Not Her: The Shadow Bride's Great Escape

Ava POV

The pregnancy wasn't just difficult; it was a war of attrition.

I was sick constantly, my body rejecting food as if it were poison, my energy drained until I felt utterly hollow.

Ethan hired the best doctors money could buy, but he treated them like mechanics fixing a car-he rarely bothered to show up for the appointments.

"Business," David would say, his eyes fixing on the rearview mirror as he drove me to the clinic. "The Don is handling urgent matters."

The "urgent matters" seemed to involve a lot of shouting behind closed doors and late-night phone calls that abruptly stopped the moment I entered the room.

I started to feel like a ghost haunting my own home.

Then the call came.

My father had collapsed. A massive heart attack.

Panic clawed at my throat. I was hysterical.

I ran to Ethan's office, blind with tears, ignoring the guards who tried to stop me.

I burst in, my lungs burning.

Ethan was on the phone, his back to me, staring out the window.

"Make it look like an accident," he was saying, his voice devoid of emotion, cold as steel. "Burn the car."

He turned and saw me.

He didn't look guilty. He didn't even flinch. He just looked annoyed.

He hung up the phone without a word of goodbye.

"Ethan, my father..." I sobbed, the words tearing out of my chest. "He's in the hospital. I need to go."

"David will take you," he said, sitting back down at his desk as if dismissing a subordinate.

"Come with me," I begged, reaching out to him. "Please. I need you."

He picked up a file, not looking at me.

"I have work, Ava. Go. Don't upset yourself, it's bad for the heir."

The heir.

Always the heir.

I left with David, crying silently in the back of the car, feeling smaller than I ever had in my life.

The hospital air was sterile, biting against my skin.

My father was hooked up to machines, his skin the color of ash.

I sat by his bed for hours, holding his hand, praying for a squeeze, a movement, anything.

He woke up only once.

His eyes were hazy, unfocused, searching the room for something he couldn't see.

"Ava..." he rasped.

"I'm here, Papa."

"The box..." he muttered, his voice barely a breath. "In the... library... hidden..."

"What box, Papa?"

"She... looks like... her..."

He drifted back into unconsciousness before I could ask more, leaving his riddle hanging in the antiseptic air.

I stayed for two days.

Ethan visited once.

He stayed for ten minutes, checked his watch three times, and patted my shoulder like I was a distressed employee.

"He had a good life," Ethan said, as if my father were already dead and filed away.

I looked at my husband, really looked at him.

I saw the cold calculation in his blue eyes.

I saw the way he stood apart from the grief, untouched by it, armored against it.

A crack formed in my heart.

A seed of doubt, ugly and thorny, began to take root.

Needing to escape the suffocating room, I went to the cafeteria to get coffee, leaving David at the door.

When I came back, I heard David talking on his phone in the hallway.

He didn't see me.

"Yes, Don Cole," David said, his voice low but carrying in the quiet corridor. "She is still here. No, he hasn't said anything. He is delirious."

Pause.

"Understood. If he wakes up and starts talking about the past... I will handle it."

I froze.

Handle it?

Handle my dying father?

I backed away, my heart pounding so hard I thought it would bruise my ribs.

I wasn't safe.

My father wasn't safe.

I returned to the room, my hands shaking so badly I almost dropped the coffee.

I looked at my father, realizing that the secrets he held were dangerous enough to make my husband-my protector-consider silencing him.

The fairytale was dissolving, revealing the horror story written underneath.