I opened my eyes and sat bolt upright in the bath. Fuck! I just wanted to zone out for a while, but all I could think of was John.
He resisted the urge to join her again in the bath. He’d fuck her all night if it were up to him, but he’d heard her stomach growling. The woman needed sustenance. So instead he lit up a cigarette and went searching in Mariana’s kitchen.
He had one go-to dinner recipe: Italian breaded chicken and tomato salad. His mother had made sure to teach him at least one recipe before he’d married his first wife. He’d been such a kid when he left home, but at least he’d been able to cook a meal.
He was looking for breadcrumbs in the pantry when his eyes fell on a tub of flour. That’d work. He could use some egg and flour and smash up some of the stale bread he’d found in the freezer.
He reached for the cream-coloured canister but paused when he saw what looked like spaghetti sauce smeared along the side.
Or blood. Dornan had a way of judging situations. He got gut feelings about things and they almost always turned out to be correct. And his gut wasn’t thinking about pasta sauce when he looked at that red smear.
He was thinking about who’d been bleeding in his apartment, and why.
He took the canister out carefully, focusing on the tiny red smear. His senses were in overdrive, his nose conditioned for such macabre things. He scratched his fingernail against the dried red substance and took the cigarette from his mouth as he brought his fingernail up to his nose.
Blood. It was blood. But that wasn’t the only thing ringing alarm bells in his head. He shoved the cigarette between his teeth again so both of his hands were free.
Christ, how heavy is this flour? The canister weighed a ton, strange since it was made of plastic. Dornan set it down again, prised the lid off and, on a whim, stuck his clean hand into the white powder.
His fingers hit something solid.
He stopped for a moment, his heart rate increasing in excitement. But it wasn’t the kind of excitement that was, well, exciting. It was the buzz of a thousand angry bees, settling in his chest, demanding to know what the fuck was hidden in this container.
No secrets, that was one of his cardinal rules. It was the thing that kept their dysfunctional relationship from completely imploding, from being eaten away by bitter distrust.
He got a grip on the solid thing hidden underneath the flour and pulled it out, sending a plume of white dust around his face.
It was a ziplock bag, wrapped around something about the size and weight of a cheap, disposable cellphone and a charger. He unfolded the layers of plastic, his temples throbbing with the weight of the possibilities.
He glanced towards the bathroom, hearing movement, and tipped the hard rectangular weight into his palm.
Well, what do you know. It was a fucking cellphone.
A rage that presented as cold indifference began to build in his body, the humming of the angry bees only drowned out by the desire for an explanation. But his gut said there was no explanation. She’d deceived him. She’d probably been talking to her family this entire time, risking everything he’d built so carefully. He located the power button and pressed it with a clean thumb, turning the phone on. It immediately demanded a passcode. Dornan jumped as his own phone began to ring, sending the long spike of ash that had been holding on to the end of his half-smoked cigarette onto the ground by his feet. He glanced down at the phone, hearing Mariana as she moved around in the bedroom. He dropped the phone back into the bag, and shoved it back into the flour canister, giving it a good shake to bury it properly. He replaced it in the pantry and swept the small bits of flour that had powdered the counter onto the floor.
Dornan braced against the counter with one hand as he took his cellphone from his jeans just as it stopped ringing. One missed call from Viper. Dornan’s stomach dropped as he remembered what had happened earlier in the day.
Another day marked another round at the fulfilment centre, another assortment of women boxed up, sold and ready to be delivered.
Only today had been different.
The cells that contained the prisoners were soundproof, part of their brilliant design. X-rays couldn’t pierce the boxes they’d had constructed to herd people like cattle through secure checkpoints and border crossings. But when you moved that little swatch of plastic to the side, sometimes the screams got out.
Today had been one of those days.
Cell four. As soon as he’d looked through the glass, Dornan wanted to die. Because there was a woman, maybe in her late twenties, and she was huddled on the floor, screaming. And she was pregnant. Very pregnant.
