She didn’t keep walking.
She went home. Back to the gilded cage. Back to Cole.
The next morning, sunlight sliced through a gap in the automated blackout blinds, pinning Audrey to the bed. It was too bright. Too clean.
Cole was still asleep beside her, a perfect sculpture in expensive Egyptian cotton.
He didn’t snore. He didn’t toss and turn.
He slept like he did everything else: with quiet, infuriating control.
The memory of the man from the docks surfaced, unbidden.
The feel of his hands on her arms, a grounding force. The spark in his stormy eyes.
A jolt of something real in a world made of glass and steel.
Then, a wave of nausea rolled through her.
It wasn’t a memory. It was hot and acidic, climbing up her throat.
She clamped a hand over her mouth, swinging her legs out of bed and stumbling toward the en-suite bathroom.
She knelt before the porcelain throne, her body trembling. Nothing came up.
It was just a hollow, churning sickness. The kind she’d been ignoring for a week.
The kind she’d been blaming on stress. On Cole.
Her breath hitched.
Stress didn’t make you late.
Her period was never late. Cole tracked it on a shared calendar app.
“For planning,” he’d said. For control. She knew, without even looking at the app, that she was nine days late.
Her blood went cold.
No. It couldn’t be. They were careful. Mostly. Weren’t they?
Their relationship had been so strained, a landscape of tense dinners and silent nights. But there had been nights of reconciliation.
Desperate, hollow moments where falling into his arms felt easier than fighting.
Her gaze fell on the chrome cabinet beneath the sink. She’d bought the box months ago.
A “just in case” that she’d shoved to the back, refusing to acknowledge its existence.
Her hands shook as she tore open the cardboard. The instructions were clinical, simple.
A death sentence in three easy steps.
She did what she had to do.
Then she set the white plastic stick on the marble countertop, next to a soap dish that had cost more than her first car.
The instructions said three minutes. It felt like a lifetime.
She stared at her reflection in the vast, frameless mirror. She looked pale. Haunted.
She saw the dark circles under her eyes. She saw the faint line of fear around her mouth.
Was this the face of a visionary? Or just a woman who had forgotten how to run?
The stranger’s face flashed in her mind again. A brief, impossible escape.
Time’s up.
She forced her eyes down.
One line appeared in the control window. Clean. Dark pink.
For a single, breathless second, she felt a wave of impossible relief.
Then the second line bled into view.
Faint at first, then darker. Sharper. An undeniable, screaming pink plus sign.
Positive.
The air left her lungs in a single, silent gasp. The word echoed in the sterile quiet of the bathroom.
Positive. A fact. An absolute.
Her hand flew to her stomach. Flat. Unchanged. But inside, a time bomb was ticking.
A baby.
Cole’s baby.
The thought was a physical blow.
It wasn’t the abstract idea of a child that terrified her. It was the idea of his child.
A link to him that could never be broken. A chain forged of flesh and blood, shackling her to this condo, to this life, to him. Forever.
Her dream of leaving, the little spark of defiance she’d felt on the docks last night, was instantly extinguished.
How could she leave now? A single mother with no savings?
Cole, the wealth management advisor, controlled their finances completely.
She had her curator’s salary, but he managed it. He would paint her as an unfit, hysterical woman.
He would take the child. He would win. He always won.
She sank to the cold tile floor, wrapping her arms around her knees.
The blue dress he wanted her to buy. The gala. The exhibit.
It all felt like a distant, ridiculous dream. Her life wasn’t hers anymore.
It had been annexed, colonized by this tiny, two-celled invader. An invader that belonged to him.
A sob escaped her, raw and ugly. She choked it back, pressing her knuckles against her teeth.
She couldn’t make a sound.
She couldn’t let him hear. If he found out, it would be over.
The final checkmate. He would become the perfect, doting father-to-be.
His control would become “caring.” His manipulation would become “concern.”
He would be unbearable. He would be thrilled.
She looked at his sleeping form through the bathroom door.
The man who systematically dismantled her confidence piece by piece. The man who called it love.
He was going to be a father.
Her father.
Her world wasn’t just falling apart. It had been vaporized.
She needed to think. She needed air. Not the filtered, temperature-controlled air of this apartment.
She needed the salt and diesel from last night. She needed a place that didn’t belong to him.
Clutching the positive test in her fist like a weapon, she stood on shaky legs. She crept back into the bedroom, her movements silent, practiced.
She pulled on the jeans from yesterday, a soft sweater. She grabbed her purse, her keys.
She didn’t look back at the sleeping man in the bed.
She didn’t need to. He was already everywhere.
Audrey slipped out of the apartment, the door clicking shut with a terrifying finality.
In the elevator, she finally opened her hand and stared at the plastic stick. Two pink lines. A prison sentence.
There was only one place to go.
A place that felt a million miles away from her life. A place where a man with stormy eyes had made her feel seen, just for a moment.
She had to get out. She had to breathe.
Even if it was just for an hour. Before the cage door locked for good.