He Made Me Jump While Carrying Our TwinsChapter 1
The ropes had long since left angry marks on my wrists, the chill of the balcony wind biting through my thin nightgown like tiny knives. My body trembled—not from cold, but from the weight of fear pressing into my chest. The towering skyline stretched endlessly below, a dizzying drop from the 65th floor.
I’d never feared pain. Never flinched at loneliness. But standing this close to the edge, strapped to a chair with my nine-month-pregnant belly exposed to the elements, my terror was absolute.
Heights.
They’d always been my undoing.
Now they were his weapon.
Lucien’s voice crackled from the phone speaker on the ground beside me, cold and sharp, thick with cruelty.
“She really thinks I’m going to feed her just because she skipped meals for a few days?” His tone dripped with contempt. “She’s not going to die sitting out there. It’s just the balcony, for god’s sake.”
I didn’t need to open my eyes to know he was talking about me. I knew his voice—knew every cruel edge it had taken on lately.
My lungs stung with every breath. My baby kicked, restless, and I could only hope the child didn’t feel what I felt. Despair. Exhaustion.
“She’s terrified of heights, sir,” came the butler’s nervous voice from somewhere in the background. “It’s been a whole day. Shouldn’t we let her back in?”
But Lucien only scoffed. “Scared of heights? She’s faking it. Just like she faked that innocent act after trying to kill Vanessa.”
Vanessa.
Of course.
She was always the center of everything now. The sweet girl from Lucien’s past who came back like a storm—beautiful, manipulative, and impossibly fragile in his eyes. He never asked for my side of the story. Not after that day in the mountains.
I’d received a text from him, asking me to meet at one of those high-elevation tourist spots. I didn’t question it. Despite my fear of heights, I went. I still had hope. Hope that he was trying to fix what was broken between us.
But it wasn’t Lucien who waited there.
It was Vanessa.
She greeted me with a sneer masked behind a saccharine smile. “You don’t belong in his life,” she whispered like venom.
And then—she screamed.