I didn’t sleep that night.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw him. Asher. His voice curling around my thoughts like smoke I couldn’t clear, his words slithering through the cracks I’d fought so hard to seal.
“You never lost the baby. Because there never was one.”
It echoed, over and over, until I thought I might go mad. Until I wanted to tear the walls down around me just to drown it out.
By morning, my reflection looked like a stranger. Hollow-eyed. Ghost-pale. And when I pulled my coat tighter around me and left the apartment above the facility, it felt like walking into enemy territory. Because that’s what this place had become — a battleground.
And Asher Beaumont?
He wasn’t just an inmate anymore.
He was winning.
—
The twist came mid-morning.
I was halfway through a meeting w
