Sophie’s POV
The plan is simple. Cleo distracts the nurse with a complicated story about medication allergies and insurance paperwork—the kind of bureaucratic nightmare that requires full attention and multiple phone calls.
Ayden waits with the car at the back entrance, engine running, ready to move the moment I appear.
I slip out of my room wearing Cleo's oversized hoodie, the hood pulled up to shadow my face. My heart pounds against my ribs as I navigate the unfamiliar hallways, following the route we mapped out on Cleo's phone.
Every footstep feels too loud, every passing staff member seems to look at me a second too long.
But no one stops me, no one recognizes the pregnant scandal girl beneath the designer cotton and hunched shoulders.
The cold air hits me like a slap when I step outside. I've been in that hospital room so long I'd forgotten what real air feels like—sharp, biting, alive.
Ayden's car idles at the curb, and I slide into the backseat before anyone can notice the patient escaping through the service entrance.
"You good?" Ayden asks, meeting my eyes in the rearview mirror.
"Drive."
The route to the detention center takes forty minutes. Forty minutes of silence, broken only by the hum of the engine and the soft rhythm of tires on asphalt.
Cleo sits beside me, her hand occasionally reaching over to squeeze mine, but she doesn't try to fill the quiet with words.
I rehearse what I'll say. Accusations I've been saving up—’you betrayed me, you helped her, you stood there smiling while she planned my destruction.’ Demands for explanations that make sense.
The anger I'm entitled to, the rage I've earned through every sleepless night and every cruel comment and every moment of terror on that rooftop.
I build my script carefully, word by word. Armor myself with righteous fury. But when I finally sit across from Cassian, separated by scuffed plastic and fluorescent lighting that makes everyone look like a corpse, my script dissolves.
Because his first words aren't about himself.
"Are you okay?" His voice cracks on the question, raw and desperate. "The baby—is everything...?" He trails off, unable to finish, and his eyes search my face with an intensity that steals the breath from my lungs.
He's looking for damage, for signs of trauma, for proof that I'm still here, still whole, still carrying the life inside me that might have been his.
He looks thinner than I remember, exhausted in a bone-deep way that no amount of sleep could fix.
The confident professor who charmed me with his kindness, who offered stability when Adrian offered chaos—that man has been stripped away, leaving something rawer underneath. More human.
But his concern is entirely for me. I wasn't prepared for that.
"I'm fine," I manage. "The baby is fine. We're... stable."
The relief that floods his features is almost painful to witness. He exhales like he's been holding his breath for days, his shoulders dropping, his hands unclenching on the table between us.
"Thank God." The words come out broken. "When I saw the video, when you collapsed… I thought..." He shakes his head. "I couldn't live with myself if something happened to you because of what I did."
The script I prepared—the accusations, the demands—rises in my throat, but what comes out is something different.
"Why?" Just one word. It contains everything.
Cassian is quiet for a long moment. When he speaks, his voice is steady but fragile, like glass that's already begun to crack.
"I never meant for things to go this far. Lisette manipulated me—I know that now."
He meets my eyes, and I see no deception there, only exhaustion and regret.
"She told me things about Adrian, about his past, about the way he treats the women he's with. She made me believe you were in danger. That he was controlling you, isolating you, that you were drowning and didn't even realize it."
"So you helped her?"
"I thought I was saving you."
The words tumble out, desperate to be understood.
"I know how that sounds. I know it's not an excuse. But Sophie, I saw the way you changed around him. The way you second-guessed yourself, the way you disappeared from your own life. I was terrified for you. And Lisette—she fed that fear. Twisted it into something I could act on."
He leans forward, and I see the anguish carved into every line of his face.
"I made choices. Wrong choices. I told her where you'd be. I gave her openings to get close to you. I thought—"
His voice breaks. "I thought if I could just get you away from him, you'd see clearly, be free. I never imagined she'd take it as far as she did. I never imagined she'd hurt you."
I want to hate him. It would be so much easier to hate him, to see him as the villain the world has painted him—the jealous rival, the betrayer, the man who sold me out to a madwoman.
Hatred is clean, simple. Hatred would let me walk out of this room with the clarity I came searching for. But his reasoning isn't monstrous. It's painfully, terribly human—misguided love, protective instinct twisted into betrayal.
He looked at my relationship with Adrian and saw what the outside world sees—a young woman consumed by a powerful older man. He tried to save me from a cage he believed I couldn't recognize.
He was wrong, he knows that now. I can see it in the hollowness of his eyes, the guilt that's been eating him alive.
But being wrong isn't the same as being evil.
"I'm sorry." His voice drops to barely a whisper. "I'm so sorry, Sophie. For all of it. For not trusting you to know your own heart. For letting fear make me into someone I never wanted to be."
He pauses, swallowing hard. "I won't ask you to forgive me, I don't deserve that. I just needed you to know—I never stopped caring about you. Even when I was making all the wrong choices, I was doing it because I cared."
The confession hangs between us, fragile and heavy.
When I leave, I don't feel closure. I feel more tangled than before.
There's still something between us. Not love—not the consuming fire that burns when Adrian touches me. But a connection, an attachment I can't simply sever no matter how much easier that would make things.
Cassian cared for me in his own flawed way. He still does. And some part of me, buried beneath the anger and the hurt and the betrayal, cares about him too.
The ride back to the hospital is silent. Cleo sits beside me, waiting, but she doesn't push.
Finally, as we near the parking garage, she speaks.
"How did it go?"
I stare out the window at the gray city passing by. My hand rests on my stomach, feeling the slight swell that holds everything I'm fighting for.
"I can't put him in jail." The words come out flat. Certain. "I'll never forgive myself if I do."
Cleo doesn't respond.
"But I don't know how to forgive him either."
The car pulls into the hospital lot. I don't move, and neither does Cleo.