Chapter 7: The Empty Test and a Dark Plan
The moon hung low and swollen over the Han River, casting silver light through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the master bedroom. Leonid lay sprawled across the whiskey-colored satin, one arm thrown over his head, his black curls fanned against the pillow like spilled ink. His breathing was deep, rhythmic, the slow cadence of undisturbed sleep.
Jennie slipped out of bed at 6:47 AM, careful not to disturb the sheets.
Her bare feet made no sound against the heated marble floor as she padded toward the en-suite bathroom. She closed the door behind her with a soft click, then stood in the darkness for a moment, letting her eyes adjust. The cold luxury of the space enveloped her—black onyx walls, gold-veined countertops, the vast mirror that reflected her own ghostly image back at her.
She reached into the pocket of her silk robe and pulled out the small white stick.
The plastic was cool against her palm. She'd bought it three days ago from a pharmacy in Gangnam, paying in cash, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses like some kind of parody of a celebrity avoiding paparazzi. The clerk had looked at her strangely—or maybe she'd imagined that. Lately, she couldn't tell the difference between real suspicion and the paranoid fantasies her own mind conjured.
Jennie set the test on the counter and sat on the edge of the sunken tub.
She had woken every morning for the past two weeks with her hand pressed flat against her stomach, straining to feel something—a flutter, a warmth, a sign. She'd googled early pregnancy symptoms until her eyes burned. Implantation bleeding. Basal body temperature. Cervical position. She'd analyzed every twinge, every craving, every change in her body with the obsessive scrutiny of a detective examining a crime scene.
Nothing.
No nausea. No breast tenderness. No fatigue beyond her usual.
But she hadn't given up hope. Women didn't always show symptoms this early. Some women didn't show symptoms at all. And he had come inside her—really come inside her, no latex, no barrier, his seed flooding her depths as she clenched around him. It had to have taken. It had to.
The test sat on the marble counter, accusing her with its silence.
She picked it up, her hands trembling, and peeled away the foil wrapper. The instructions blazed at her from the back of the box. For best results, test first thing in the morning. Urinate directly on the test stick for five seconds, or dip in a clean sample for ten. Wait three to five minutes for results. A positive result will show two lines. A negative result will show one.
Her mouth was dry. She sat on the edge of the tub, her bare thighs sticking slightly to the cool onyx, and held the test between her fingers.
This is it, she thought. This is the moment that decides everything.
She positioned herself over the toilet, the porcelain cold against the backs of her thighs, and closed her eyes. The stream of urine hit the test stick, and she counted to five, her lips mouthing the numbers like a silent prayer.
Then she set the test on the counter, face up, and began to wait.
The first minute passed. The second. She got up and paced the length of the bathroom, her reflection following her in the vast mirror. Her hair was mussed from sleep, her face bare of makeup, and for a moment she looked almost fragile—a woman of thirty-eight, waiting to see if her body had betrayed her again.
She couldn't wait five minutes. She looked at the test.
One line.
The control line, clear and steady. And nothing else. No second mark. No faint pink echo of possibility. Just emptiness where hope should bloom.
The third minute passed. The fourth. She watched the test like a hawk, willing a second line to appear, willing the chemicals to shift and reveal a different truth.
Nothing.
Negative.
The word echoed in her skull, cold and hollow. Six weeks of desperate hope, of lying to the man she loved, of counting days and checking calendars and praying to gods she didn't believe in—and this was the answer. A single, damning line on a piece of white plastic.
Jennie stared at the test, and something inside her cracked.
Not broke—she couldn't afford to break. But cracked, the way ice cracks under pressure, web-like fractures spreading from a single point of impact. Her hands began to shake. Then her shoulders. Then her whole body, until she had to grip the edge of the counter to stay upright.
"No," she whispered to the empty room. "No. No. No."
She'd done everything right. She'd stopped taking her pills. She'd convinced him not to wear a condom. She'd angled her hips up afterward, lying on her back with her legs against the headboard for a full hour, whispering incantations to a universe that apparently gave no fucks about her desperate need.
And still. Still nothing.
Hot tears pricked at her eyes, but she blinked them back. Fury was rising in her chest now, a cold, familiar fury that she'd learned to harness over years of business negotiations and backstabbing competitors. It burned in her veins like liquid nitrogen, freezing out the pain, hardening the cracks in her heart into something unbreakable.
She picked up the test. The plastic was cold against her clenched fist.
