Too Late For Regret: My Possessive Billionaire

The leather handle of Ciara Astor's Hermès Birkin creaked under the death grip of her fingers.

She sat on the genuine leather sofa in the waiting room of an Upper East Side private obstetrics clinic-the same clinic where, three years ago, she had sat alone after her first miscarriage. Back then, she had not been Ciara Astor. Back then, she had still believed that marrying Alexzander Astor would mean never sitting in a waiting room alone again.

Her breathing was shallow and fast. The air conditioning blew directly onto her exposed neck, but her palms were slick with sweat.

The man beside her-a stranger with a bored expression and a wedding band that matched his wife's across the room-glanced at her and looked away. No one here knew her. No one here knew that she was Mrs. Alexzander Astor, wife of the man the financial magazines called "the king of private equity." And no one here knew that her husband had not come with her today because he had canceled their appointment for an emergency meeting-the same emergency meeting he had attended every Tuesday for the past six months.

A nurse in crisp scrubs walked over, a warm smile spreading across her face. She handed over a crisp white report folder.

"Congratulations, Mrs. Astor," the nurse said softly. "You are exactly six weeks pregnant."

Ciara's heart slammed against her ribs. Heat flooded her eye sockets.

Her fingers trembled so violently she could barely grasp the edge of the folder. She stared at the black ink on the page, the letters blurring together: Gestational age: 6 weeks. Fetal heartbeat: detected.

A heartbeat. A tiny, flickering heartbeat.

She stood up abruptly, her chair scraping against the polished floor. The other patients in the waiting room looked up, startled, but Ciara was already pushing through the heavy glass doors of the clinic. The crisp, early autumn wind of Manhattan hit her face, cooling her flushed cheeks. The smell of roasted chestnuts from a cart on the corner mixed with the diesel of passing taxis.

She pulled her phone from her bag. Her thumb hovered over the screen before she dialed her husband Alexzander Astor's private line.

The line rang. Once. Twice. Three times.

It rang for what felt like an eternity. Four rings. Five. Ciara's excitement began to curdle into something colder.

Finally, the call connected.

A wall of chaotic noise blasted through the speaker. Sirens wailed in the background-police sirens, not ambulance sirens. The screech of tires tearing against asphalt pierced her eardrum. A man's voice shouted something unintelligible, and then a woman's voice cried out in pain.

"Alex?" Ciara asked, her voice shaking-not just with excitement anymore, but with the first tendrils of real fear.

"Ellie! Hold on!" Alexzander's voice roared through the phone.

He sounded frantic. The usual cold, calculating tone of the Wall Street titan was completely gone. The voice she heard was not the voice that had signed billion-dollar deals without blinking. It was raw. Unhinged. Terrified.

Ellie.

The name hit Ciara like a slap.

She knew that name. She had known it since she was eighteen years old, standing in the garden, watching Alexzander Astor dance with another woman at a debutante ball. Elliana Beaumont, who had laughed when Ciara had tripped over her gown that night, who had whispered to the other girls that Ciara was "trying too hard."

The same Elliana Beaumont who had left for Paris the week before Ciara's engagement announcement. The same Elliana Beaumont who Alexzander had never, not once, mentioned in the three years of their marriage.

The smile froze on Ciara's face. The blood drained from her head, leaving her extremities ice-cold. Her stomach-her six-week-pregnant stomach, carrying the child she had prayed for through two years of fertility treatments and three rounds of IVF-contracted into a tight, painful knot.

"Alexzander, what is happening?" she demanded, her voice rising in panic. "Why are you with Elliana? Where are you?"

The line went dead.

The rhythmic beeping of the disconnected call echoed in her ear. She pulled the phone from her face and stared at the screen: Call ended. Duration: 0:47.

Forty-seven seconds. He had not asked her why she called. He had not told her where he was. He had not said her name.

Ciara stood frozen in the middle of the sidewalk. Her mind went blank. She did not hear the frantic whistle of the bicycle courier behind her-a young man in a neon yellow vest, balancing three towers of takeout containers on the back of his electric bike. She did not see the bike swerving violently to avoid a mother pushing a stroller. She did not see the stacked delivery boxes begin to tilt.

The courier shouted. A pedestrian screamed. The heavy cargo, easily forty pounds of Chinese takeout and Italian pasta, lost its balance and crashed hard into her side.

The massive impact threw her off balance. Her right foot twisted. The heel of her Jimmy Choo shoe-the nude patent leather pumps she had worn to her first wedding anniversary dinner, the dinner Alexzander had left early to take a call from London-snapped clean off.

Ciara crashed hard onto the unforgiving concrete pavement. The skin on her palms tore open instantly, warm blood welling up and mixing with the grime of the city sidewalk. The shock of the fall stole her breath. She lay there for a split second, stunned, staring up at the gray autumn sky between the high-rises.

Then the pain came.

First, a sharp, tearing agony shot up her right arm. She looked down and saw her wrist bent at an unnatural angle. The bone had not broken through the skin, but something inside had definitely snapped.

Then, a second later, a deep, terrifying cramp seized her lower abdomen.

