My Husband Used Me to Carry His First Love's Baby

Alexander Moretti stared at the frozen security image until the room seemed to lose all sound.

The man behind the wheel had a leaner face than Alexander remembered. There was silver at his temples now, and a pale scar cut from the corner of his left eyebrow toward his hairline. But the eyes were unchanged.

Dark. Steady. Merciless when they needed to be.

Dante Moretti.

Alexander's older brother.

The brother whose coffin had been lowered into the ground seven years earlier.

"Run it again," Alexander said.

No one moved.

His chief of security, Marcus Vale, looked toward the technician. The technician swallowed, backed the recording up, and pressed play.

At 2:13 a.m., the rear service gate opened for exactly twelve seconds. A black sedan rolled into the shadow of the trees. At 2:17, a figure in a dark coat crossed the edge of the garden.

Me.

I moved slowly, one arm around my stomach, the other gripping the sleeve of a woman Alexander recognized as Rosa, the housekeeper who had worked for the Moretti family since before our marriage.

At 2:18, Dante stepped from the driver's side.

He looked directly into the camera.

Not accidentally.

Not briefly.

He knew where the lens was.

And he smiled.

Then he opened the back door for me.

Alexander surged forward and slammed his palm against the monitor.

"Where is Rosa?"

Marcus answered carefully. "Her room is empty. Phone is gone. Passport is gone. One suitcase is missing."

"And the gate?"

"Opened using an old master authorization."

Alexander turned.

"Whose?"

Marcus hesitated.

That hesitation was enough.

Alexander crossed the room so fast that the technician backed into the wall.

"Whose authorization?"

"Your father's original family code," Marcus said. "But it was deactivated years ago. It should not have worked."

Alexander's face changed.

Because only three people had ever known that code.

His father.

Alexander.

And Dante.

Alexander picked up a crystal glass from the desk and threw it into the fireplace.

It exploded against the stone.

"Find them."

Marcus did not answer immediately.

"I said find them."

"We are trying. But the sedan switched plates three blocks away. Traffic cameras lost it near the river."

Alexander looked again at the frozen image of his brother.

"He was dead."

No one in the room was foolish enough to agree.

Seven years earlier, Dante Moretti's car had gone over the side of a mountain road during a storm. The vehicle burned before emergency crews reached it. A body had been recovered. The family had held a funeral closed to the public. Alexander had stood beside the grave with his father and watched dirt fall over the coffin.

He had never questioned it.

Until now.

"Sir," Marcus said, "there is something else."

Alexander turned slowly.

Marcus placed a tablet on the desk.

"At 1:42 a.m., someone accessed the west office from inside the house. The camera there was disabled for ninety-one seconds."

Alexander's eyes sharpened.

The west office contained copies of private hospital records, trust documents, and encrypted business files.

"What was taken?"

"We do not know yet."

Alexander's jaw tightened.

"Then you do not know enough."

He looked toward the windows, beyond them to the dark lawn where I had vanished.

His wife.

His unborn daughter.

His carefully controlled plan.

Gone in less than ten minutes.

And the man who had taken me was supposed to be dead.

Twenty-seven miles away, I was curled in the back seat of the black sedan with a blanket over my shoulders and blood on the inside of my lower lip.

Every time the car turned, pain pulled across my abdomen.

I kept one hand under the curve of my stomach, whispering the same words over and over.

"Stay with me, baby. Stay with me."

I did not care whose egg had created her.

I did not care what a file called me.

For eight months, I had felt her move beneath my heart.

I knew the rhythm of her kicks. I knew she became restless when I drank orange juice and strangely calm when rain hit the bedroom windows. I knew she pressed one foot against my right side every night around eleven, as if she had already chosen her favorite place in the world.

Biology had changed in one terrible afternoon.

Love had not.

Rosa sat beside me, holding a towel to my cheek.

"You need a doctor," she said.

"Not one Alexander can control."

"That is where we are going."

The driver looked at me in the rearview mirror.

I had seen his face only once before that night, in a family portrait stored in the attic.

Dante Moretti had been twenty-nine in the photograph. Alexander had been twenty-four. They stood on either side of their father, both wearing black suits, both unsmiling.

Dante had looked like a man who knew something dangerous.

Now he looked like a man who had survived it.

"You knew me?" I asked.

His eyes returned to the road.

"I knew of you."

"Alexander said you died."

"Alexander says many things when the truth is inconvenient."

My throat tightened.

"Why did you help me?"

"Because Rosa called me."

I turned toward her.

Rosa looked down.

