One Step From Bliss, One Step Into the Abyss

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Tom Barnes said that when you marry the one you love, the wedding suite ceiling should have a mirror, and the bathroom should have grab bars.

But five years ago, pregnant with a boy and a girl, I was cornered in that suite by his enemies and tortured until I lost them.

After that I never dared set foot in that place again.

Until the anniversary of my children's death, when I brought the little clothes I'd sewn by hand to mourn them.

Only to walk in on Tom and a woman tangled together on our wedding bed.

Caught in the act, all Tom did was shield her behind him.

"Maddie, I'm a man. I have normal physical needs."

"Just like five years ago, when you betrayed me to save yourself. You can understand that, can't you?"

I stared at the tattoo on the inside of the woman's forearm.

Exactly the same as the ones on the people who had brutalized me back then.

Then I remembered the vow Tom swore over me five years ago, as I lay in the ICU.

That he would chase them to the ends of the earth.

That he would kill every last one of the people who had killed our children.

I only found it laughable.

I reached back and pressed the villa's self-destruct button, and I asked him with a smile.

"If it's only a physical need, then it wouldn't matter if she died here, would it?"

""

"Madeline Gilbert! Calm down!"

"It's been five years, and you still won't let me lay a single finger on you!"

"Freda and I just each get what we need. She hasn't broken up our family, so why do you have to make her your enemy?"

I pointed at the tattoo on her forearm.

"She already broke it. Five years ago."

Only then did Tom notice the arm the woman had left uncovered by the sheet.

A flicker of panic crossed his eyes, and still he tried to talk his way out of it.

"Maddie, let me explain"

But I cut him off.

"Tom, you truly disgust me."

I turned and walked toward the escape elevator, the one that held only two people.

Every step was so hard.

As the head of the largest underworld organization in Harbor City.

Tom and I lived every day licking blood off a knife's edge.

Until five years ago, when I fell pregnant by accident.

Looking at those two tiny shapes on the ultrasound.

I told Tom I wanted a steady home with him.

Tom agreed.

In less than a month he wiped out every old enemy.

On our wedding day, he even mobilized the whole city's security to keep me and the children safe.

But a few who'd slipped the net still worked their way in among the wedding staff.

They cornered me in the wedding suite and tortured me for three whole hours.

The children were gone, and I hemorrhaged so badly they took my uterus.

I lost the right to ever be a mother.

In these five years there hasn't been a single day I wasn't living in pain.

The moment I close my eyes, my head fills with the sight of my two children dissolving into a pool of blood.

I thought Tom was the same.

But not only was he not.

He was sleeping with the enemy who had killed our children.

I stumbled. Tom had shoved me from behind.

Dragging the woman by the hand, he rushed into the escape elevator, and still he had something to say to me.

"Maddie, I know you can't move past the children's death, but Freda is innocent."

"I'll take her up first. The self-destruct system has an emergency brake. Go over and press it to stop it."

"Once you're out, I'll explain everything properly."

But Tom didn't know there was no emergency brake anymore.

The tragedy five years ago took more than my two children.

It took the last of my reason too.

I'd disabled every emergency brake in the villa.

So that one day, if any of those who'd slipped the net set foot in here again.

I could take them down with me.

The explosion went off.

I thought I saw the children I'd missed for five years.

I reached out toward them.

But a pair of large hands pulled me out of the villa.

I got lucky.

Amos Clayton, one of my own men, dragged me out of the villa a second before it went up.

But the blast still caught my legs.

Shrapnel had lodged deep inside.

Too close to the nerves.

If I didn't want to end up crippled, the only way was to dig it out without anesthesia.

I lay on the cleaning table, fingers clawing straight through the sheet beneath me.

Sweat poured off me, and I never made a sound.

After all, no pain compares to being stabbed in the back by the one you love.

When they finished, I refused the doctor's advice to rest in bed.

I went back to the wedding suite and ordered Amos to tear out every last bit of the renovation inside.

Amos looked uneasy.

"Maddie, I know you're angry."

"But this place was Tom's wedding gift to you."

"If I smash it up like this, Tom will blame me."

I caught the wording, and I fixed my eyes on his.

"So you already knew?"

"Why didn't you tell me?"

Amos stammered.

"Tom said he was afraid it would be too much of a shock for you."

I laughed until it turned to tears.

Afraid of the shock.

So he hid the fact that he'd kept alive the enemy who killed our children.

So he hid that he was sleeping with that enemy.

So even my own men knew Tom had a woman stashed away.

And I was the only one left in the dark like a fool.

I shoved Amos aside, swung the hammer up, and drove it hard into the wall.

Amos tried to stop me, but he was too late.

Behind that plain, ordinary wall, there was another world.

A pink crib. A blue baby walker.

And more diapers, formula, and children's toys than I could count.

And all at once I understood.

Why Amos, who was supposed to be out on a job,

had shown up in the villa a second before the blast to pull me out.

Not loyalty to his boss.

Fear that I'd hurt someone innocent.

I pressed the gun to Amos's head and asked him.

