, thicker now. White flecks gathered in my hair and on my shoulders, the cold biting all the way through. I slipped my phone away, exhaled a long breath of steam, and turned back to Assistant Hale.
“Tell Mr. Sterling this for me,” I said. “I won’t make the same mistake twice.”
I laid a hand over my stomach and met his eyes. “I’m not clinging to the child I lost before, and I have no intention of gaining status through bearing his child.”
I spoke slowly, clearly, leaving no room for misunderstanding.
“This baby truly is mine and my husband Dr. Ethan Carter’s.”
I really had been pregnant with Adrian Sterling’s child once.
It was the sixth year I’d been with him. From twenty to twenty-six, the best years of my youth had been spent on him.
When I was seventeen, my father ran off after piling up enormous gambling debts. Loan sharks came pounding on our door, and I had nowhere left to go. I packed one small bag and left for Kingston on my own. For three years, I worked as a club hostess in a nightclub lounge glittering with money and liquor. In that world, I learned how quickly people turned cold, how to read a room, how to swallow humiliation, and how to smile anyway.
I met Adrian just after I turned twenty.
He paid off my father’s debts, drove those thugs away, and even paid for me to go back to school. Back then, he was like a beam of light cutting into a life that had already started to rot from the inside out.
So after I graduated, I stayed by his side willingly and became the woman he kept in the shadows.
In those six years, I went with him from one business dinner to the next, one stop on that endless business drinking circuit after another. I took one drink after another for him. Adrian hated drinking. Unless it was absolutely necessary, every glass was passed to me instead. Even when I drank so much I ended up in the hospital with stomach bleeding, I never complained once.
I thought that if I was good enough, sensible enough, obedient enough, I’d be allowed to stay beside him a few more years.
Then that tiny life came quietly into mine.
Chapter 3
Chapter 3
When I held the pregnancy report in my hands and saw the words six weeks pregnant, I was terrified—and secretly happy. For the first time in my life, I wanted to fight for something. I wanted to keep that baby, even if it could only ever be called an illegitimate heir.
I hid it from Adrian. I guarded my stomach carefully, day after day, until one night at an important dinner, I took another drink in his place and had to bend over, gagging.
A woman one of the vice presidents had brought along laughed and said, “Ms. Bennett, don’t tell me you’re pregnant.”
I looked at Adrian instinctively.
He frowned, barely noticeable, but I saw it. In those dark eyes, there was no joy at all. Only sharp scrutiny. Only open displeasure.
He never allowed anything unexpected into his life. A sudden pregnancy was the last thing he would tolerate. And I had hidden it from him for that long.
It was the first time he ever truly lost his temper with me. His voice was cold enough to cut.
“Sophie Bennett, I really underestimated you. You’ve got more nerve than I gave you credit for.”
He dropped me off outside the villa without another glance and left me there with a single sentence.
“I’m giving you one night to think. Remember who you are. If you still can’t figure it out by morning, pack your things and get out.”
It snowed that night too. Just as cold as today.
The wind cut across my face. I stood outside all night with red eyes, one hand over the slight curve of my stomach. I knew there had never been anything equal between us. I was only one of the women in his life—just one he found more pleasing than the others, one he’d kept longer.
The next day, I went to him on my own and told him I was willing to terminate the pregnancy.
By then, I was already twelve weeks along. The doctor said I’d spent too many years drinking, my body was weak, and I already had a prior miscarriage on record. If they forced the surgery this time, it could tear my cervix. I might never be able to have children again.
I repeated every word of that warning to Adrian.
He only stubbed out his cigarette. His dark eyes didn’t shift in the slightest.
“What does that have to do with me?” he said.
In his world, keeping an illegitimate child wasn’t exactly impossible. A few of his friends even half-joked about it with him.
“Adrian, you’re already in your thirties. Sophie’s the only woman you’ve kept around this long. Having a kid wouldn’t be the worst thing. Let the child be born and send them overseas to be raised.”
Adrian said nothing.
Later, after a few rounds of drinks, someone who was already tipsy laughed and asked, “Come on, Adrian. You’ve kept her by your side for six years. Don’t tell me you never felt anything at all.”