"Why do you deny me everything I love?" she whispered, addressing the universe with venom. "I gave him everything. I raised him—not financially, no one knew, but emotionally, spiritually, I pulled that boy out of the gutter and turned him into someone magnificent. Oh, the scholarships. The way he flourished once my money and my influence quietly cleared every roadblock away. All denied to him because no one could know I was behind it."
Her voice cracked.
"It should have taken. I felt his cum inside me. I felt it."
She looked at the test again. Hoping for a sudden miracle. A delayed reaction. Surely, she thought, surely, if I look just a moment longer, a second line will appear.
Of course, it didn't.
With a snarl, she hurled the stick into the wastebasket. It clattered against the ceramic and came to rest beneath a crumpled tissue. A moment of brittle silence passed before she moved to the counter, bending to retrieve the box from where she'd smoothed it flat. She tore it in half with steady hands, then the halves into quarters. She had almost reached the corner of the bathroom where the vanity used to house a small bin when she stopped. Her fists were shaking. She stared down at the torn cardboard in her hands, her knuckles white, the seams of her fury straining.
She shoved the remains deep into her makeup bag, burying them beneath lipsticks and samples, alongside the quietly discarded foil wrapper from the test. She would dispose of everything properly later, she told herself. When he was awake. When she had more time.
When she had a new plan.
She took a deep breath, then another. The bathroom smelled like bergamot and expensive soap and failure. She stared at her reflection in the vast mirror, meeting the eyes of an elegant woman with a fractured heart held together by sheer, coiled fury.
"You're not done yet," she told her reflection. "You've never lost anything you truly wanted."
But the words rang hollow. Empty. Because she knew, with a certainty that cut through her carefully maintained composure, that she had never wanted anything the way she wanted this. Wanted him. Wanted a child that carried his dark eyes and his gentle heart. Wanted to tie him to her in a way that no beautiful, fertile, twenty-something girl could ever untangle.
And her body—her traitor, forty-year-old body—wouldn't give her that gift.
"Please," she whispered, and she wasn't sure if she was speaking to the universe or the sticky ceiling still warm from her tantrum. "I'll do anything. Anything. Just let me have this one thing. Just this..."
But no one answered.
She looked around the bathroom. The steam from her earlier shower had long since dissipated, leaving the air cold. Her skin prickled with goosebumps, and she realized the nausea she'd been making herself feel all those mornings had been born entirely of self-suggestion. There would be no child growing in her belly. Not from tonight.
A strange calm settled over her. Not acceptance—never that—but a quiet, calculating resolve. The calm of a woman who had been backed into her last corner and was going to come out swinging.
Leonid stirred in his sleep as she re-entered the bedroom. The satin sheets rustled, pooling around his hips. He looked impossibly beautiful lying there, his pale skin glowing in the moonlight, his lips slightly parted. She paused in the doorway, drinking him in, memorizing the lines of his body.
The thought pulsed through her, almost a pang: He'll never know. I'll make sure he never knows.
She approached the bed quietly and slid beneath the sheets, pressing her body against his warmth. He murmured something in his sleep, something indistinct, and turned toward her without waking, draping his arm across her waist.
Jennie pressed a kiss to his forehead, just above his closed eyes.
"I'm not done with you yet," she whispered into his skin. "We're not done. I don't care how many tries it takes. I will have your child."
She didn't sleep for the rest of the night.
When dawn broke, a cold, gray light filtering through the sheer curtains, she was still awake, staring at the ceiling, planning.
---
Three weeks passed.
Three weeks of pretending she'd accepted the natural course of things. She let Leonid believe she was consulting specialists for anxiety and insomnia—a convenient excuse for the doctor's appointments she began scheduling under meticulous, encrypted layers. Three weeks of taking him to bed each night, her body a beautiful vessel of despair as he slipped a condom on, as she kept the lie alive as seamlessly as she kept her manicured nails flawless.
Oh, how she had grown to hate the slick, chemical smell of a condom. The cheap, masculine force of him stretching her was not enough without the depth of his seed against her cervix.
But she bided her time.
She read about fertility. Everything she could find. She learned about ovulation windows and luteal phases, about cervical mucus and basal body temperature. She ordered an expensive fertility monitor online and used it in secret, peeing on strips every morning, charting her cycle on an app that she protected with a fingerprint lock.