"Where's the child?"

Amos still tried to speak up for that little bastard.

"Maddie, the kid's innocent."

"And besides, Freda is Tom's"

I put a bullet through his wrist.

Clutching the wound, Amos finally gave it up.

"Dragon Lake Manor."

It felt like my heart had been carved straight out of me. I don't even know how I got into the car.

All I could think of was five years ago, when I'd just found out I was pregnant.

By then I'd been building everything alongside Tom for years.

The gunfire and the fighting had wrecked my body long before.

The doctor said the baby might not make it, and advised me to terminate first.

There'd be time enough to try again once I recovered.

But Tom looked at those two tiny heartbeats on the ultrasound.

He spent a fortune building a private estate in Dragon Lake Bay, said to be the safest place in all of Harbor City.

He brought in the best medical team to stand by twenty-four hours a day.

I never imagined the very team meant to protect me and the babies would become the ones who watched them die.

Afterward, I couldn't bear the memories the place stirred.

I told Tom to sell the estate.

He agreed to every word.

Then he turned around and hid his mistress and his bastard son right there.

Rage boiling in my chest, I kicked the manor gates open.

It was empty inside. Only Tom, waiting for me.

Seeing the red in my eyes, he came over and held me the way he always had, soothing.

"Maddie, stop this. There's no child."

"Those things are just offerings I bought for the children of ours who never got to be born."

"All these years it wasn't only you. I never forgot them either."

"What happened today is on me. I've already sent her away."

"From now on I'll stay by your side, and we'll be just like before."

I said nothing.

I just smiled coldly and threw the photo of that woman holding a baby in his face.

Just something I'd thrown together with AI on the way over, in case he tried to deny it.

But Tom flew into a rage on the spot, seized my throat hard, and said,

"What did you do to Freda and Bliss?"

Bliss...

That was the name Tom and I chose five years ago, together, for the two children who were never born.

I've killed too many people in this life.

If I fall into the lowest pit of hell when I die, it would be no more than I deserve.

All I ever wanted was for those two children to have a whole, happy, easy life.

But they weren't only denied a safe birth.

Even the name I gave them myself was taken away.

Tears ran down to the corner of my mouth, so bitter my throat closed.

I asked Tom.

"So you'll finally admit that little bastard is yours?"

"Our children have been dead five years! And you couldn't wait to climb into bed with the woman who killed them, and give her a child of your own."

"When you hold that little bastard, when you rock him to sleep."

"Does it ever cross your mind that our children never even got one look at this world?"

"Shut up!" Tom's grip tightened.

"Maddie, the child is innocent."

"And what's between me and Freda Walker is nothing like what you think. I'm the one who wronged her first!"

"Tell me where they are, and I'll give you anything you ask."

I asked him.

"Does that include killing them?"

Tom's pupils shrank sharply. He cursed at me.

"You're insane!"

"How many times do I have to say it? None of this has anything to do with Freda or the children!"

I looked straight into his eyes and said it word by word.

"Tom, the one who's really gone insane is you."

"You promised me. You'd kill everyone who had a hand in our children's deaths."

"No matter how far they ran."

"If you can't do it, then I'll do it for you."

Maybe my words pushed Tom too far.

He ordered me locked away.

Every method he'd once used on traitors was turned on me, one by one.

They tortured me for a day and a night, and still I wouldn't give.

I only passed out, my body spent past its limit.

Tom had a basin of cold water thrown over me to bring me around.

He gripped my chin, his eyes cold.

The same way he used to look at old enemies.

"Madeline, I'll give you one last chance."

"Where are Freda and the children?"

My mind was slipping. Instinctively, I let it slip out.

"I don't know..."

Tom only closed his eyes.

The next second, countless snakes came pouring toward me, tongues flicking.

The slick weight of one slid over my ankle, and I woke all the way in an instant.

And it dragged me back ten years, to the first time I ever met Tom.

To the snake pit in the borderland wilderness, where I nearly died pulling him out.

I lived through that, but it left a scar in me that never healed.

For ten whole years after, there wasn't a snake in our home. Not even anything long and coiled shaped like one.

And now, for that woman, he was using the one thing I feared most to break me.

I screamed and shoved back to get away.

"Tom! You can't do this!"

"Get them away from me!"

But he stood outside the door, looking down at me from up there.

"You forced my hand."

As he spoke, the snake nearest me opened its bloody mouth wide.

Instinctively, I shut my eyes.

Then a woman's voice rose suddenly from outside the manor.

"Tom, what are you doing?"

Tom wept with joy and rushed to gather the woman and the infant in her arms against him.

His eyes full of the shock of getting back what he'd lost.

But I saw the other child, the one standing beside the woman.

Four, maybe five years old.

If my two children hadn't died, they'd have been exactly his age.

So Tom's betrayal ran far longer than I'd ever imagined.

I reached for the earring on my right side.

The moment the indicator light came on, I said, softly.

"Brother, I regret it. Come and take me home."

"And one more thing. I want Tom Barnes in hell."