Page 102 of Beauty and the Daddy

When did things get so complicated? How the hell am I supposed to tell him now? After I've lied about the doctor, about the pills, about everything?

"You're such an idiot, Belle," I whisper to myself.

Footsteps in the bedroom. My heart slams against my ribs as I fumble the test back toward the drawer. Too fast, too panicked—it slips from my fingers and hits the tile with a plastic clatter that might as well be a gunshot.

Two pink lines stare up at me like evidence at a crime scene.

I drop to my knees, trying to cover it with my body, but it's too late. The bathroom door swings open.

"Belle, what's taking so…"

Luca's voice dies. I watch his eyes track from my face to the floor, to the small white stick that just destroyed both our worlds.

When he looks back at me, it's not the Luca Moretti who kissed me silly just moments ago. There's pain there, and rage. But worse of all, betrayal.

"You lied to me, Belle."

23

LUCA

Two pink lines.

The world stops. Not slows—stops. Like someone hit pause on a movie I thought I understood, and now every frame before this moment feels like a lie.

Pregnant. Belle's pregnant. With my child.

The emotions hit in waves: shock, then rage, then something deeper—a terror so profound it makes my hands shake. Because I've been here before. I've loved a woman carrying my child, and I've watched that love turn to ash and screaming metal.

A flash. A sound that isn't sound so much as absence, like the world skipped a frame and came back wrong.

I bend and pick the test up off the floor. It's small. Stupidly light for the way it detonates my life. One more life for me to protect, and I didn't even know about it.

I can't believe Belle kept this from me.

I look up. Belle's got my shirt on, knuckles white at her sides. Her eyes are glassy, proud, terrified. It wrecks me.

"You lied to me," I say.

She swallows. "I?—"

"You were going to sneak out again, during a lockdown week, right after an attack." I hold the test up between two fingers. "You were going to do this alone?"

"I didn't know how to tell you."

"Trynot lying." I hear the snap and hate it, but I don't pull it back. "You think I haven't lost enough to secrets in this house?"

"Luca—"

"Elena died because of me," I say, the words ripping from somewhere deep. "Car bomb. They wired our sedan, but the explosion was meant for me. She took my keys that morning because I was running late, and she hated being late for anything. I watched her get in." My voice cracks. "I watched her turn the ignition. I was still on the front steps when the world caught fire."

She takes a sharp breath and clutches her heart. "Luca, I'm so sorry… I didn't know."

The room tilts; I anchor on the counter. "I stood there like a fucking statue while the world burned five feet from me and there was nothing to pull her from. Nothing left to hold onto except a ring the paramedics put in a bag."

Belle's eyes well up. "I'm so sorry."

"So don't you dare make me watch another woman I love walk into danger because she thinks she has to do italone." The word rips low from my chest. It's too honest. I hear it. She hears it.