Cheryl had cried herself to sleep hours after Jeremy had left her shackled to the bed, and naked. No one had stepped into the room, not even the servants. She had managed to use her feet to pull up the sheets but she could only get it up to her abdomen. She sighed, it was better than being completely naked.
She was aware that Jeremy could be cold when he wanted to, but she had never seen nor imagined that he would be this heartless, even towards her. And what he had done to his father? Taking the company completely from him was the height of it.
Sure he would receive the support of the board members. Ebeneezer Xiu, despite being a powerful man, was now a cripple and there was only so much he could do by himself. The company needed someone seemingly better, and who else to fill in the position other than his own son and obvious next in command of the Aberus - Jeremy Xiu.
In the world they were from, whoever presided over the Aberus was like a king, a ruler or a semi god, and that was the exact kind of power that the Xiu name carried.
When the alliance between her and Jeremy had been proposed, she had been over the moon. Jeremy, being the only son of Ebeneezer and the only bachelor Xiu male in the family, had been the target of every family, of every young vampire girl. She was aware that Ebeneezer Xiu had entertained many proposals from different families but she had gotten a head start.
She had been close to Donna, was practically friends with her, and that had earned her a certain degree of familiarity with Jeremy and eventually his mother and Ebeneezer. So when her father had told her of Ebeneezer's request for her hand in marriage to his son, she had not been too surprised.
She had been fine with just having the Xiu name attached to hers at first. Love for Jeremy had been there but she was only just nursing it, after their marriage, he was hers alone so she had no fear of him leaving her - not until she made that fatal error.
The old man Xiu had wanted an heir and he was pressuring her to get pregnant, it was something Cheryl was not capable of doing. She would never be able to get pregnant because in her pursuit for bodily perfection, and the horror that might befall her, like it had befallen many women who carried vampire offsprings - being drained of blood by your own foetus - she feared that.
Her parents had not been aware of what she had done because she told no one. In their six years of marriage, Jeremy had only slept with her once, and that was thanks to Ebeneezer urging him to produce an heir. She had seized that opportunity to claim pregnancy.
The plan had been simple; fake a pregnancy, after a couple of months, arrange to get beaten up so she could "loose" the baby and then maybe pay off a doctor to tell the family that her womb had been damaged by the attack. It was a simple three point agenda, but she had not taken into consideration what conditions would have been best to break the news to them.
She had choosen a wet August night.
Three people had died that night; Jeremy's mum, the driver, and an unfortunate woman they had hit. The news of their accident didn't get to her until the next day when she arrived home, it was the first time she had seen Jeremy cry and he had held on to her, desperate for comfort.
His mum had been his whole world and his comfort. She recalled that as she held on to him, she felt her blood swim through her veins faster and she had been dazed for a while. At that point, Jeremy was unaware of what had caused the accident, and Ebeneezer laid unmoving, but alive in the hospital's ICU.
She sniffed and began to sob. If she could go back to that time, she would undo what it was that she had done because that had been the turning point for her family - the Declan - and the Xiu family. She had royally messed everything up.
But even after that, she could still say that Jeremy was hers, until recently when Donna resurfaced, and she had resurfaced with Jeremy's child, an offspring she would never let Jeremy know of. But she could not trust that Donna would keep her daughter away from Jeremy forever, if Ebeneezer knew he had a grandchild, he sure would not care if it came from Donna, a grand child was a grand child and it was all he had ever wanted. He would accept them both, she would loose everything for real this time.
She could never let that happen.
She would threaten Donna to leave the city, and if she would not, then she would have to take her daughter away from her. She knew just how important Donna held her child, the little girl was basically her entire world, if she was hoping in using her to come back into Jeremy's life, she would rather cut her out of the picture. She would have no regrets.
* * * * * *
The house was silent when he stepped in, somehow he found it to be strange as he could not be used to this silence except if Cheryl was not home, then what about the servants?
He walked through the living room to the stairs, heading for his room. He listened and tried to walk as quietly as he could, he couldn't exactly why he was being this cautious or what had set him in edge, but he couldn't help it either.
"Jeremy," he heard his name being called just as he had walked past the door to his father's room. He paused and turned back towards it.
The room was dimly lit but his eyes adjusted to the change quickly. He could see his father seated on a chair which faced the windows but the curtains were not drawn. He approached him from behind.
"Father, you called for me."
"How's work been?"
Jeremy was taken aback by that question. His father never asks him of how work had been, it caused him to narrow his eyes. He walked until he stood beside his father.
"Work?" He questioned, "You never ask, what prompted you all of a sudden?"