I opened my mouth to refuse. He pressed me into the chair before the word formed, snapping at the nurse to hurry. No explanation. No question. Not a single glance at my face long enough to see what was written there. The moment the needle slid into my arm he turned and was gone, his expression tight with the particular panic of a man whose entire world is bleeding in the next room.
The nurses worked around me, murmuring to each other.
"What's the emergency? Young Mr. Moretti looked half out of his mind."
"His wife. Ruptured cyst, massive hemorrhage. They just brought her in."
"Three years married and still that desperate over her. Must be nice to be loved like that."
Each word drove into me like a knife.
So that was it. Their intimacy had ruptured something inside her, and the hospital's reserves were low, and he had seen me sitting in the corridor and had not thought twice. I was a matching blood type. Nothing more. A convenient vein.
While he had been tangled up with the woman he loved, I had been on an operating table losing our child.
If he had spared me even one moment of actual attention, he would have seen it. The pallor. The way I held myself. The surgical bracelet still on my wrist. He would have known.
But he didn't look. He never looked. His world began and ended with Adrian Winslow, and everything outside that circle was furniture.
I laughed. The sound came out wrong, cracked down the middle, and the tears followed before I could stop them, sliding down my face while the needle drew blood from my arm for the woman my husband loved more than he had ever loved me.
Julian Moretti. If you love her that much, then I will give you what you want. From this day forward, we are nothing to each other. No debt. No name. No blood between us. Mountains and oceans apart, and not a single thread left to pull.
When I walked out of the hospital I found a restroom first. I fixed my makeup with steady hands, checked my reflection twice, confirmed that nothing on my face would betray what had happened inside those walls. Only then did I drive to the Moretti compound.