In her lavish, penthouse apartment, surrounded by towering arrangements of white orchids that filled the air with a cloyingly sweet fragrance, Seraphina Rivers watched the clip of Luna’s performance on her tablet.
She replayed it three times, a sneer of contempt twisting her beautiful lips. The raw, undeniable talent was a personal affront. The public’s overwhelmingly positive reaction was infuriating.
“She’s more resilient than I gave her credit for,” Seraphina muttered to her caregiver, who was silently polishing a silver tray in the corner. “This quiet, mousy act is just that—an act. She’s playing the victim, and they’re eating it up.”
She tossed the tablet onto the silk settee. The public sympathy she had so carefully cultivated with her “dying cancer patient” narrative was being threatened by this mysterious, soulful singer.
She needed to reassert control, to remind everyone who the real protagonist of this drama was.
Just then, her private phone, the one she used for more delicate matters, buzzed on the marble coffee table. It was her private investigator, a former tabloid journalist with no discernible scruples.
“I have the information you wanted,” the man’s oily voice said on the other end. “It took some digging, and a rather generous ‘donation’ to a records clerk, but I found out about Elara Vance’s visit to Sterling Medical Center.”
Seraphina sat up straighter, her full attention captured. “And?”
“She didn’t visit a friend. She didn’t have a check-up. Her appointment was with Dr. Maya Khan. Head of the obstetrics and gynecology wing.”
Seraphina went completely still. The words hung in the air. OB-GYN.
The implications hit her not like a bolt of lightning, but like the slow, satisfying click of a tumbler falling into place in a complex lock.
Pregnancy. A baby. Julian’s baby.
This was a complication she hadn’t anticipated, but it was also, she realized with a dizzying rush of excitement, the most powerful weapon she could ever have hoped for. A triumphant, exquisitely cruel smile spread across her face.
“Is there more?” she purred, her mind already racing, connecting dots, formulating a strategy.
“Yes,” the investigator continued. “Dr. Khan’s private schedule was… accessible. There’s a follow-up appointment for Mrs. Croft-Vance in two days. It’s coded as a ‘surgical procedure.’ Given the department, there are only a few things that could mean.”
“She’s getting rid of it,” Seraphina whispered, the words tasting like victory. “Oh, this is perfect. How deliciously, wonderfully tragic.”
She now held the ultimate trump card. A secret pregnancy was leverage. But a secret terminated pregnancy? That was a character assassination tool of the highest order.
She wouldn’t use it yet. The timing had to be perfect. She would wait until Luna, until Elara, was at her highest point.
She would let her believe she was winning, that she had escaped. And then, she would bring her crashing down in the most public, most humiliating way imaginable.
Julian, meanwhile, was finding his own perfectly ordered world beginning to fray at the edges.
His business life, the realm where he was king, remained pristine. Deals were closed, profits soared. But his personal life, the domain Elara had managed with silent, invisible efficiency, was descending into a state of low-grade chaos.
This morning, he’d spent ten minutes searching for a matching pair of cufflinks, an item she always laid out for him beside his watch.
At a crucial board meeting, he’d been unable to find a specific market analysis file on his laptop, a file she would have not only prepared but also flagged for his attention.
He’d snapped at his assistant, a young, competent woman who looked at him with wide, fearful eyes, and immediately felt a pang of… something. Not guilt, precisely, but a deep-seated irritation at his own incompetence in these trivial domestic matters.
These were small things, insignificant annoyances, but they were cracks in the flawless facade of his life, and they were growing.
He was beginning to feel her absence not as a missing person, but as a missing limb, an essential part of his own functionality that he had taken for granted until it was gone.
He still told himself it was a tantrum, a phase. But the seed of a terrifying thought had been planted: what if it wasn’t?
Later that evening, Elara’s phone rang. It was an unknown number, a local landline. She almost ignored it, but something compelled her to answer.
“Hello?”
“Elara, dear? Is that you? It’s Beatrice.”
Julian’s grandmother. Elara’s heart did a painful clench. Of all the Crofts, Beatrice had always been the one who saw her, not just the convenient wife for her grandson.
She had treated Elara with a genuine warmth and affection that had been a balm on many lonely days.
“Grandma Bea,” Elara said, her voice soft with an emotion she couldn’t hide. “How are you?”
“I’m old and stubborn, same as always,” the old woman’s voice crackled with a familiar, wry humor. But then it turned serious.
“I know Julian told you not to tell us about… whatever this mess is. But I’m not a fool, child. I see the papers, I hear the whispers. Things are not right with you two.”
“I called the house, and the housekeeper said you haven’t been there in days. Are you alright, dear? That boy… he is proud and he is foolish, and he doesn’t know how lucky he is to have you.”
Tears, hot and unexpected, welled in Elara’s eyes. She had been so focused on the fight, on her own survival, that she hadn’t allowed herself to feel the grief of losing this part of her life.
“I’m okay, Grandma,” she managed to say, her voice thick. “I promise, I’m taking care of myself.”
“Good,” Beatrice said firmly. “You do that. You were always too good for him, you know. You have a light in you, Elara. Don’t let him, or anyone else, put it out.”
“Whatever happens between you and my grandson, you will always be my granddaughter. Don’t you ever forget that.”
After the call ended, Elara sat in the deepening twilight of her apartment, the city lights beginning to twinkle outside her window. She didn’t move for a long time.
Beatrice’s unconditional kindness, her words of support, felt like both a blessing and a burden.
The thought of the termination surgery, now just two days away, felt like a heavy, cold stone in her stomach.
Beatrice’s voice echoed in her mind: You will always be my granddaughter. A grandchild. A great-grandchild.
Suddenly, the decision was no longer a simple, surgical severing of ties with Julian. It was tangled up in love, in family, in a future she hadn’t allowed herself to imagine.
The sterile clarity of her decision was gone, replaced by a messy, heartbreaking, and profoundly human conflict.