The pleasure was all too brief, and I wanted more.
Dark laughter filled the room, and he began to swing his hips again.
“My perfect red-haired harlot.”
I didn't protest because I couldn't.
That's what I told myself.
Chapter 5
Bianca
My paranoia broke me.
I stopped leaving the house. Stopped answering the door. The curtains stayed drawn, the locks double-checked, but none of it mattered.
He came anyway.
Every night, William Montague slipped through the cracks in my sanity. His cold hands roamed my swollen belly, whispering praises as my skin hardened and my ribs stretched thin as eggshells.
Within two weeks, I looked monstrous, with my stomach a grotesque, perfect sphere, like I’d swallowed a basketball made of bone china. It didn’t weigh me down. No, it was hollow, echoing when I tapped it, the sound muffled, tinny, like a finger against a doll’s chest.
I ignored Eric’s messages. His calls. His frantic knocks. I couldn’t drag him into this.
The news broke.
The buyer who took Melissa was burned alive in his home. The footage showed nothing but ash and charred beams—and there, perched atop the wreckage like a macabre trophy, Melissa.
Unscathed.
Smiling.
The cracked black veins were visible on her soot-smeared cheeks.
Yes, I was a mess. I was scared because I had every reason to be. This was a nightmare that no one could save me from.
???
The night of the birth came. It was a memory that would forever haunt me because it changed the trajectory of my life. The pain came first—a splintering crack deep in my core as if my spine were a porcelain column shattering from within. My back arched off the bed, fingers clawing at the sheets, but my nails splintered like old varnish, flaking away.
Then the sound.
Not the wet tear of flesh but the high, crystalline snap of a doll dropped on marble. My skin split in jagged fault lines, radiating from my navel, white-hot fissures spiderwebbing across my belly. I was left gasping for air as I glanced down.
Blood seeped out, but it was too thick and dark. Beneath it, something gleamed.
A curve of smooth, blood-smeared white orb.
His egg.
It pushed outward from my ruined flesh, larger than any child, its surface veined with gold like a cursed Fabergé. The cracks deepened, and it ruptured with a final, agonised scream (mine? the orb’s?).
Black smoke boiled forth, acrid and sweet, reeking of burnt hair and funeral incense. It coiled in the air, alive, forming limbs, a torso until he stepped free.
William Montague, reborn in the flesh.
His hair was as dark as polished mahogany, clung to his forehead, damp with the remnants of his spectral form. His eyes, icy blue and pitiless, locked onto mine, the pupils swollen with triumph. Gone was the pale grey and smoke.
