Snow Falls in Prague; I Won't Wait for a Heartless Man novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Get Rid of It
On the day Freya learns she is pregnant, Brecken orders four bodyguards to hold her down at a clinic, and a woman with an unmarked syringe walks in. Freya stops lying still.
On the day my pregnancy test came back positive, my boyfriend was holding a wedding veil over another woman's head.
I saw it through the window of a bridal salon downtown, with the clinic's message still open on my phone.
Bethany had texted me an hour earlier.
Come help me pick! Brecken says you have the best eye.
She spotted me first and waved with both hands.
"Freya! You came! I need one honest opinion in here, and everyone else just says yes."
Bethany Quarles was Brecken's oldest friend.
She had been studying abroad for two years, and she was back, glowing, in a white gown with a long train.
She had my brown hair, my height and my narrow jaw.
The saleswoman looked from her to me and laughed. "Are you two sisters?"
"No," Brecken said, without looking up from the veil. "Bethany's the original."
I held my phone against my chest.
Brecken Lowry, thirty-one, who owned half the towers on the lakefront, had been mine for two years.
"Brecken, I need to tell you something."
"Can it wait? Her fitting's at three."
"I'm pregnant."
He lowered the veil.
He still did not look at me.
"It was an accident," he said. "Get rid of it."
The saleswoman stopped smiling.
A bride behind the curtain stopped talking to her mother.
"Brecken, don't say it like that," Bethany said softly. "Freya, honey, I'm so sorry."
"Bethany almost died saving me," Brecken told the room. "She can't have children."
"Finding out her stand-in is pregnant would crush her."
Stand-in.
He had never said it out loud before, and he said it in front of strangers.
Every month Bethany had left a white pharmacy bag in our medicine cabinet, because the pharmacy was on her way.
I had taken every pill in it on schedule, and I was pregnant anyway.
"I'm keeping it," I said.
Brecken looked at the window.
Four men in dark coats stood on the sidewalk, the same four who followed him everywhere.
"Take her to the clinic," he said. "Gently."
"You can't make me," I said. "It's mine too."
"Stop making this harder, Freya," he said. "It's one hour."
I grabbed the dress rack and it came down with me.
The saleswoman looked at the carpet.
Nobody in that salon moved to help me.
Two of his guards lifted me by the arms, and my phone skidded under a chair.
Bethany picked up my bag from the floor and held it out to the third guard.
"She'll want this later," she said kindly.
I bit one guard's hand to the bone, and another one hit me across the mouth.
The ride to the clinic was twenty minutes.
I screamed for the first five and then I stopped, because no one on that sidewalk had turned around.
The private clinic on the North Shore had no name on its door.
Brecken walked in beside me, his hand on his phone.
He did not touch me.
In the operating room, four guards pinned me to the table, one on each limb.
A surgical light hung over my face.
The doctor read a chart and did not meet my eyes.
I stared up at the light and felt cold all the way through.
"Brecken," I said. "This is what you chose."
His jaw moved.
Then he looked at his watch and said, "Bethany's fitting is at three," and walked out.
The door swung shut behind him.
The doctor left next, saying he needed to scrub in.
The lead guard checked his phone.
"Out," he told the others. "Orders. Sterile room, nobody in it but staff."
They buckled my wrists and ankles to the table, and they went.
For a minute I was alone with the hum of the light.
Then a woman in scrubs came in and locked the door behind her.
She wore a mask and a paper cap, and I had never seen her before.
She had no badge.
She did not wash her hands.
She did not look at the tray of instruments either.
She took a syringe from the pocket of her scrub top and pulled off the cap with her teeth.
"This is quicker than the doctor," she said.
I looked at the strap on my right wrist.
The guard had been in a hurry, and the buckle was only half through its hole.
So I stopped lying still.
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