I used to think the scariest thing about marriage was the possibility of slowly drifting apart. You hear stories about couples who wake up ten years down the line and realize they just don’t love each other anymore. I would have given anything for that to be my story.

Instead, I found out the man I married was a monster, and I learned it while falling backward into a freezing abyss. When I met Victor, he seemed like the answer to every lonely year of my twenties. He was charming, attentive, and incredibly patient.

More importantly, he loved me. Just Elena. Not Elena Sterling, heiress to the Sterling Insurance Empire. My father, Arthur, is a ruthless, brilliant man who built a multibillion-dollar company from nothing. Growing up under his shadow was suffocating. I wanted a normal life, so when I moved across the country, I dropped my last name socially and lived on a modest salary.

I wanted someone to fall in love with me for who I was, not for my trust fund. Victor and I had a whirlwind romance. He was a mid-level financial analyst who seemed hardworking and ambitious. We married within a year. By our fourth anniversary, I was thrilled to find out I was pregnant.

I thought our lives were perfectly on track. But looking back, that’s exactly when the cracks started to show. Victor became distant. He worked late constantly, smelling faintly of an expensive perfume he claimed belonged to a female coworker he shared an office with. He was irritable, snapping at me over minor things, and he seemed weirdly detached from the pregnancy.

He never wanted to touch my stomach when the baby kicked. I chalked it up to anxiety about becoming a father.

I told myself he just needed time to adjust. Then came the “babymoon.” Victor insisted we take a weekend trip to a secluded mountain cabin near Blackthorn Cliff.

It was January, brutally cold, and I was nine months pregnant. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay near our hospital, but he was so insistent, claiming we desperately needed to reconnect before the baby arrived. I caved, hoping it would fix whatever was broken between us.

The drive up the mountain was suffocatingly quiet. When we finally parked near the trailhead, Victor suggested a quick walk to the overlook. The wind was howling, whipping ice against my cheeks. I wrapped my coat tighter around my swollen belly, shivering violently. “Victor, please, I can’t do this,” I begged, my teeth chattering as we neared the edge of the cliff.

“Take me home. It’s too cold for me and the baby.” He stopped and turned to look at me.