After Six Miscarriages, I Carried Someone Else’s IVF Baby Chapter 02

After Six Miscarriages, I Carried Someone Else’s IVF Baby Chapter 02

“Cara(means Darling), the doctor said your IVF was successful. Let’s not see something cruel right now. It might scare the baby.”

Dario coaxed me gently, the concern in his eyes so convincing I almost wanted to applaud his acting.

Seeing that something was wrong with me, he noticed the glass in front of me and squeezed my palm.

“Cara, how long have you been here? Why didn’t you come upstairs to find me?”

There was a careful test hidden in his words.

I lowered my eyes and said flatly, “You men were talking business upstairs. The room was full of cigar smoke. I didn’t like it.”

He let out a breath of relief.

Then he stroked my hair and told a maid to bring me hot tea.

The maid had just handed the tea over when Dario suddenly raised his gun and blew her head open.

I did not even have time to react.

Thick blood splattered across my face.

The maid’s outstretched hand remained frozen in the motion of offering the cup as she fell, her eyes still wide open.

My stomach churned violently.

Dario acted as if nothing had happened.

He put down the gun, carefully wiped my face clean with his sleeve, picked up the hot tea, and fed it to me sip by sip.

I swallowed mechanically, my entire body shaking.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Marco order someone to drag the maid away.

A winding trail of blood was left across the floor.

“She couldn’t even keep an eye on my wife’s drinking. That means she endangered my child. No reason for her to live.”

I looked at the cruel darkness in Dario’s eyes, and my stomach turned.

He touched my face with heartache.

“It’s my fault for letting you suffer so much. We finally have a baby now. No more alcohol, understand? This child has to be born healthy no matter what.”

I took several deep breaths before forcing out a dry smile.

“Okay.”

But my heart was shaking from the cold.

In three years of marriage, I had been pregnant six times.

Every time, I miscarried for no reason.

After it happened too many times, the doctors called it recurrent pregnancy loss.

Six months ago, a doctor told me I would never be able to carry a child again.

Dario held me with so much pain in his eyes and said he did not care about children. As long as I was happy and healthy, that was enough.

I had always blamed myself for failing to give him a healthy child.

After asking around everywhere, I chose the difficult path of IVF.

My abdomen had been punctured again and again by needles, and I swallowed handfuls of hormone pills.

All the suffering I had endured had only been to pave the way for Chiara.

Just because she said she was afraid of pain, I had to lose my chance at motherhood forever and become nothing more than a surrogate machine.

“What’s wrong? You look awful. Are you feeling sick? I’ll call the doctor right away.”

“I’m fine. Just some pregnancy nausea.”

Dario’s eyes reddened with distress. He brushed his fingers gently over my face.

“Cara, you’ve worked so hard. I hate that I can’t suffer for you. Our wedding was rushed back then. I ordered your favorite wedding gown, flown in from Milan. Before your stomach starts showing, I’ll take you to try it on tomorrow.”

I stared at him.

Such devoted eyes.

He treated me like a fool and lied to me again and again.

If he knew I had no intention of giving birth to this child, my ending would probably be the same as that maid’s.

I tugged at the corner of my mouth.

“I’m going back to the room to rest. You can keep talking.”

As soon as I returned to the room, I rushed into the bathroom and vomited until my stomach twisted into knots.

Tears fell hard and fast.

The physical pain was not even a fraction of what was tearing through me.

It took me a long time to recover.

When I finally came out, I saw the phone Dario had forgotten on the coffee table.

As if possessed, I picked it up.

I tried Chiara’s birthday once.

It unlocked.

The wallpaper was a photo of Chiara leaning against his shoulder, smiling like a flower in bloom.

I opened his photo album and scrolled one picture after another.

More than five thousand photos.

Every single one had Chiara in it.

He had saved them in four separate folders, recording different stages of Chiara’s life.

Each folder had only one word or one phrase as its note.

Put together, they read: “My” “Only” “Love” “In This Life”.

In their messages, Dario had once risked his life to hijack the crown of Monaco’s royal family overnight.

I suddenly remembered that day.

He had taken two bullets and nearly failed to come back.

I had brought the only keepsake my mother had left me, a sapphire cross necklace, and used it to exchange him back from the royal family.

All because Chiara had once said she wanted to feel like a queen at her twenty-fifth birthday party.

Tears dropped onto the screen, and my heart felt carved open.

Not because of all the lies over the years.

But because I had thrown away the only thing my mother left me for the sake of the demon who destroyed me.

Through my blurred vision, my gaze landed on the crescent-shaped birthmark on Chiara’s right shoulder.

My eyes widened in shock.

On my own right shoulder, in the exact same place, was an identical birthmark.

I remembered that when I first met Chiara, she did not have that mark.

After I told her I had once saved a man covered in blood while working as a Doctors Without Borders surgeon in Sicily, she began distancing herself from me.

Not long after, she became Dario’s adopted sister.

And Dario had once said Chiara had saved his life.

But Chiara was afraid of her own shadow.

She had never been to a mafia-infested place like Sicily. In fact, she despised it and looked down on it every chance she got.

My cold fingers curled tightly.

An absurd possibility slowly took shape in my mind.

So that was it.

I collapsed onto the floor, laughing and sobbing at the same time.