Chapter 2
Series 1 Chapter 2
When I woke up, the suffocating stench of antiseptic filled my lungs.
My right leg was locked in a heavy cast, and a thick bandage covered the throbbing wound on my forehead. The hospital room was deathly quiet, save for the mechanical beep of the heart monitor.
I turned my head toward the chair beside the bed.
It was empty.
No flowers. No cards. Not even a glass of water.
When a nurse came in to check my IV, I forced my cracked lips to move.
“Where is my husband?”
The nurse paused, her expression shifting into a guarded, pitying look.
“Mr. Sterling was here earlier, but… he’s been staying in the room down the hall.”
“Madeline,” I whispered.
“Yes,” the nurse murmured gently. “She’s been very shaken up by the accident, so he’s been spending his time comforting her.”
Shaken up.
Madeline had walked away from a two-thousand-foot cliff crash with a single scratch on her eyebrow. I had undergone a four-hour surgery to reconstruct my shattered leg.
Yet she was the one who needed my husband.
By evening, the bitter cold in my chest hardened into an unbearable rage. I grabbed my cracked phone and dialed Alexander’s number.
It rang and rang, right before going to voicemail.
I called back immediately. This time, someone picked up.
“Hello?”
It wasn’t Alexander. It was Madeline.
Before I could speak, I heard his voice right beside her—low, tender, and wrapped in an intimacy that hadn’t belonged to me in months.
“Who is it?”
“It’s Vivienne,” Madeline replied, her voice dripping with sweet, feigned hesitation.
The line went dead.
They were sitting side by side in the dark. They had looked at my name flashing on the screen, and together, they had chosen to ignore it.
By midnight, the pain in my body was nothing compared to the fire burning in my veins.
I threw off the blanket, grabbed the metal IV pole, and dragged my heavy, broken leg out of bed. Every step sent white-hot agony shooting up my thigh, but I didn’t care. I needed to see them. I needed to look my husband in the eye and watch him try to lie to my face.
Madeline’s room was just six doors down.
The door was ajar, spilling a thin strip of yellow light across the dark hallway.
I stopped right outside, my fingers gripping the cold steel of the pole.
“You shouldn’t have carried me out first,” Madeline’s voice drifted out, laced with a sickening sweetness. “Vivienne saw everything. What if she figures it out?”
Alexander was silent for a beat. Then, his voice answered—steady, calm, and utterly chilling.
“She won’t.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’ll make her believe I had no choice,” Alexander said without a second of hesitation.
My blood ran instantly cold.
He hadn’t left me because Madeline was closer to the door. He hadn’t left me out of panic.
He had left me to die because she was the woman he wanted to keep, and I was the obstacle they needed to erase.
Before I could turn away, the door swung wide open.
Alexander stood in the frame. The moment his eyes locked onto mine, every trace of warmth vanished from his face, replaced by a cold, calculated mask.