It was not like the mild twinges the fertility doctor had warned her about. This was a hot, twisting claw, digging into her womb, ripping at something she could not see but could feel-something vital, something that was slipping away.

She curled into a tight ball on the dirty sidewalk. She wrapped both arms fiercely around her stomach, as if she could physically hold the baby inside her body. Cold sweat drenched her cashmere sweater in seconds-the cream-colored sweater Alexzander had brought back from Milan last spring, still with the price tag on, handed to her by his assistant because he had been too busy to give it to her himself.

Her vision swam with dark spots. The sounds of the city-the honking taxis, the shouting pedestrians, the rumbling subway beneath her feet-faded into a dull roar.

Pedestrians gasped and formed a circle around her. An African American woman in a nurse's scrubs dropped her groceries and frantically dialed 911. A teenager in a prep school blazer knelt beside her, asking if she could hear him. An elderly man took off his coat and tried to put it under her head.

Ciara bit down on her lower lip until she tasted copper. She squeezed her eyes shut and sent a desperate, silent plea upward-to God, to fate, to whoever might be listening. Please. Not again. Please keep my baby safe. Please.

The wail of an ambulance cut through the city noise. Red and white lights flashed against the buildings. Paramedics pushed through the crowd, strong hands lifting her onto a stretcher. They strapped her injured arm down tightly, wrapped a cervical collar around her neck, and started an IV in her other arm.

"The clinic called it in," one paramedic said to the other. "Six weeks pregnant. Possible miscarriage."

The ambulance sped down the avenue, sirens blaring relentlessly, weaving through traffic until they reached the emergency bay of a Manhattan trauma center-the same trauma center where, three years ago, a younger Ciara had been wheeled in alone, bleeding and crying, while her fiancé Alexzander was on a private jet back from Hong Kong.

The paramedics pushed her stretcher through the sliding doors into the ER. The harsh fluorescent lights forced Ciara to squint. The smell of antiseptic and blood filled her nostrils. Somewhere to her left, a man was screaming. To her right, a child was crying.

Her stretcher came to a sudden halt at a corner to let a crowd pass. Rapid, heavy footsteps-five, six, seven people-echoed down the corridor. White coats. Surgical masks. Gurney wheels squeaking.

Ciara forced her heavy eyelids open.

Her gaze locked onto a tall, familiar figure rushing toward the trauma rooms, surrounded by a swarm of doctors in navy blue scrubs.

It was Alexzander.

His custom Armani suit-the charcoal gray one he had worn to the Met Gala last spring, the one she had helped him pick out-was wrinkled beyond recognition. His silk tie was pulled loose, hanging haphazardly around his neck. His white dress shirt was untucked, and there was a dark stain on the collar-makeup, or perhaps blood.

His handsome face, the face that had graced the cover of Forbes and Vanity Fair, was pale and twisted with an expression Ciara had never seen on him before: raw, naked terror.

He was holding a woman tightly against his chest.

The woman's face was pale as porcelain, her eyes closed, her head resting weakly against his shoulder. Her long golden hair-the same golden hair Ciara remembered from that debutante ball fifteen years ago-spilled down her back. Her legs dangled limply. She was wearing a hospital gown, and there was an IV taped to her arm.

Elliana Beaumont.

His first love. His one that got away.

"Get the best trauma room ready right now!" Alexzander roared at the approaching doctors. His chest heaved with unchecked panic. "I don't care who you have to move. I don't care what it costs. She has internal bleeding. Move!"

Ciara opened her mouth. She tried to call his name. Alex. Alex, I'm here. I'm hurt. I'm carrying your child.

Her throat was completely dry, raw from screaming on the sidewalk. No sound came out. Only a small, strangled whisper that the chaos of the ER swallowed whole.

Alexzander's eyes were fixed entirely on the woman in his arms. He sprinted past Ciara's stretcher-so close that the fabric of his suit jacket brushed against the edge of her white hospital blanket. The scent of his cologne, the Tom Ford she had bought him for his birthday, washed over her.

He did not look down.

He did not see the blood dried on her face, the dark red streaks across her cheek from when her palms had scraped the pavement and she had touched her own skin.

He did not see the cervical collar around her neck, or the splint on her right wrist, or the tears still wet on her temples.

He did not see his wife, curled in agony, less than twelve inches away from him.

A physical pressure crushed Ciara's chest-not the cramping in her abdomen, but something else. Something worse. It squeezed the air from her lungs, pressed against her ribcage, made her feel like she was drowning on dry land.

The pain in her stomach doubled. A warm, wet sensation spread between her legs.

She stared at Alexzander's broad back as he disappeared through the double doors at the end of the hall. The doors swung shut behind him with a soft pneumatic hiss. The red light above them blinked on: *TRAUMA ROOM 1 - IN USE.*

A single tear broke free from the corner of Ciara's eye, sliding down her temple and soaking into her hair. It was warm against her cold skin.

The nurse pushed her stretcher forward, steering her toward the opposite end of the hall. The fluorescent lights blurred into streaks of white. The sounds of the ER faded into a distant hum.

The world spun violently.

Before the darkness swallowed her entirely, one word echoed in her mind-cold and sharp and final, like the snap of her heel on the pavement.

Divorce.