Chapter 57 Marlena
The phone rang just after noon.
I was sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of tea gone cold between my palms, watching Elena sleep in the armchair by the fire.
She'd drifted off mid-conversation the way she still did sometimes, the years of sedation pulling her under without warning.
I'd stopped trying to keep her awake. Rest was healing her faster than anything else could.
I almost didn't answer. The number was unknown, and unknown numbers hadn't brought me anything good in a very long time.
But I pressed accept anyway, because ignoring things had never made them stop.
"Marlena." The voice was bright and warm and sharp underneath, the way a knife could be beautiful before it cut you. "I wasn't sure you'd pick up."
I didn't recognize it immediately. "Who is this?"
"Vivienne." A small pause, perfectly timed. "Vivienne Kensington. I think you know the name."
I stayed very still with the cold mug between my hands and kept my voice completely flat. "What do you want?"
"To be kind, actually." She didn't sound kind. She sounded like a woman who had already won something and wanted to watch the loser understand it. "I thought you deserved to hear this from me rather than read it somewhere. That felt more civilized."
"Hear what?"
"I'm pregnant." The words landed clean and precise, like they'd been practiced. "Twelve weeks. Nikolai's baby."
The room spun then.
It tilted hard to the left and I gripped the edge of the table with one hand, my knuckles going white against the wood. Twelve weeks. Three months ago.
Three months ago I had been living in his penthouse, wearing his ring, performing his marriage for cameras and charity galas. Three months ago I had also, without knowing it, been carrying a baby of my own.
A baby I had lost on a basement floor in Monaco while my body bled out around it.
"I'm sending you the doctor's paperwork now,"
Vivienne continued, pleasant as a woman discussing weather. "So you don't have to wonder if I'm telling the truth. I know how men like Nikolai can make you doubt things. I've known him much longer than you have, darling. I understand how confusing it all must feel."
My phone buzzed in my hand. Once, twice. Images loading. I pulled the phone away from my ear and looked at the screen with eyes that felt like they belonged to someone else. Medical letterhead. A clinic in London. A name, a date, a heartbeat measured in weeks.
Twelve weeks.
I went back to the call but she was still talking, smooth and continuous, filling silence the way expensive perfume filled a room.
" – always knew the arrangement with you was temporary. He needed something specific from you and now that's finished. I don't blame you for any of it. You were in an impossible position." Another pause. "We both know what he's capable of when he wants something."
I hung up.
I didn't say goodbye. I didn't say anything at all. I simply pressed the red button and set the phone on the table face down and sat very still while the fire crackled across the room and Elena breathed softly in her sleep.
The pictures were still on my screen. I knew they were there without looking.
After a long time I turned the phone over and looked at them again.
I thought about what the doctor in Switzerland had told me with her kind face and careful voice. The baby didn't make it. I'm so sorry. There was nothing we could have done.
I had grieved that loss in pieces, in the spaces between grieving Luka and caring for Elena and preparing to testify against a man I had once, despite everything, started to trust. I had folded the grief small and tucked it somewhere I didn't have to look at directly. But now Vivienne's voice had found it and pulled it back into the light, and the pain was as fresh and raw as the first moment.
Nikolai had been with her. While I was in his penthouse, while I was learning to read the silences between his words and finding things in them that felt almost real, he had been with Vivienne Kensington.
Creating something that would survive when mine had not.
I sat on the kitchen floor without deciding to. My back found the cabinet and I pulled my knees to my chest and stared at the photographs still open on my phone screen.
Maybe it was a lie. Vivienne had every reason to want me destabilized, every reason to manufacture a wound exactly this shape and size. She was smart enough to know where it would land.
But the paperwork looked real. The clinic was real.
Twelve weeks was a real number that pointed to a real night in a real bed that had nothing to do with me.
Or maybe it had everything to do with me. Maybe it was another layer of the plan, another piece of the architecture Nikolai had built so carefully around my life. Maybe Vivienne was part of it too, another tool, another arrangement. Maybe none of it meant what it looked like.
Not knowing was its own kind of agony.
I picked up my phone and called Damien.
He answered on the second ring. "Marlena. Everything okay?"
"I need you to check something." My voice came out steadier than I felt. I told him about the call, about Vivienne, about the photographs and the clinic name and the twelve weeks.
I said the words plainly, without emotion, the way I'd learned to report facts to him over the past weeks. Just information. Just data for his file.
When I finished there was a brief silence. "I'll look into it," he said carefully. "These things can be fabricated. Give me twenty-four hours."
"Thank you.".
"Are you alright?"
"I'll call you tomorrow," I said, and hung up.
Elena was still sleeping. The fire had burned lower, the logs settling into deep orange coals that threw soft light across her thin face. She looked peaceful.
She looked like the mother I remembered before everything broke.
I stayed on the floor and let the minutes pass. Outside, wind moved through the pine trees in long slow waves and the mountain was very quiet and very indifferent to all the small human disasters happening inside this cottage.
I should not have cared. I had demanded the divorce. I had called the lawyers and given testimony to the FBI and made my list and drawn my lines and meant every single one of them.
Nikolai Volkov was the man who had destroyed my life and I was in the process of making sure he answered for it.
But somewhere in the long sleepless stretch of the afternoon, a feeling worked its way through the armor I had built so carefully. Something hot and unreasonable and shameful that I did not want to name.
Jealousy.
The jealousy of a woman who had lost a baby in a basement and was now looking at proof that another woman had not.
I hated myself for it. I pressed my forehead against my knees and breathed through it slowly, the way I breathed through everything now, counting in and out until the worst of it passed.
It didn't mean anything. It didn't change anything. Nikolai had lied about everything from the very beginning and whatever he had with Vivienne Kensington was just another part of the life he had hidden from her.
I lifted my head and looked at the phone in my hand. The screen had gone dark. I could still feel t
he weight of those images on it, the medical letterhead, the careful date, the heartbeat counted in weeks.