"I heard him give the order to lock you in," she said. "I saw you on the floor. I saw him walk away while you were in pain. I have watched that family forgive too many things because the Moretti name frightens people. I could not forgive that."

I swallowed hard.

"How did you know Dante was alive?"

"Because I helped him disappear."

The answer struck me harder than the car's movement.

Dante's gaze lifted again in the mirror.

"Rosa saved my life seven years ago," he said. "Tonight she asked me to repay the debt."

I looked between them.

"From Alexander?"

Dante's hands tightened on the steering wheel.

"From our father. From Alexander. From everyone who believed control was the same thing as loyalty."

A cramp tightened low in my stomach.

I gasped and bent forward.

Rosa grabbed my hand.

"Claire?"

"It hurts."

"How badly?"

I could not answer.

The pain came like a belt being pulled around my body. My vision blurred. I tried to breathe through it, remembering every prenatal class Alexander had paid for but never attended.

After forty seconds, the pain eased.

Dante accelerated.

"We are ten minutes away."

"Where?"

"A private clinic outside White Plains. The doctor is not connected to Moretti money."

I laughed once, without humor.

"I used to think that was impossible."

"So did I."

My phone was gone. Rosa had taken it and left it on my bed because Dante said Alexander could track it. I had no purse, no identification, no clothes except the black leggings and sweater I had been wearing when Rosa unlocked the bedroom door.

I had escaped my own home like a criminal.

That thought should have terrified me.

Instead, for the first time since Alexander struck me, I could breathe.

The clinic was hidden behind iron gates and a line of bare trees. There was no sign on the road, only a small brass plaque near the entrance that read HAWTHORNE MATERNAL CARE.

Two nurses were waiting when we arrived.

Dante opened the back door himself.

"Can you walk?"

"Yes."

I tried.

My knees nearly folded.

He caught my elbow without touching my stomach.

"Easy."

I hated the word. Alexander had used it whenever I questioned him.

Dante seemed to see something in my face because he released me immediately.

"Sorry."

That one word almost broke me.

An apology.

For a hand on my elbow.

My husband had slapped me to the floor and had not apologized once.

Inside, a doctor named Miriam Cole examined me while Rosa stayed beside the bed. My blood pressure was dangerously high. There were signs of uterine irritability, but no active labor. The baby's heartbeat was strong.

When the monitor filled the room with that rapid, familiar sound, I covered my face and cried.

Dr. Cole let me.

After several minutes, she lowered her voice.

"Claire, I need to ask you a question, and I need you to answer without considering what anyone else wants. Do you feel safe returning to your husband?"

I looked at her.

No doctor had ever asked me that.

Not once in eight months.

"No."

The word came out rough.

Then stronger.

"No. I am not safe with him."

Dr. Cole nodded.

"Then you will not be returned to him."

I stared at her.

Something inside me shifted.

Not the baby.

Me.

For months, Alexander had made every decision sound final. He chose the hospital. He chose the obstetrician. He chose which vitamins I took, which appointments he attended, which questions he answered before I could speak. He had arranged the pregnancy itself without my knowledge.

I had forgotten what it sounded like when someone told me I still had a choice.

Dante entered an hour later carrying a sealed envelope.

He placed it on the table beside my bed.

"Rosa took this from the west office."

My fingers went cold.

"What is it?"

"The reason Alexander will come after you with everything he has."

I opened the envelope.

Inside were photocopies of consent forms bearing my name.

My signature appeared on every page.

I stared at it.

It looked almost perfect.

Almost.

I knew the small loop I made in the letter C. I knew the angle of the B in Bennett. Whoever had copied my signature had practiced.

At the top of the first page were the words:

GESTATIONAL CARRIER AGREEMENT.

At the bottom was a date.

Eleven days before my embryo transfer.

I had never seen the document in my life.

"He forged my signature," I whispered.

"Yes," Dante said.

I looked at the next page.

There was a payment authorization to the fertility clinic.

Then another document.

A private letter from Alexander to Dr. Raymond Kell, the physician who had supervised my treatment.

The message was short.

Mrs. Moretti is not to be informed of donor identity. All communications are to come through me. The carrier believes the embryo was created using her own oocytes. Maintain that understanding until delivery.

My hands began to shake.

Dante watched me quietly.

"There is more."

I looked up.

"How can there be more?"

He did not answer at first.

Then he reached inside his coat and placed a small flash drive beside the documents.

"Alexander did not only plan to take the baby after delivery."

My heartbeat changed.

"What did he plan?"

Dante's expression hardened.

"He planned to make sure you could never challenge him afterward."