Chapter 3
943 Words
Agony wracked Liam, cold sweat beaded on his forehead, dripping down his temples, yet he still forced a wobbly smile onto his face.
"Megan, Sandra's been spoiled rotten by her parents her whole life. She couldn't even take a single whipping. But you're different. You survived a ninety-nine whipping last time. Nine more? You can handle this for sure."
When Megan didn't move, his face darkened instantly. "If you can't even do this much to help your husband out, you don't get to keep raising our son."
Megan stumbled back two steps, and forced a smile that was uglier than crying. To keep her son from being taken from her, she gritted her teeth and took those nine whips, one after another searing into her skin.
Megan had thought if she swallowed her anger and bit her tongue, she'd eventually get treated decently. But instead, Liam went and registered Sandra's son in the Huntington family lineage.
Megan hated Liam.
She hated that he didn't love her anymore, and that he'd trapped her between a rock and a hard place with nowhere to turn.
She hated that for Sandra's son, he'd let her own baby boy, barely a hundred days old, become the laughingstock of the entire Huntington family.
Megan threw off the polished, dignified mask of Mrs. Huntington and reached out to media outlets to expose his affair with Sandra. But Liam had already planned to go public anyway. Megan's little exposé only made them even more shameless and unbridled.
Before long, Megan was the biggest joke among the city's social circle.
Blind with rage, she lost every last bit of self-control. Megan wrote a long damning post exposing how Sandra and her mother killed her mother. But before she could hit send, Liam intercepted it.
To punish her, he threw a grand, public acknowledgment banquet for Sandra's baby, announcing the child's place in the family to everyone in the circle. Whatever he did to pull it off, even her mother-in-law didn't object.
On the day of the banquet, Megan locked herself and her son inside their house. For her son's sake, she was ready to stop fighting. But Sandra had no intention of letting her rest.
Sandra sent her a video.
In the clip, Liam held Sandra tight, kissing her like he'd never got enough, his heavy, ragged breathing sharp and grating in Megan's ears.
"Liam said, even after you two divorced, I don't have to pretend or hold back around his mom."
Megan clenched her fists so tight her nails bit into her palms. What about all the wrongs she'd suffered? What did all that count for?
And then Sandra sent her a photo of her son. That photo shattered every last shred of calm Megan had been clinging to.
The little boy was wearing Megan's lucky peace lock around his neck. It was the keepsake her mom left her, that she'd put on her own son's neck.
Megan raced straight to the acknowledgment banquet. She didn't even see the jeering, dismissive stares of the crowd around her, she just marched straight up to Liam.
The second he saw her, a satisfied smile spread across his face. "Megan, so you've finally come to your senses..."
"Give me back my lucky peace lock," Megan cut him off, her voice trembling as she spoke, "it was my mother's gift to me. What right do you have to give it away to someone else?"
By the time she finished that sentence, Megan was already falling apart.
After her mom died, Sandra stole that lucky peace lock from her once before. Megan cried and begged and refused to give up, so her father beat her within an inch of her life. Then he locked her in a dark, tiny room and starved her for a full day and night.
When Liam found out what had happened, he wasn't even twelve years old yet. Still, that didn't stop him from bursting into Megan's house and setting the whole place ablaze.
Using his age as a shield, he drove a knife into her father three times.
After he snatched the peace lock back, he snarled a warning at Sandra, that if she ever dared steal anything of Megan's again, he'd stab her next. Sandra was so terrified she fainted dead on the spot.
But eighteen years later... Sandra didn't just steal him away from Megan.
Now, if she set her sights on any of Megan's things, one little word from her was all it took for him to steal it for her.
Liam pulled Sandra and her son behind his broad back, shielding them from Megan. He stared her down, his gaze ice-cold.
"It's just a stupid peace lock. What difference does it make who wears it? Besides, Johan calls you mom anyway. What's the big deal about giving it to him?"
The unapologetic casualness in his voice shattered the last shred of self-control Megan was clinging to.
"I am not his mother! And nothing that belongs to my son is going to that bastard!"
Right then, the little boy hurled himself at Megan, hammering his tiny fists over and over right where her C-section scar sat.
White-hot pain shot through her, and Megan jerked her hand up out of pure instinct.
But before her fingers could even brush him, Liam lunged forward and shoved her backward as hard as he could. Megan toppled over backward, and the back of her head cracked against the sharp edge of a table.
White-hot pain exploded through her skull.
In the split second before everything went black, the only thing Megan heard was Liam screaming her name, wild with panic.
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