After They Ate Me Alive, I Fought Back

Chapter 5—Let the Bullet Fly

I opened the bathroom door and found Nathan standing there in nothing but a towel.

Once, that sight had done something to me. He’d had eight-pack abs and the easy confidence of a man who knew exactly what his body could do. Now there was a soft, faint swell above the towel line—nothing dramatic, just the small, smug pudge of a man who’d been eating home-cooked prenatal meals at somebody else’s table.

My stomach turned.

Not from the view. From everything attached to it.

“I got my period,” I said, and ducked past him into bed.

He followed, and I could hear the frown in his voice. “You’re not due until the end of the month. It’s the middle.”

“Don’t know.” I pulled the covers up to my chin. “Too much happened today. Stress does things.”

“We’ll see a doctor once you’re feeling better.”

“Once in a while is nothing. Let’s just sleep—we have to file early tomorrow.”

He slid in behind me and wrapped an arm around my waist. “You know, baby, you seem awfully eager to get rid of me.”

Oh, you have no idea how eager.

I rolled to face him, lacing our fingers together, and let my voice go three parts hurt, seven parts devotion. “How can you even say that to me? I just think a short pain is better than a long one. The sooner we sort out your mom and your brother, the sooner we can be together again.”

A tear slipped down onto his hand, right on schedule. He apologized immediately—he always did—and I let myself be soothed, and I fell asleep on his arm.

Or I lay there, on the very edge of the bed, wide awake until dawn, pretending to sleep while he snored beside me like a busted engine.

The moment the first gray light touched the window, while he was still out, I reached over and yanked a few hairs from his head.

He jolted awake, annoyed. “What the—?”

“I dreamed you left me.” I blinked up at him, eyes swollen from a night of no sleep, and watched the annoyance die on his face. “That after the divorce, you just... didn’t come back.”

He held me. Swore he’d never leave. And a few hours later, he drove me to the county clerk’s office like a man taking his wife to brunch.

The divorce application took all of five minutes. I walked out holding the receipt—the receipt that said, in government-issued ink, that Elena Cole and Nathan Cole were now, officially, on the clock.

Nathan smiled. “I’ll get it all sorted before the waiting period ends. We won’t have to go back for the final papers.”

Of course he said that. That was the plan, from his side: make me think it was all going to be called off, right up until the moment it wasn’t.

Not what I wanted.

But I’d learned, somewhere between the smoking husband and the crying mother-in-law, that the worst thing you can do in a fight is rush it.

Let the bullet fly a little longer. See where it lands.

“Go talk to your mom,” I said. “I’ll take the mall.”

He reached for my hand. I stepped back, gentle, natural. “If I’m there, it’ll just escalate. You go alone.”

He studied me. “You sure?”

“I’ll eat, shop, watch a movie, maybe get a massage.” I waved him off. “Go. I’m not a child.”

He patted my head like I was exactly that. “You’ll always be a little bit my child, baby. I’m afraid you’ll fly away if I don’t hold on.”

That’s right. A fat, dumb duck on the chopping block—of course he’s scared I’ll waddle off before he can swing the cleaver.

“Our love is rock solid,” I said sweetly. “I couldn’t fly out of your hand if I tried.”

He liked that. He liked it so much he pulled out his phone and transferred me a hundred thousand dollars on the spot. “Should’ve sent this yesterday. The whole mess with my mom, it slipped my mind.”

“Thanks, honey.” I smiled. Accepted. Turned toward the mall.

The smile died the instant my back was to him.

Because here’s a thing I’d started noticing, now that I was paying attention: Nathan sent me nearly his entire salary every month. Kept a few thousand for himself. The stock dividends went to my account. On paper, the man barely had two nickels to rub together.

So how, exactly, was he funding Hermès bags and a downtown penthouse and a whole second family?

He wasn’t.

He was stealing from my company. I’d have bet the entire nine-figure inheritance on it.

Time to go back to work.

But first—one stop.

I waited at the mall entrance, watched Nathan’s car disappear around the corner, then flagged a cab to the most reputable DNA lab in the city. I handed over the hairs—Nathan’s, and Liam’s—and paid for a rush.

Three hours. I could wait three hours.

I spent them at an electronics market, buying things a devoted wife has no business buying: pinhole cameras small enough to vanish into a bookshelf, voice recorders thin as a credit card. I paid cash. I did not smile at anyone.

By the time I got back to the lab, the results were ready.

I didn’t open them there. I carried the manila envelope out to a bench in the middle of the plaza, in the cold, with the city moving around me, and I sat there for a long time before I untied the string.

One thin sheet of paper. It weighed more than anything I’d ever held.

Paternity established: 99.99%.

I’d known. Of course I’d known. But there’s a difference between knowing a thing and having a government lab sign its name to it.

The last stupid, traitorous hope died right there on that bench. The hope that I was wrong. That there’d been a typo, a misunderstanding, a dream I could wake up from. The hope that my baby would get to have a father who loved us both.

Gone.

I laid my hand flat over my belly. Still flat. Still mine.

And I made a choice—not the easy one, the only one.

You wanted a mother who’d fight for you? Congratulations. You’re getting one.

I couldn’t afford to grieve. Grieving was a luxury for women who weren’t being hunted. I had to be sharp, and fast, and a little bit ruthless, and I had to do it before the thirty days ran out.

I needed someone to talk to—somewhere to put the poison so it wouldn’t eat me from the inside. I pulled out my phone and called Lola.

Then I hung up before it connected. She was abroad, halfway around the world, and it was the middle of the night wherever she was, and anyway, some things you just have to carry alone. Far water can’t put out a fire that’s already at your door.

The cold wind bit through me, and it steadied me, the way it always had. I packed the grief away, got in a cab, and told the driver to take me to the building my father built.

Whitmore Technologies.

I hadn’t been inside in three months. Not since the last shareholders’ meeting. I knew every hallway, every plant in the lobby, every scuff on the elevator doors. The people, though—the people I no longer trusted. Two years is a long time to leave a man in charge of a company. Long enough to fill it with loyalists. Long enough to bury a knife in every corner.

For all I knew, the woman in Nathan’s phone worked right here on the third floor.

I rode the elevator to the top, to the corner office that used to be mine—the one I’d handed to Nathan two years ago, telling myself it was temporary, telling myself I’d be back once the baby came.

I was back now. Just not the way any of us had planned.

My hand was on the door handle when a voice came from behind me.

“Excuse me. Who are you looking for?”