Chapter 5 Her Terms
For weeks, Caspian came home on time and kept his promise to have dinner with her. Then, one day, he left his phone at home.
She picked up the phone from the kitchen counter where he had left it. The screen lit up with notifications. She did not read them.
The drive to his office took twenty minutes. She had never been there before. He had always said it was too boring, too corporate, that she would hate it. She had believed him.
The building was glass and steel. The lobby smelled like bergamot. She almost laughed at that. Bergamot. Of course.
She took the elevator.
And then the doors opened on the executive floor, and she stepped out, and she saw him.
Dorian.
He was standing by the elevator bank, a tablet in his hand, his dark hair pushed back from his face. He was wearing a suit. He looked taller, sharper and his gray eyes found hers before she could look away and the elevator door closed at that moment.
Her stomach dropped.
She prayed he would not recognize her. She had been a different person that night. A woman who kissed strangers and left before dawn. She had not given him her name. She had not let him see her face in the light. Maybe, maybe he had been drunk enough, tired enough, that she was just a blur.
She did not have time to process that. She had Caspian’s phone. She walked down the hall toward his office, her heels silent on the carpet, her mind still stuck on seeing her one night stand.
She stopped at the scene before her.
Caspian was inside. His desk was massive, some dark wood that looked costly. His chair was turned toward the window. He was not alone.
Xiomara was on her knees in front of him sucking on his hard dick.
Her red nails were on his thighs. Her dark hair was loose, falling over her shoulders. She looked up at him with that same lazy, satisfied expression from the plane, and then she turned her head just slightly, just enough to see Veyra through the glass.
She smiled.
It was the same smile from the arrivals hall. The one that said I have already won.
Caspian had his head thrown back. His eyes were closed. He did not see Veyra. He did not see anything.
Veyra stood there for three seconds.
She didn’t cry. She didn’t run. She slid Caspian’s phone into her coat pocket, pulled out her own, and pressed record on the scene in front of her. Her hands were steady — steady enough to surprise her, steady enough to count the red scratch marks on Xiomara’s nails against his thigh, steady enough to catch the timestamp clearly in frame.
Six weeks since the postnup was signed. That was the only thought in her head right now, cold and precise, like she was checking a receipt.
She lowered the phone, turned, and closed the door softly behind her. Not even her heels made a sound on the carpet.
Xiomara’s smug little I already won — Veyra carried it with her out of the building, except by the time she reached the elevator, it didn’t feel like a threat anymore. It felt like evidence.
She stopped at the corner, waiting for the light. The wind picked up. She tightened her grip on Caspian’s phone, already running the math on when to add this footage to everything else she had, and how to use it to force him to honor that five-billion-dollar clause.
The light hadn’t turned yet when she heard an engine surge behind her.
She turned instinctively.
That was the moment she saw it clearly — the car wasn’t slowing down. It swerved hard the second she turned, aiming straight for the edge of the sidewalk, straight at her, like it wasn’t losing control at all. Like it was aiming.
She didn’t even have time to step back.
The impact hit her sideways, hard enough to lift her off her feet, and she went flying like a rag doll.
She felt the ground meet her body — hip first, then shoulder, then the back of her skull.
She heard someone screaming. It took a moment to realize the sound was coming from her.
The last thought before everything went dark wasn’t fear. It was confusion.
That car had plenty of room to stop. It didn’t.
Then the world faded to gray, and there was no more sound at all.
She woke up in a hospital bed.
The ceiling was white, too white that it hurt to look at. She turned her head and the room tilted with her, slow and sick, like she was on a boat.
Her ankle was elevated in a contraption of pillows and Velcro. It was wrapped in something thick. The color of it was wrong. She blinked and blinked again.
A nurse came in. A woman with kind eyes and tired hands. She said something about a fracture and about surgery. About how lucky Veyra was that it was just her ankle and not her spine.
Veyra nodded like she understood.
She did not understand anything.
The nurse left. A doctor came. He was young and spoke too fast. He used words like displaced and reduction and six to eight weeks and she signed something.
And then, almost as an afterthought, the doctor said: "You’re also about six weeks pregnant. The fetus appears unharmed, but we’ll need to monitor—"
The rest of his sentence fell away.
She stared at him. His mouth was still moving. She could see his lips forming words, but her brain had stopped translating. All she could hear was a high, thin noise, like a radio tuned to nothing.
Pregnant.
She had not slept with Caspian in months. Not since before Christmas. Not since he started coming home after midnight and turning his back to her in bed.
She did the math without meaning to. The night in the hotel bar. Dorian’s room. The way he had touched her like he was learning a language he wanted to speak forever.
Six weeks.
She put her hand on her stomach. It was flat but something was in there. A person. A mistake. A consequence of the only impulsive thing she had ever done in her entire life.
