The Eight-Months-Pregnant Woman Was Hit by Her Husband, but the Smile Disappeared from His Face as Soon as the Elevator Doors Opened

Andrei’s hand was still burning on me when he picked up the phone from the table and mockingly told me that even the police obeyed his money.

“Don’t make a sound, Elene,” he said, squeezing my chin with his fingers. “One word and I’ll take you out of this house barefoot.”

It was seven o’clock in the evening in the kitchen. Outside the windows, rain struck the glass walls, while my shadow trembled on the white marble. The mark of his hand on my right cheek burned like a hot spot. And inside my belly, the baby moved as if it, too, felt my fear.

“You know yourself that this house, this car, and everything you are wearing are mine,” Andrei continued. “You are only my wife.”

“I am not your property,” I said with difficulty.

Something collapsed in his eyes.

“Say that again.”

“I am not your property.”

He struck the glass against the table so hard that crystal fragments scattered across the floor. One of the splinters stopped near my foot. The warm kitchen lamp was reflected on it, and I was thinking how strange it is that sometimes the smallest thing reminds you: you can still make a choice.

I had lost my choice three years earlier, when I married Andrei and hid my father’s surname. Viktor Kravchuk was the founder of one of the world’s largest industrial conglomerates, but to me he was only the man who, after my mother’s funeral, told me that his family name would bring danger to me. He had enemies. Many of them.

Therefore, for years I told everyone that I was the child of an ordinary family.

Andrei turned this lie into a weapon.

“You were nobody when I met you,” he said. “I made you what you are now.”

“No,” I answered, placing my hand on my belly. “You only thought you could create me.”

The second blow was stronger. I fell backward, but caught hold of the edge of the cabinet. A ringing sounded in my ear. For several seconds, the room went dark.

A small hidden phone under the basket of kitchen towels in the bedroom was recording everything. My lawyer had left it for me. In recent weeks, she had also changed the house’s surveillance cameras and collected photographs of my bruises, threatening voice messages, and the suspicious transfers that Andrei sent to his “advisers”.

But the recording could not stop his hand at that moment.

Andrei knelt beside me.

“Who will help you, Elene?” he asked in a whisper. “Your dead mother? Or that fairy-tale family you have never talked about?”

I answered nothing.

At that very moment, the private elevator rang.

Andrei quickly stood up.

“No one was supposed to come to this house.”

The elevator doors opened. First, two stern-faced men appeared, and then Viktor Kravchuk came out between them. He was holding black leather gloves in his hands. His gaze immediately fixed on my face, my split lip, and the hand placed on my belly.

“Who are you?” Andrei asked arrogantly.

My father calmly took off his glove.

“I am the father of the woman you have just hit.”

Andrei laughed nervously.

“Father? Elene said she had no family.”

“There was much you did not know about her,” Viktor answered.

The man standing beside him turned on a tablet and handed it to Andrei. Andrei took the device automatically. The first file opened on the screen, while Viktor’s second assistant locked the corridor door and slowly took a step toward him…

Andrei looked at the screen, and his initial confidence immediately disappeared. His company’s bank accounts were visible on the tablet. The transfers marked in red were arranged by months.

“What is this?” he asked.

Viktor stood in front of him and was in no hurry.

“You should ask the question better, Andrei. You should ask who found all this.”

I leaned against the kitchen wall. My belly was tightening, although more than the pain I feared that the baby could feel my anxiety. In my pocket I had a small silver pendant left by my mother. A miniature photograph folded inside it. In that photograph were me and my father when I was still little, before Viktor decided that his surname represented danger for me.

Andrei quickly flipped through several files.

“This is falsified.”

“Then why is your personal confirmation code on every transfer?” Viktor asked calmly.

“Many people had access to my system.”

“But only you were at the meetings where the withdrawals were decided.”

Andrei looked at me.

“You did this.”

“I only kept what you yourself did,” I told him.

He lunged toward me, but one of Viktor’s companions blocked his way. The man did not even raise a hand. He simply stood in front of him. For the first time, Andrei felt that he was no longer the strongest person in the room.

“You lived in my house for three years,” Viktor told him. “You humiliated my daughter, stole money, and thought her silence was weakness.”

Andrei chuckled irritably.

“If she is your daughter, why did she hide it? Why did she tell me she was a poor girl?”

Her father did not blink.

“Because she wanted you to fall in love with her, not with my wealth.”

These words fell heavily into the room. My breath caught. This was exactly the truth I had waited years to hear him say, but hearing it was still painful.

Andrei shook his head.

“She cannot be your daughter. I checked her past. Her documents name another man as her father.”

