Page 131 of Devil's Tulip

“Well, I checked the footage and saw you and Elira. She didn’t come back for her purse at all—she gave you birth control pills.”

My heart stutters.So he knew about them all along?I wipe my sweaty palms down my pants, trying to maintain a façade of calm. “Yes,” I admit. “I called her and asked for them.”

“I saw where you hid the pills, so I took them, flushed the originals down the toilet, and replaced them with placebos. You weren’t going to use them anyway, I thought. But… you did, didn’t you?”

I can tell from his tone that he asked a question, but my hearing fizzled out at the point he said he flushed my birth control pills down the toilet and replaced them with placebos.

A high-pitched ringing fills my ears, and my vision blurs, the room spinning around me as the earth seems to tilt beneath my feet For a moment, I think I might faint.

“You–you what?” I ask in a horrified whisper. He flushed my pills? I’ve been taking the placebo all along?He forced this pregnancy on me!As if feeling my distress, my baby turns in my belly and kicks gently, grounding me just enough to keep from blacking out.

Michael’s lips press into a thin line as he takes in my expression. “Gianna, you need to calm down,” he says, his tone maddeningly reasonable. “It was in the past. It all worked out perfectly.”

I stare at him in complete disbelief, my chest beginning to heave with my breaths. “Calm down? It all worked out perfectly?” I repeat, my voice shaking. I’m not even sure who I’m looking at right now. Have I ever really known him at all? “How could you do this to me? You trapped me!”

“I loved you. Iloveyou,” he corrects, taking a step towards me. “I did what I thought would keep you by my side.”

“And it didn’t matter that I told you I wasn’t ready for a child?” My fingers grip the edge of the island so hard my knuckles turn white. I slide off my chair, desperate to put space between us. When he takes another step forward, I raise my hand like a shield. “No, stay there.”

He doesn’t even look sorry. There’s no guilt on his face—nothing. Maybe I could feel differently if he at least looked remorseful, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t see what he did that was so completely, unforgivably wrong.

He really is a fucking psychopath.

“I–I need to be alone,” I choke out and turn away from him, walking as fast as my six-month belly allows to my old bedroom. I slam the door shut behind me.

I haven’t been in here in months, and it feels foreign to me now. But I can’t bear going to the room we’ve been sharing.

He betrayed me.Again.

God, I’m such an idiot. How naïve was I to think everything was just… perfect? The more I think about how stupid and gullible I was, the hotter my face burns with humiliation.He has a camera in here—hell, there are cameraseverywhere. Has he been watching me all along? I saw the evidence in that shrine of a photography room, but I only looked at it through love-tinted glasses.

I fucking took those pills every single day, choking them down even when the bitter medicine stuck in my throat, because I didn’t want to get pregnant before I was ready. And he knew that. Heknew, and he made sure it happened anyway.

An invisible vise clamps around my chest, squeezing until I can’t breathe. Nausea pushes at the back of my throat, and I start to hyperventilate.

I can’t get enough air.

I slap my hands over my chest, then freeze when a horrifying thought hits me—even now he might be watching. Where else does he have cameras? The walk-in closet? The bathroom?

My skin crawls at the thought, and I shudder violently. Is this how an animal in a zoo feels? A bug under a microscope? Have I ever had a private moment at all in this house?

I need to get out of here.

I can’t stay here in this room, this house, with him. The baby kicks me hard, and I gasp, doubling over, gripping my belly. Shit, shit, shit.

My eyes dart around the room and snag on an empty paper bag on my study desk. I lunge for it, pressing it to my mouth and breathing rapidly—in, out, in, out—until my heart rate slows and oxygen returns to my starved lungs.

When my panic subsides to a manageable level, my brain kicks back into gear. If I want to leave without raising suspicion, I can’t take anything with me. If he sees me packing, he’ll knowsomething’s up. And the last thing I need is him suspecting anything. There’s no telling what he might do.

What if he throws me in that prison again?

There’s a soft knock on the door, and I just know it’s him—I can sense his presence through the wood. Fury boils through me, but I force myself to keep breathing in and out.

The door handle turns—I forgot to lock it,stupid, stupid—and Michael steps into the room. “Gianna, I–” He stops short when he sees me by the desk, breathing with the aid of a paper bag. “Are you okay?”

I try to relax my posture, but my entire being is quaking with suppressed rage and fear. I manage a stiff nod, not trusting myself to speak without screaming or sobbing.

He hesitates, eyes darting over me, then sighs. “I just got a call from work. The site we launched last night just crashed, and I need to go fix it with my engineers. We’ll continue this conversation when I get back, okay?”

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