Better yet, she learned about his weaknesses. Bodyguards who wore earpieces and filled water glasses absently. Waiters at her restaurants who knew her by sight and trembled when she smiled. How easy it was to slip into a connection, to let him disrobe her in the front hall, to pour him a glass of the deep, smoky bourbon that he liked after sex.
The Viagra arrived in an unmarked brown package. She ordered it from a website that catered to older men with performance anxiety, using a pseudonym and a prepaid debit card. It came in a plain white bottle with no label, which was perfect.
She crushed it into a fine powder, then crushed a handful of the sleeping pills Dr. Kim had prescribed her years ago, for flight anxiety and occasional insomnia. The powder was pale, unassuming. She mixed it into a small vial and tucked it into her jewelry box.
She watched him sleep every night, memorizing his face.
"I'm sorry," she whispered sometimes, her voice so low it was barely a breath. "I'm sorry I have to do this. But you'll understand. When we have a baby, you'll understand why I did all of this. You'll thank me. You'll love me for it."
And she believed it. Or maybe she just needed to believe it.
---
The night of his twenty-fourth birthday week celebration, she stayed home, turning down his invitation to dinner with his friends from university. Instead, she waited for him at the mansion, wrapped in a silk robe the color of spilled wine, her hair loose and falling in dark waves around her shoulders.
He came through the door just after midnight, his hair mussed, his cheeks flushed from the evening, and a few hours of carefree youth clinging to him like cologne. He laughed at something on his phone as he entered, and the sound made her heart clench with a familiar, possessive ache.
"Successful celebration?" she asked, gliding toward him, her bare feet silent against the heated stone floor.
"Better now," he said, pocketing his phone and pulling her into his arms. He smelled like soju and someone else's perfume—probably just a classmate's, probably nothing—but she crushed the flash of jealousy before it could fully ignite. Not tonight. Not when she had other things to attend to.
"Did you have cake?" she asked, unbuttoning his shirt as they walked toward the bedroom.
"There was cake. Someone tried to shove my face into it."
"Did they succeed?"
"No. I'm too fast." He let her push him onto the bed, falling back against the satin with a grin. "I got a call from my advisor today. They want to feature my thesis project in the spring showcase."
"Leonid, that's incredible." She genuinely meant it, her face softening with pride. "I'm so proud of you."
"I couldn't have done it without you." He reached for her, but she stepped back, smiling.
"Let me get you something to drink. A celebratory toast."
She padded to the vanity where a crystal decanter of bourbon sat on a silver tray. Her hands were steady as she poured the amber liquid into a glass, and she felt none of the tremor that might have rattled her just weeks ago. She added the contents of the small vial, a faint white powder dissolving instantly into the drink, ghostly and invisible.
When she turned and pressed the glass into his waiting hand, still smiling down at him, she felt a strange distance from herself, as if watching a scene unfold on a stage. This woman was someone else. Someone who could do terrible things with clear, patient eyes.
She had, in the past weeks, kept up a steady stream of affection to soothe him. But there was a part of him that resisted—some instinct, like a horse refusing to approach a twisted piece of bright cloth laid across its familiar path. The thought of him seeing a doctor made her question everything.
"To you," she said, raising her own glass—lined with only clean bourbon—and clinking it against his. "To the brightest man I know."
He drank.
The effects were fast, faster than she'd expected. His eyelids drooped within minutes, his body going lax against the pillows, glass slipping from half-open fingers. She caught it before it spilled, setting it on the nightstand with a soft clink.
"Jennie," he said, the word slurring, confusion swimming in his dark eyes. "I feel strange. Like I've—I've been drugged, I—"
"Shh," she whispered, stroking his hair. "You just need to rest. You've had a long night. Close your eyes."
"I don't feel right. Jennie, what—" His voice faltered, his eyes sliding shut despite his attempt to keep them open. "Something's wrong. I—"
"Nothing's wrong, baby. Nothing's wrong at all. You're just tired. Sleep."
He fought it for a moment longer, pure instinct warring with the chemicals flooding his veins. But the dose was too high, the combination too potent. His body relaxed, and within minutes he was unconscious, breathing slow and deep, lost in dreams beyond the reach of conscious thought.
Jennie watched him.
She watched his chest rise and fall, watched the pulse beating in his throat, watched the way his long lashes fanned against his cheeks. For a long moment, she just looked at him, drinking in the beauty of his vulnerability. This was the man she loved. The man she had raised from a boy, watched grow, obsessed over from a distance until she finally had him in her arms.