Tension appeared on Viktor’s face for the first time.

“There is a lie in those documents.”

He looked toward me. There was not anger in his eyes, but exhaustion.

“Elene, it is time for you to know everything.”

“Not here, Father,” I told him quietly.

Andrei heard the word “Father,” and his face changed.

“You were both lying to me.”

“Yes,” I answered. “But not for the reason you think.”

Viktor’s assistant placed a thick folder on the table. The brown cover was stained with fingerprints, as if someone had hurried to hide it.

“This contains the original marriage agreement, a bank audit, and the clinic’s report,” he said.

Andrei put his hand on the folder but did not open it.

“The clinic’s report?” he whispered.

Then I realized that there was one more thing about which I had not yet spoken either to him or to my father.

In the seventh month of my pregnancy, the doctor told me that Andrei had been secretly contacting my doctor. He wanted to know whom the child would resemble and whether it had any hereditary danger. But on that same day the doctor told me something else: my husband had tried to obtain my medical records from the clinic.

“What did you want to find out about my child?” I asked.

Andrei smiled, but now this smile was forcibly attached to his face.

“Nothing that concerns you.”

Just then my phone rang. The name of lawyer Marika Japaridze appeared on the screen. I answered the call, and everyone in the room fell silent.

“Elene,” Marika said in a concerned voice, “open the folder only when every door is locked. We discovered that Andrei had already prepared one document before your child’s birth. If it is signed today, the child’s guardianship may be endangered…”

Andrei heard the phone and reached toward the folder’s lock. I looked at his wrist. His fingers were trembling. Viktor leaned forward, opened the lock, and slowly placed his hand over the first page…

On the first page lay my marriage agreement. Andrei recognized it immediately.

“This agreement is certified in court,” he said. “You cannot change anything.”

Marika was still speaking to us on the phone, while Viktor’s assistant switched the sound to the speaker.

“Elene, look at the signature,” the lawyer said. “The mark in the lower left corner was not in the original.”

I looked at the page. My name was written on the agreement, but the final line of the signature was strangely interrupted.

“This is not my signature,” I said.

Andrei pushed the chair back.

“What are you saying?”

Viktor took out the second sheet. On it were the notary’s written testimony and an excerpt from the video recording. The recording showed Andrei’s lawyer entering the notary’s room in my absence, already holding a signed document.

“You forged my hand,” I told Andrei.

“I only handled a formality.”

“A formality according to which after the marriage you lost everything and renounced your claim to my family’s property?”

Andrei stepped backward.

“Your family owns nothing.”

At that moment Viktor took out the last sheet.

On it lay a corrected copy of my birth certificate. Years earlier, my mother had hidden Viktor’s name because his opponents were searching for our trail. But the genetic examination conducted to confirm biological paternity was unequivocal.

Viktor Kravchuk was my father.

“I came late into your life,” he said and exhaled quietly. “But I never abandoned you.”

Andrei was silent. His face became gray.

“You planned all this in advance,” he said.

“No,” I said. “You planned your own downfall when you thought my silence would be eternal.”

Marika said into the phone:

“There is another file. Andrei sent a letter to the clinic saying that after the child’s birth Elene should be declared mentally unstable. He wanted to obtain temporary guardianship and transfer the child to a private institution.”

It seemed as if the air disappeared from the room.

“You wanted to take my child away?” I asked.

Andrei quickly shook his head.

“I was simply protecting my family.”

“With violence? Forgery? Stolen money?”

He raised his voice.

“You will never escape me!”

Two law-enforcement officers immediately appeared in the doorway. Marika had organized this in advance, but they had not entered yet. Viktor raised his hand, and they stopped in the corridor again.

“Not yet,” he said. “There is one more thing he must hear.”

The assistant played a video on the tablet. The kitchen appeared on the screen. The first blow, the second blow, and my voice asking him to move away from me could be seen.

Andrei watched the screen as if he were seeing another man there.

“Turn it off,” he whispered.

“That is you,” I told him.

“I do not speak like that.”

His voice sounded in the recording: “You are nobody. The child is mine too. If you resist me, I will take you both away from me.”

Andrei covered his ears with his hands.

And for the first time, I felt that I was no longer afraid.

But just then my phone rang again. This time the number was unknown. I answered the call.

“Mrs. Elene,” said a man whose voice was trembling, “I am the head of Andrei’s security. Your husband did not tell you that the maternity bag has already been taken from the house. And also… the car standing near your clinic is not registered in his name…”

I ran to the window. Beyond the rain I saw a black car, and someone was sitting in the back seat. Andrei looked too, and for the first time he was frightened in the way I had been frightened for years…