23. Thirty Percent

23. Thirty Percent

Sophia clawed at his wrist, coughing hard once he finally let go.

“Our wedding was arranged while your parents were still alive,” she gasped out. “We’ve been engaged since we were children, Caleb. You can’t just—”

“I’m not the father,” Caleb cut in. “Sia’s real father is Kelvin. My own cousin.”

Sophia went very still.

“I thought you’d been drugged,” he continued. “I thought Kelvin had done that to you. I pitied you enough to accept the baby anyway. But that’s not what happened, is it? You meant to drug both of us that night. Kelvin was the one who ended up paying for it instead.”

She didn’t deny it. Her silence was answer enough.

“I’ll give you thirty percent of the company shares,” Caleb said, already turning to leave. “That’s more than you deserve. The only reason I’m letting you go at all is because of Sia.”

“Caleb.” Sophia’s voice cracked behind him, tears finally spilling over. “You love her. Don’t you? Tania.”

 

• • •

 

Caleb froze at the door, his hands curling into fists at his sides.

Sophia sobbed harder, some of it grief, some of it clearly rage at the idea that she’d slept with his cousin instead of him. She scrambled up and blocked the doorway before he could leave.

“She’s the enemy’s daughter,” Sophia said, wiping her face. “Do you even know what her mother did to your family? What it cost your mother’s life?”

Something in Caleb went cold and sharp all at once. “How do you know about that?”

His hand found her throat again before he’d fully decided to move.

“How did you know!”

Sophia wrenched free, panic flickering across her face before she smoothed it over, pivoting fast. “It doesn’t matter that I slept with your cousin. Sia is as good as yours. You can’t just walk away from this engagement.”

“Don’t push me,” Caleb said quietly. “I won’t hesitate to change my mind about the shares.”

He left her sobbing on the floor. Her head lifted slowly as the door shut behind him, her eyes bloodshot and strangely calm.

“Tania is the only woman in your heart,” she said to the empty room. “Damn you, Caleb. You’re never going to know the real truth.”

 

• • •

 

Caleb drove through the city with the wind howling against the windshield, a storm building fast overhead.

His mind kept circling back to Kelvin. To his father. To the two of them standing together over something Caleb still couldn’t fully picture without his chest tightening.

He’d spent months believing Kelvin had wronged Sophia. Now the truth sat upside down in his stomach, uglier than the lie had been.

Sophia’s words kept circling too, refusing to leave him alone. Whatever she knew about Tania’s mother, she’d learned it from somewhere, and that somewhere unsettled him more than he wanted to admit.

He pulled over at the cemetery without deciding to, the rain already soaking through his jacket by the time he reached his mother’s grave.

He knelt in the mud, picked up a handful of wet earth from the gravestone, and pressed it hard against his forearm until his skin split.

“I’m sorry,” he said, over and over. “I’m a coward. I let her in. I let the enemy’s daughter in, and I can’t make myself regret it.”

He thought of the boarding school she’d sent him to, so young, so far away, and how he’d hated her for it at the time, not understanding until years later that she’d only been trying to spare him from watching his own family come apart. He’d come home to find her already gone.

The rain kept falling, and Caleb stayed kneeling in it long after there was any reason to.

 

• • •

 

Tania stood at the glass wall of the villa, watching rain lash against the gates, turning the day’s events over and over without landing anywhere close to peace.

She was half-asleep on her feet when she finally heard the front door. Caleb, drenched from head to foot, having apparently left his car somewhere and walked the rest of the way.

She crossed to him without thinking, pulling her shawl off her shoulders to dry his hair.

He caught her wrist, then pulled her fully into his arms instead, holding on tight enough that she felt it in her ribs.

“I hate you, Tania,” he murmured into her hair.

A small, tired smile pulled at her mouth. “I hate you too.”

He drew back just enough to look at her. “I hope that’s true.”

“Me too,” she said, and hugged him again instead of answering any further.

She thought of her mother, of whatever horrible thing had started all of this, and how unfair it felt that two people could love each other this much and still be standing on opposite sides of something neither of them had chosen.

They stood there a long time, neither one willing to be the first to let go.

 

• • •

 

Tania woke to a sharp ache behind her ribs and barely made it to the bathroom before she was sick, blood swirling faint pink through the water. She rinsed everything away fast at the sound of footsteps approaching.

Caleb found droplets on the tile anyway.

“I’m on my period,” she said quickly. “It happens sometimes, even during pregnancy. It’s normal.”

He studied her a beat too long before letting it go.

Marcus arrived not long after with a stack of files, and Tania cooked for both of them, waving off Caleb’s halfhearted protest that she should be resting.

Once they left for the office, she sat alone at the kitchen table and called Dr. Jeff.

“How long do I actually have left, Uncle Jeff?” she asked. “The truth this time.”