After His Mistress Faked a Baby, I Burned It All Down

Once he agreed, the breath went out of me. I let the phone slip from my hand and passed out.

When I woke again, my whole body screamed with pain.

"Quit faking. Wake up." Luke nudged me with his foot, his voice thick with irritation.

A violent cough tore out of me, and I spat a mouthful of blood onto the floor.

I wiped my mouth and fixed him with a stare. "Don't push your luck."

He turned, picked up a sheet of paper, and forced it into my hand. "This stock transfer agreement. You're signing it."

I let out a hollow laugh and let the page drift down to the floor. "I'd die first."

That stopped him cold. He looked at me, bloodied head to foot, and something in his eyes flickered, like he didn't recognize me.

The old me had leaned on him every single day. Obeyed him.

Luke crouched down and reached out to wipe the blood from my forehead. I turned my face away and said, faint but clear, "Keep your filthy hands off me."

He paused. Then he stood and looked down at me from his full height. "Stop making a scene. Sign, and I'll let you go on being Mrs. Randall, fair and square."

Under that imperious stare, I tore the transfer agreement to shreds.

He swept Tonya against his side and slammed the door on his way out. "Sit here and think about what you've done. Until you're ready to sign.

"Let's see how long that backbone lasts." His voice dropped, smooth and gentle now. "Tonya's the easy one. She actually understands me."

Once they were gone, I gritted my teeth and dragged myself to the study computer to dig through his records on the company asset transfers.

Luke's machine was wiped clean. But I found it anyway, a second hidden system buried underneath.

I typed in his birthday, then our wedding anniversary. Neither worked. In the end I tried Tonya's birthday, and the hidden system opened right up.

I clicked through fast and found exactly what I was looking for, the dirty work he'd done in broad daylight.

I copied it all to a hard drive, the transfer records, the core trade secrets he'd stolen out of my father's company.

The study was dead silent, nothing but the sound of my own breathing. Every breath dragged pain through me.

When the screen flashed that the save was complete, I sagged back against the chair.

Then footsteps came pounding down the hallway.

Luke kicked the door open, his eyes locked on me like a snake's. "What did you do to my computer?"

I slid the hard drive into my clothes and said the first thing that came to me. "I was retyping the stock transfer agreement."

He bought it. The cold drained out of his face, and he hauled me up out of the chair. "Good. You finally learned. Now come with me to your father's grave."

I had no idea what he wanted at the cemetery. While I was still turning it over, we were already there.

Tonya stood waiting, pointing and gesturing at a crew of construction workers. As I watched, an excavator drove forward and shoved my father's headstone flat to the ground.

She saw me and lit up with a smile. "I'm starting my own business. This lot's already registered under my name. I had a feng shui master come out, and he says the energy here is the best there is. I'm putting up a fifty-thousand-square-foot shopping complex. Your dad can watch over my little venture, help it thrive."

She leaned close and dropped her voice in my ear. "On paper it's a mall. In real life? A red-light district."

Rage roared up in me. I threw myself in front of the excavator, waving my arms. "Stop digging!"

Tonya stepped closer and said softly, "You should go die. Right alongside your father."

I struck her across the face with the back of my hand. She clapped a hand to her cheek, weeping prettily, and at the same moment she pressed her body in against mine and cried out, loud enough for everyone to hear, "As long as you spare the baby, you can hit me as many times as you want."

Then she shoved a knife into my hand and dragged my wrist, my fist, toward her own belly, murmuring at a pitch only the two of us could catch, "All that prep with the blood pack finally pays off."

Tonya cupped her bleeding stomach and looked past me, tears streaming. "I was only begging her to spare my baby…"

Luke's face went black with fury. "I came here out of decency, to tell you your father's grave was being redeveloped. And this is how you act. A dog can't change its nature."

I didn't bother explaining. "It's my father's grave. Who are you to hand it over to a woman you've known three years?"

Luke looked me dead in the eye. "Don't you dare call Tonya 'some woman.'"

"Three years ago, someone drugged me in a bar. If it weren't for her, I'd be dead."

Three years ago, a rival had hidden a bomb in the bar Luke always went to, and slipped sleeping pills into the liquor he liked. When I found out, I ran into the flames after him at the risk of my own life. He came around fast enough. I was the one who walked out with the skin burned off my lower back, who spent a full month in the burn ward getting skin grafts.

When I was discharged and went to find him, I found him instead with Tonya, the two of them tangled together in our wedding suite.

So why was Luke standing here now, saying Tonya was the one who saved him?

He waved a hand. "Level the rest of it."

I ignored the roar of the excavator and threw my arms around my father's headstone, holding on for everything I had.

Luke kicked me clear of it and took a hammer to the stone I'd carved with my own hands, smashing it apart.

I clawed my way back toward the grave. The ashes were all I had left of him now. I dug into the patch of earth that belonged to my father with my torn-up hands, blood streaking my fingers in seconds, and I didn't care, I only wanted one last thing to keep.

Luke came back lugging a bucket of acid. I locked my arms around the urn, the way my father used to hold me when I was small.

He ordered his bodyguards to pry me up. The urn slipped from my arms and hit the ground, shattering, my father's ashes scattering like broken snow. I reached for them and the guards held me fast, never letting go.

In that instant something split open in me, and only one thought was left: every last one of them would pay.

Carrying all of that hatred, I felt the darkness close over my eyes.