The doctor was still talking. Something about follow-up appointments. Something about not making any decisions until the fracture healed.
She stopped listening.
When he left, she lay very still and stared at the ceiling and thought about her options.
There was only one option.
She could not have this baby. Not now. Not like this. She was broke. She was broken. She was married to a man who had let her mother die. She lived in a mansion that was not a home. She had nothing to give a child except her own exhaustion and the bitter taste of betrayal.
She would have an abortion. After the fracture healed and after she could walk again.
She closed her eyes and told herself that was the right decision.
****
Caspian arrived an hour later.
He burst through the door like a man in a movie. His hair was disheveled. His shirt was untucked. His eyes were red and wet. He looked exactly like a husband who had just learned his wife was in the hospital.
Veyra watched him perform.
She saw it now. The way he checked his reflection in the window before he turned to face her. The way he practiced the tremor in his voice. The way he fell to his knees beside her bed like he had practiced that too.
"Veyra," he said. "Oh my God. I got here as fast as I could. The police said it was a hit and run. They’re looking for the car. I swear to you, I will find whoever did this and I will make them pay."
She said nothing.
He took her hand. She let him. She was too tired to pull away anyway.
"I was so scared," he said. His voice cracked. Perfectly. "When the hospital called, I thought—I thought I was going to lose you."
You almost did, she thought. But not the way you mean.
She looked at his face. The red eyes and the wet cheeks. The way his mouth trembled like he was holding back a sob.
She thought about what she had seen through the glass door. Xiomara on her knees and her mouth on Caspian’s hardened dick. Xiomara’s red nails on his thighs. Xiomara’s smile when she saw Veyra watching.
"You were with her," Veyra said.
He went still.
"When I got hit," she said, "your dick was inside Xiomara’s mouth."
His hand tightened around hers. Too tight. "Veyra, that’s not—it wasn’t—"
"Don’t lie to me." Her voice was flat. "I saw you. Through the glass. I came to bring you your phone, and I saw you."
He let go of her hand. He stood up. He walked to the window and stood with his back to her, his shoulders rising and falling too fast.
When he turned around, his face was different. The performance had dropped. What was left underneath was smaller, meaner and more desperate.
"I tried," he said. "I tried to stay away from her. But you wouldn’t touch me. You slept in the guest room every night. You flinched when I came near you. What was I supposed to do?"
She stared at him.
"I’m a man, Veyra. I have needs. And you—you made me feel like a monster. Like everything I did was wrong. So yes, I went back to her. Because at least she looked at me like I wasn’t garbage."
"You told me you cut ties with her."
"I lied." He said it simply and without any shame. "I lied because I knew you would leave if I told you the truth. And I couldn’t—I can’t lose you. So I lied."
She felt something crack inside her chest and no, it was not her heart but something smaller and more fragile, the last piece of herself that still wanted to believe he could change.
"If you hadn’t kept rejecting me," he said, his voice rising now, "I wouldn’t have suffered like this. Xiomara wouldn’t have had a chance. This is on you too, Veyra. You pushed me away."
She laughed.
It was not a happy sound. It was dry and broken and it hurt her throat coming out.
"I pushed you away," she repeated. "I pushed you away because you let my mother die. Because you spent eighteen million dollars on another woman while I ate cereal for dinner. Because you looked me in the eye and told me we were saving for our future and you were buying diamond rings for your mistress."
He opened his mouth.
"Don’t," she said. "Don’t tell me it was a mistake. Don’t tell me you were drunk."
He closed his mouth.
She looked at him. At the man she had married. At the man she had loved. At the man who had destroyed her life piece by piece and then blamed her for not holding the pieces together.
"I want a divorce," she said.
He went very still.
"I want the five billion dollars," she said. "Per our agreement. You cheated. I have proof. Give me what I’m owed, and I will walk away and never speak to you again."
He was quiet for a long moment.
Then he laughed.
It was a cold sound. This was the man underneath all the masks.
"You think you’re going to get five billion dollars from me?" He shook his head. "You’re delusional."
"The agreement—"
"The agreement is a piece of paper." He stepped closer to her bed. His shadow fell across her face. "You think I can’t afford better lawyers than you? You think any judge is going to give you five billion dollars because your feelings got hurt?"
"My mother died—"
"Your mother was dying anyway." His voice was sharp now. Impatient. "The surgery might have given her another year, maybe two. It wasn’t going to save her. You’re acting like I pulled the plug on a healthy woman. She was already gone. I just saved us both the medical bills."
She could not breathe.
Before she could find the air to answer him, there was a knock at the door.
A police officer stepped in, notebook already open in his hand. He glanced between her and Caspian, offered a short, procedural nod, and said:
"Mrs. Thorne. We’ve identified the vehicle."