And she was going to do something unspeakable to him.
"If you knew," she whispered, tracing the line of his jaw with her fingertip, "you would hate me. But you don't know. And when this is over, when you hold our child in your arms, you'll understand."
She stripped off her robe, letting it fall to the floor, and climbed onto the bed, straddling his hips. She wore nothing beneath the silk. Her bare skin pressed against him, warm and inviting, and she drank in the feel of his body under hers.
The sight of him perfectly still beneath her turned something in her gut. As she watched his chest rise and fall, the first trickle of doubt began, small and sharp, a single drop of acid on the fabric of her fixed intent. Here was the man who had made her laugh. Here was the boy who had looked at her with worship and trusted her absolutely. And she was about to take that trust and shatter it.
She leaned down, pressing her lips to his chest, tasting the salt of his sweat. Her hand moved down his abdomen, fumbling with his belt buckle.
He didn't move. Couldn't move.
It should have been easy. He was helpless, already hard, his body responding to the Viagra she'd fed him. She was slick and ready, burning with need, determined to see this through. The heat of her own inner walls, the shape of him pressing against her, was all she could feel.
But when she guided his cock to her entrance and began to lower herself onto him, the acid drop of doubt ate deeper, and her conviction faltered. The thin, dark wire of it cut through her, and her movement stalled.
He's not consenting, she thought, and the thought was a lightning bolt in the dark of her mind. He doesn't know. He can't say no. He can't say yes. He's having his body used by someone who's supposed to be his partner, who's supposed to protect this. Her stomach curdled, clenching in on itself.
Her hand went flat on his chest. The slow, steady beat of his heart met her palm.
What am I doing?
The child. The child she thought she wanted so badly—to hold a piece of him, to have something that belonged to them both, to make it impossible for him to leave her—the child would be a lie born of this. A lie on a foundation of betrayal so absolute he would never recover. He was the man she loved. The only person who had ever made her feel real. And she had drugged him.
Her face crumpled, her throat tightening like a fist. Gently, shaking, she lifted herself off him, and her chest was hollow. She shifted to the side instead, curling against him, the heat of his limp body against her skin a cold accusation. The tears came then, silent and hot, sliding down her cheeks to soak into the satin pillowcase.
"I'm sorry," she whimpered into his chest. "I'm sorry. I can't. I can't."
What would be left of her if she did this? If the love she felt for him became so twisted and violent that she could consume his trust and swallow his everything like a mirror of the woman who had broken her years ago?
No. She couldn't become that. She wouldn't become that. For all the desperate, clutching need of her love, she would not violate him like this.
She lay beside him for a long time, aware of the slow rise and fall of his sleeping chest, a weight pressing on her lungs. Then she slid carefully out of bed, retrieved her robe, and tied it around herself with hands that still trembled.
She padded to the bathroom and locked the door behind her. Leaning against the cold marble wall, she slid down until she was sitting on the floor, knees drawn up to her chest, her face buried in her arms.
The vial was still on the nightstand, she remembered. Half-full. She would have to dispose of it carefully, she thought, from a great, bodiless distance. She would have to make sure there were no traces in his system by the time he woke up. He would probably feel groggy, confused, but she would be gone, in the guest wing, or on her way to the clinic for a checkup on her "hormonal issues," and he would attribute it to the bourbon.
She thought of the pregnancy test, buried in the kitchen trash. The negative line.
The baby was gone. But what of the man who had been so close to being a father? The man she had almost betrayed?
The thought of a world where she had done it—where she had gone through with it and let him wake in horror as he pieced together the fragments of what his lover had done—it would have been the end of everything. The end of him, of her, of the bright, fragile thing between them that she loved more than she knew how to say.
Her heart was beating too fast, a wild bird hammering at her ribs. The midnight calm was gone, replaced by a shaking.
I lose him either way, she thought.
The silence of the room was absolute. And in its vacuum, her own voice sounded strange, not hers. The words were a whisper.
"There has to be another way," she said. "There has to be a way to be whole that isn't this."
The dawn crept in, cold and gray. Jennie remained on the bathroom floor, her eyes dry and burning, and across the bedroom, her sleeping victim turned restlessly in his drugged dreams, unknowing of how close he'd come to ruin. She remained until the morning light strengthened and she had calmed her body to stillness, donned her mask, and prepared to face the wreckage of her own making.