The morning light sliced through the blinds, casting long shadows across the polished floors as Xavier stepped into the sterile silence of his living room. Cathleen perched like an ice queen on her minimalist throne and didn't even glance up. Her fingers curled sensuously around the porcelain mug, the steam from her coffee mingling with the frost in her gaze.
"Welcome home, Mr. Knight," she drawled, her voice a silken threat.
"Cat, I-" His words were clumsy, tripping over the tension and thickening the air.
She cut him off as sharply as a whip's crack. "I believe we have to take care of that name, Mr. Knight. It's Cathleen or Mrs. Knight to you."
His jaw was clenched, muscles working beneath stubble. The fight had drained from him; every inch of his body screamed for a reprieve, but none was coming. He was a man on the edge and Cathleen... Cathleen was the abyss staring back.
He sighed, a sound heavy with the weight of unspoken battles. "Mrs. Knight, we need to talk."
A smile played on her lips-a cruel curve forecasting pain. "About?" she questioned, each syllable laced with venom.
The words he needed to speak lodged in his throat, each of which was a potential detonator in the minefield between them. His hands found the back of a chair, knuckles whitening. This was no mere spat between spouses; it was war, and he was outflanked.
"About us, about everything." His voice was gravel, ground down by the relentless millstones of their mutual destruction. "I didn't know you'd go this far," Xavier says.
"Go far?" Her eyebrows arched, mocking. "You haven't seen anything yet, Xavier." The way she said his name, was like a curse-dark magic intended to bind and subdue.
Something inside him recoiled-the remnants of the man he once was, retreating before the onslaught of her cold fury. He knew then, with a sinking certainty, that the woman he married was gone, replaced by this avenging angel who wore Cathleen's skin and wielded pain like a master artist.
"Then tell me, what's the endgame?" His question hung between them, like a noose awaiting its victim.
Her laughter was a bitter symphony, echoing off the walls. "Oh, darling," she purred, "we're just getting started."
Xavier's voice was a scalpel, interrupting the silence. "What is it that you want, Cathleen?" His gaze, unyielding, sought hers, a challenge laid bare on the battlefield of their living room.
"Depends," she drawled, the word stretching into a smirk. "What do you mean by that, Mr. Knight?"
His jaw clenched, and his muscles taut as coiled springs. "You are not in business. Why are you after my company?" The question shot through the air like a bullet, aimed straight at her heart.
Cathleen's smile was slow and predatory. "I want you to suffer," she confessed, her voice honeyed with malice. "The same suffering I went through. You killed my daughter so you could spend time with your precious son and the woman you love. I want you to beg me to eat; beg me for anything that makes you breathe."
Xavier's knees met the floor with a thud, his pride crumbling like the walls of a besieged fortress. "Cat, I want you to stop, please," he begged, his voice a whisper in a storm.
Her laughter was ice. "No, I won't stop. Not until you're dead, just like my daughter," Cathleen declared, rising from her throne of pain and towering over him.
"Bella is..." Xavier's words faltered, teetering on the precipice of truth.
"Bella is dead; why can't you say it?" Cathleen's heels clicked a death knell on the marble, punctuating each syllable.
Rising, Xavier steadied himself, his hands pressing into his thighs. He looked at her-really looked-at the villain he had unwittingly sculpted from the flesh and bone of his wife. With shaking fingers, he retrieved his phone.
"Caleb," he barked into the receiver, his command terse. "Follow my wife. Ensure she doesn't harm herself." Then he hung up, the line going dead like the finality of their conversation.
He left, each step heavy with dread, retreating to his father's house. The saferoom greeted him with its sterile glow, a sanctuary turned mausoleum. Old Mr. Knight sat there, his vigil kept beside the neonatal fortress they had built.
"Xavier," the old man's voice, was gravity itself, an anchor in tumultuous seas. "I think you need to tell Cathleen. At this point, there isn't much hope. Anything can happen."
Tears betrayed Xavier then, carving tracks down his cheeks, a river eroding the stoic cliffs of his face. He wept, a broken man, amidst the machinery of life and death. His gaze pressed against the glass, a barrier to the fragile life on the other side. His breath fogged the windowpane, each exhaling a silent prayer for the daughter he couldn't reach. Machines beeped and whirred, their cold, mechanical symphony a stark contrast to the silent storm raging within him.
"Dad, I can't lose my little girl," Xavier rasped, his voice raw from unshed sorrow. "Cathleen... she hid her pregnancy to protect her from me. And now, what? I confess I took Bella because she wasn't breathing." He choked on the words, the truth asphyxiating. "She'll hate me more than she already does if I present a half-dead daughter to her."
Old Mr. Knight's eyes, weary with wisdom, held his son's tortured gaze. "Xavier," he uttered, every word weighted with the gravity of their reality.
"Tell me, when Cathleen demands to see her daughter's grave, what charade will you play?" The old man's question sliced through the heavy air.
Xavier scrubbed at his face, tears cutting through the grime of guilt. "She cannot see Bella like this. She can't." His fists clenched, and his knuckles were bone-white. "If Cathleen sees her fighting, barely clinging to life, she might say... Let her go. Bella is suffering." The mere thought clawed at his insides, like a beast ravenous with fear.
"Knights don't surrender. We fight," Xavier declared, planting his feet firm like roots into the ground.
"Even when the battle is lost?" The old man's voice was soft, but it thundered in Xavier's ears.
"Especially then," Xavier spat back, defiance flaring hot in his blood. "I won't have Cathleen witness her struggle, Dad. She'd rather mourn a memory than a miracle slipping away. I can't do that to my wife, I want her to see a lively daughter and then catch the person who did this to my girl."
Old Mr. Knight nodded, his silence a heavy shroud over the neonatal chamber. The clock on the wall ticked on, indifferent to the desperation of men and the battles they fought against the inevitable march of time.