The Rejected True Heiress (Liora and Callum) novel Chapter 391

Liora’s POV

The courtyard fell silent around us. The girl, with her hand resting on the swell of her nine-month-pregnant belly, looked at Mia and I with obvious distrust in her eyes. Then, she looked at the money that Mia was still holding.

“What’s your name?” Mia asked softly, smiling a little.

The girl looked nervously between the two of us again. “P-Petra,” she admitted.

“Petra! That’s a pretty name,” Mia whispered.

The girl didn’t respond to that.

“Look,” I said. “We’re not going to report you to anyone if you got wrapped up in something unsavory with Bianca, and we’re not going to take your money or anything. We just want to know what’s going on.”

Petra looked at my crutch. Then at Mia, who was still holding the cash. Then at the ground.

“She told me not to say anything,” she finally muttered.

“She tells everyone that,” Mia said with a sigh.

That seemed to strike the girl right where it mattered. Petra’s shoulders dropped a little, and she let out a long breath through her nose. She ran her hand over the swell of her belly.

“A few weeks ago,” she started slowly, “she came up to me. Out of nowhere. I never expected that the princess, of all people, would want something from me! I’m a nobody!”

“What did she want?” I asked.

Petra’s lips quivered. “She said she needed a favor. And that she would pay well for it.” She glanced down at the crumpled bills still clutched in her fist. “I needed the money. My situation isn’t exactly—” She stopped and shook her head. “Look, I just… I needed it. So I listened to her offer.”

I waited to hear the rest before I jumped to any conclusions, although I already had a bad feeling about this.

Petra met my eyes for the first time. “The next day was when she made the announcement about her pregnancy.”

Nobody said anything for a long moment.

I looked at Mia. Mia looked at me. The expression on her face was somewhere between stunned and completely unsurprised, which was probably the same expression I was wearing.

The implications were clear: Bianca had faked her pregnancy. She paid a pregnant girl for her urine so the test came out positive. She gathered wild ipecac and kept it in her pocket so she could pop a berry whenever she needed her “morning sickness” to appear real.

I wasn’t even surprised, and that was the sad part. The fact that Bianca had paid a pregnant girl and was actively making herself sick with a poisonous plant wasn’t exactly what I had expected, but it sounded right up her alley.

No wonder her mother had talked about padding her belly. No wonder she had been wearing baggy hoodies rather than her usual skintight designer dresses and cardigans. She wasn’t trying to hide the swelling belly of an early pregnancy.

She was trying to hide the fact that there was no swell to her belly, and that it was remaining perfectly flat.