A Debt Repaid In Blood, A Marriage Paid In Silence Chapter 01
The day after I gave birth to our daughter, Julian Hartford dropped the act completely. He brazenly slept with another woman in our bedroom.
When I caught him red-handed, he didn’t show an ounce of guilt. Instead, he mocked me without a care in the world.
“The baby’s here. What else can you use to threaten me now?”
My friends all stared at me, terrified I’d fly into a rage like I used to.
But this time, I didn’t cry or scream. I just picked up my daughter with a calm face and walked out of the room.
From that day on, I became the perfect wife he’d always dreamed of.
When paparazzi came knocking, I paid them off for him.
When he fought with his mistresses, I cleaned up his messes.
It wasn’t until our daughter’s one-month celebration that another woman showed up at the door, pregnant, demanding I step aside.
Julian finally let out a laugh, joining in to watch me make a fool of myself.
“Let’s see how my perfect wife pretends to be magnanimous this time.”
I didn’t get angry. I just turned around and handed the baby to him.
“I’ll give this child to you, to repay the life you saved mine all those years ago.”
Silence fell over the room in an instant.
Under Julian’s glare, so dark it could’ve dripped water, I calmly told him how to take care of our baby.
“Never feed her more than 2 ounces at a time, every three hours or so. Keep her head higher than her body when feeding…”
Julian stared at me coldly, then let out a scoff.
His voice was laced with faint contempt.
“I thought you’d been quiet for a month because you’d come to your senses. Turns out you’re just hatching another stupid plan, Wren Hale. You really think this baby can’t survive without her birth mother?”
“I’ll tell you this—if you leave, there’s a line of women waiting to take your place as her mom!”
His cold words echoed through the villa. The maids all looked at me with pity and sighed.
I twitched the corner of my mouth, already used to this treatment.
It was just like the first time I caught him cheating. He’d watched me break down and cry, completely indifferent.
Leaning against the door with his arms crossed, he’d said flatly,
“Wren, stop making a scene. It’ll only backfire on you.”
I didn’t believe him. I forced him to cut ties with his mistress.
But Julian just took her and left the country, not coming home for three months.
My in-laws blamed me and cut off my allowance entirely.
The wealthy wives I’d been close to all distanced themselves from me.
Even the maids looked down on me, openly laughing at my misfortune.
In the end, I had to swallow my pride and beg him to come back.
Julian hadn’t lifted a finger, but he’d won hands down.
So this time, he taunted me with the same cocky confidence.
“Wren, you’ve had it too easy for too long. You don’t know your place until you stir up trouble.”
He stepped closer, backing me into a corner, and my face turned even paler.
“You should be grateful to me, you know. If it weren’t for me, my mom never would’ve saved you and your mother, and your mom never would’ve lived another eight years.”
When he finished speaking, I collapsed into a chair.
The baby was placed back in my arms.
Julian stroked the top of my head in satisfaction, a smile in his voice.
“Just be good, and you’ll always be the lady of this house.”
With that, he wrapped an arm around his new mistress, Lila Reed, and strutted into our bedroom.
The head maid couldn’t help but come over to comfort me.
“Madam, why anger the sir? It’s enough that he provides for you. After all, you married him for the money in the first place…”
She trailed off, flustered, and fell silent.
But I knew what she was going to say. I had married him for money.
I was thirteen when my father cheated on my mom. He threw us out into a rainstorm, my mom covered in bruises.
We had no money, and my mom was deathly ill.
I had no choice but to get down on my knees and beg for money on the busiest street in the city.
That’s when Julian found me, like a ray of light cutting through the dark. He took me and my mom in.
He’d always stroked my head tenderly, protecting me like an older brother.
When I grew up, Julian’s mom found out our birth charts were a perfect match. She chased away Julian’s girlfriend, the one he’d been madly in love with, and forced him to marry me.
That’s when his look towards me changed.
His mistresses came and went, one after another. Even when I broke down and screamed,
Julian just stared at me with a cold face and mocked me.
“This is what you begged for, isn’t it? You sold your dignity for money.”
He knew I’d asked his mom for a million dollars when I agreed to the marriage.
But he had no idea that money was for my mom’s liver transplant—her last chance at life.
In the end, the surgery went wrong, and my mom died.
Maybe it was God’s punishment for my greed, leaving me a broken, hollow shell of a person.
