Page 13 of Consequence of One Reckless Night

Alexandre remembered shivering beside his mother, hiding in the folds of her skirt.

“I told you to get rid of it!”

To this day, he felt the pain those words had inflicted.

His father hadn’t wanted him. Rico had paid Liza to destroy Alexandre in the womb itself, but his mother, manipulative that she was, had seen him as her golden ticket out of poverty. She’d foolishly believed that Rico would marry her and instate her in his palatial home.

But that never happened. Rico remained with his wife, and never publicly acknowledged Alexandre as his son.

When Liza understood that Rico couldn’t be extorted, she went to Carlos and threatened to expose the truth about Alexandre’s birth.

Carlos, on the other hand, had been easy to extort. He paid Liza handsomely for her silence. For years, money exchanged hands till one day, Carlos had enough and decided to adopt Alexandre.

He’d thought it would appease Liza, but it hadn’t.

Alexandre was her bargaining chip, and she wasn’t willing to let go of him. She haggled for more money, and when she realized that Carlos wouldn’t bow to her demands, she went to the press.

He vividly remembered the furor kicked up by the damning newspaper article. It made him instantly famous, and his mother had milked the attention for all it was worth.

To this day, Alexandre didn’t know what had compelled Carlos to adopt him, but it had saved him from his avaricious mother.

If he thought life away from Liza would be better, he was proven wrong because not one person had cared about him. He’d lived like a poor cousin in the Monteiro mansion, eating with the servants and wearing his half-brother’s castoffs, always confined to the shadows because he was a bastard, an ugly reminder of his father’s infidelity—a permanent stain on the Monteiro name.

“She should have gotten rid of you,” he remembered Rico yelling at him one day when he accidentally ran into his father in the living room of the palatial mansion. Those words rang loudly in his ears and Alexandre flinched as the words tore into him.

“Get rid of it.”

The words echoed in his head, spilled from his lips as he struggled to free himself from horrific clutches of his past. That one sentence had been flung at him every time Rico took out his anger on him, and Alexandre shuddered as old wounds tore open, and he began to bleed anew.

He was so caught up in his own misery that he didn’t hear Raquel’s pained gasp or see her stumble out of the room with her hand covering her mouth.

How long he struggled with the pain lashing his insides, he didn’t know but when he yanked himself back to the present, Raquel was gone.

Chapter Six

Raquel sat in the chairwith her back straight and her head held up high. In the mirror, the reflection didn’t show the timid, mousy woman that people believed her to be. Instead, she saw a woman determined to protect the life of her unborn child. She saw a strong woman, gathering her courage, resolved to do the best she could for herself and her child.

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