I Crawled Through Hell. Turned To Be My Don Husband’s Loyalty Test Chapter 04
Slap!
The slap came before I could finish.
my vision blurred. Burt I didn’t fall.
Five years of dragging weight through mud had made my legs strong.
“Do you have any idea,” Dominic’s voice was a low, vibrating snarl, “how many backs will Luca get whispered behind now? “
“Now everyone knows his mother exhumes the dead and a vulture raised him, Linnea.”
“It was a kindergarten graduation. Why the hell did you have to show up and ruin it for him?”
A torrent of accusations came pouring down on me.
For a second, I almost forgot I was a mother, and felt like a criminal instead.
I looked at him—his suit was bespoke, his skin was clean, his life was perfect.
Behind him, Sienna stood like a porcelain doll.
“I wasn’t the one who told them what I do, Dominic. Sienna did.”
“Sienna was trying to save you!” he roared.
“Parents were already whispering, ready to rip you apart. She panicked and scrambled to explain why you looked… Like that.”
“Like what?” I whispered.
“Like someone who hasn’t slept in three days? Who spent five years in the war zone for your son’s medicine?”
A pause. Then a look of pure, unadulterated contempt crossed his face.
“Has dragging corpses out of the dirt completely killed your sense of shame, Linnea? “
“Look at you. You’re sewage.”
The words hit me harder than the slap.
Five years ago, when Luca was diagnosed, Dominic was the one who ‘found’ me the job.
He’d sat me down at our small kitchen table, held my trembling hands.
“Work is work, Linnea,” he’d whispered,.
“No job is beneath a mother saving her child. Luca and I will always be proud of you. You’re our hero.”
So I went to the war zone, without hesitation.
I remembered that first month—the smell, the frozen faces. I threw up every day until there was nothing but bile.
I’d spent ten minutes in gas stations doing math over a water bottle, then put it back because Luca needed that buck more.
The old guys on my crew shared food because they couldn’t bear watching me starve.
I knelt in mud picking up coins from mourning families.
I did all of it for them. I let them eat me alive—and now they look down, asking why I’m so broken.
A bitter laugh escaped my throat.
I wiped the blood from my lip, slow and steady.
“Why should I be ashamed?” I asked, my voice chillingly calm.
“I earned every cent with these hands. I didn’t steal. I didn’t lie. I held the hands of the dead when no one else would.”
“You’re delusional,” Dominic spat. “You’ve lost your mind chasing money. You’ve become addicted to the filth.”
“You’re right,” I smirked coldly, my heart finally going stone-cold.
“Money is the only thing that never betrayed me.”
“Linnea, don’t make this messier.” Sienna stepped forward, her voice a soft, manipulative trill.
“Listen, I wanted to be on your side. But today—the reputation hit, Luca’s two-hundred-thousand unpaid bills… I can’t.”
She said it like it was her money. Like she was the one who’d spent her youth in a trench.
I opened my mouth to say something—but the sky split open. Rain lashed down, cold and sharp.
Sienna sneezed once. A dainty, practiced sound.
I watched as Dominic moved instantly—opening the car door for her, shielding Sienna from the rain with his own body.
As if a single drop touching her expensive hair would be a tragedy.
It suddenly hit me—for five years, through rainstorms and blizzards, he had never once asked if I was okay.
Not even when I told him over the phone how many bodies I’d dragged out of the war zone that day.
His only reply was always: “People die in war zones all the time. So, good haul today?”
“Linnea,” his icy voice snapped me back to the present.
He turned back to me, his face twisted in irritation.
“Why do you always have to make everyone around you miserable?”