The MC President's Forsaken Wife (Zara and Knox) novel Chapter 451

Chapter 222-1

Becca

+25 Points

The motel room smells like cheap lemon disinfectant and damp carpet that’s seen thirty

years of transient misery. And that’s the best that can be said about this f*****g dump.

Outside the thin glass window, the sky is a flat, bruised purple, heavy with rain that refuses to

break. Inside, the only light comes from the buzzing yellow tube above the bathroom sink

and the flickering neon sign from the gas station next door.

I sit on the edge of the sagging mattress, staring at my hands resting in my lap.

My knuckles are cracked and split, the skin around my fingernails scraped down to red, sensitive meat. My palms are raw, flaking, and dry from hours of coarse, stiff-bristled

scrubbing with industrial lye soap.

I scrubbed until the skin peeled. I scrubbed until the water ran clear down the drain. I scrubbed until my wrists throbbed and my arms shook so hard I couldn’t hold the brush

anymore.

It doesn’t matter. I can still feel it.

I can still feel the cold, slick tile of that bathroom floor under my knees in Knox’s house. I can still feel the sharp cramps that had doubled me over in the dark, the metallic smell of hot blood filling the small room, the absolute horror of realizing my body was tearing itself apart.

I called 911 with shaking, blood-stained fingers, screaming into the receiver for help while

lying on that cold tile alone.

Knox wasn’t there.

Knox was already dead – put down like a dog on an oil-stained floor earlier that night. By the time the paramedics burst through the front door, Knox was already cold, and my world was

already over.

I didn’t cry then, and I’m not crying now. Tears are for people who still have something left to lose. Tears are for women who expect someone to come to them with a blanket and a soft

word.

I stayed in that hospital for six hours after the ambulance brought me in.

1/3

Chapter 222-1

+25 Points

Six hours listening to the mechanical hum of heart monitors, the pitying, clinical tones of

emergency room doctors telling me I had lost the baby, telling me my body had been under

too much trauma, too much stress, too much physical exhaustion.

They wanted to keep me overnight for observation. They wanted me to talk to a therapist. They wanted to ask questions about who they should call, why the baby’s father wasn’t

answering his phone, why I was alone.

I didn’t answer a single question. I lay on that narrow gurney staring at the water-stained ceiling tiles until five in the morning, listening to the shift change in the corridor.

The second the night nurse stepped out to answer an alarm down the hall, I pulled the IV line out of the back of my hand, left a smear of dark blood on the white cotton bedsheet, and walked right out the emergency room doors into the freezing air.

I went back to Knox’s house before dawn broke. The front door was still unlocked, swinging open on its hinges like a corpse left out in the yard. The house was dead, hollowed out,

silent.

The smell of Knox still lingered in the hallway – but Knox wasn’t there. He’d never be there

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