HE STOLE MY BABY’S HEART SO I’LL STOP HISChapter 1
ELIANA
The phone felt heavy in my hand, though my voice came out steady.
"I'm divorcing that monster. This time for good. Then I'll come to you."
Silence stretched on the other end before it broke with a sigh of relief.
"Finally. Eliana... he should've never had you. When?"
"Two weeks," I said, jaw clenched. "That's all I need to cut the last tie."
The word divorce tasted like freedom and blood all at once.
Because my husband, Darren Centineo hadn’t just betrayed me—he had destroyed me.
And yet, I was still standing.
It had been barely twenty-four hours since the nightmare began.
Masked men bursting into my living room. Fists and boots raining down on me while I was forty-two weeks pregnant.
The agony of contractions tearing through me too soon. My own screams echoing in my ears as I begged them to stop.
Then—Darren, charging in like a hero. Pretending fury as he fought them off, as though he hadn’t orchestrated it all.
He’d lifted me like I mattered. Whispered frantic comfort as though I were his world. "Eliana, stay with me. I’ll protect you. I’ll protect the baby."
Lies. All of it.
At the hospital, I had been rushed into surgery. My last conscious thought was my baby’s cries.
But when I woke, Darren’s voice sliced through the fog:
"Good. Now take the heart and prep my son for surgery."
The words didn’t register at first. Then the room spun. My baby—my child—was his sacrifice.
I was too weak to move, but I heard it all. His threats. The doctor’s protests. The silence that followed when my newborn was taken from me.
By the time I dragged myself down that hallway, my son was gone.
And there they were. Darren. His mother, Janine. And Sally—his first love. Cooing over the living child in Sally’s arms.
Their baby.
The baby who had my child’s heart beating inside its chest.
Sally’s smirk had cut me deeper than any knife.
Janine’s sneer burned into my skin. "She’s not the first to lose a child, she can make another."
And Darren, nodding along, confessing that the attack on me had been his idea. That my labor, my pain, had been engineered.
It was the moment my love died.
The moment something colder, sharper, unbreakable was born in its place.
Now, as I stepped into the hospital room, Darren shot to his feet, the guilt clear in his eyes.
"Eliana—how long have you been standing there?"
"I just got here," I said flat and empty.