Dornan had slammed the viewing pane shut, but it was too late. He could still hear her screams, even though he knew that couldn’t be possible. He finished up the other thirty-nine checks, most of them the same as cells two and three. Nobody else had screamed like her. Nobody else had made themselves heard like the woman about to become a mother, who vocalised her doom for nobody except Dornan to hear.
And then they were gone, loaded onto the truck, which rose on its bridge and disappeared into the sub-floor, ready to be driven out to make the scheduled deliveries.
His phone rang again, snapping Dornan out of the garish daydream he kept replaying in his mind. He looked at the screen. It was Viper again. Viper, along with a couple of other Brothers, was running the trucks tonight. It might be a situation. He took the cigarette from his mouth and hit answer. ‘Yeah?’
The sound of heavy tyres on asphalt greeted him through the phone. It was loud running trucks back and forth across the zig-zagging roads of the United States.
‘We got a situation, boss,’ Viper yelled over the steady hum of the road noise. ‘I need you to help with a clean-up. I’m pulling in to the rest stop.’ He gave an address and Dornan memorised it. A clean-up. That was code. It meant one of the prisoners had died. Fuck.
Mariana walked into the loungeroom in a thin bathrobe that left nothing to the imagination, her hair wrapped up in a peach-coloured towel. Dornan fought the urge to tie her up and either interrogate her or fuck her senseless. His cock ruled him when it came to Mariana Rodriguez.
‘Which one?’ Dornan asked.
‘Number four,’ Viper replied immediately, and Dornan’s suspicions were confirmed.
‘Boss, it’s fucking bad. Hurry.’
The line went dead.
Mariana hovered at the edge of his vision. ‘Everything okay?’ she asked.
Dornan raised his fist and slammed it into the counter hard enough that the whole thing shook. The immediate pain calmed him somewhat, but all that rage, all that fight, was still waging a war inside him.
‘What happened?’
He raised his gaze to look at her. He drank her in for a good few moments, taking in the curve of her hips, her tiny waist, full breasts and slender neck before his almost-black eyes settled on her dark blue ones. Was she a liar? Had she betrayed him? If she hadn’t yet, would she?
‘Get dressed,’ he ordered, thinking about the secret cellphone. He wouldn’t let her out of his sight until he got an explanation.
‘Why?’
He frowned. ‘That’s for me to know,’ he said, his tone vicious. Go on, resist me. Argue with me. Do something so I can fucking explode.
But she didn’t. Of course she didn’t. Her ability for feeling out situations was just as good as his, if not better. She heard the danger in his voice and decided to obey. She nodded, pulling the robe tighter around her as if it would somehow protect her.
‘What should I wear?’ she asked softly.
‘Something warm,’ he said. ‘Bring your coat. And your sneakers. We might be digging a hole.’ He looked at her pointedly.
Her eyes went big and round, but she didn’t protest. She backed away, not letting him out of her sight until she was at her bedroom door.
He hated scaring her. He loved her. But a small part of him, the vengeful, suspicious man inside, was secretly pleased.
FUCK.
>
It was the single thought that ran through his head.
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.
Viper was opening the back of the large trailer, his face ashen. And there was the muffled, yet unmistakable sound of a woman screaming.
Dornan hadn’t spoken a word to Mariana the entire way here. Almost an hour it had taken to arrive, and now she was sitting in the car, probably wondering why the hell she was suddenly privy to cartel activities. Well, until he found out where that fucking phone had come from, and what it was for, she’d be spending a lot of time with him. Fuck what anyone else thought. John might be the boss in name, but Dornan was the leader of this Gypsy pack.
‘Why the fuck did you call me out here?’ Dornan growled. ‘You go in there and you shut them up!’
He was angry. He was angry and so fucking tired of having to deal with this shit day in and day out, so tired of the souls who begged him to let them go – and worse, the ones who didn’t beg, the ones who sat in the deepest corners of their cages, defeated, having already given up on life. Yeah, he preferred the fighters. They still had a spark of something in their eyes. Hope.
Not that it ever did them any good.
‘I’ve got a truck full of fucking deliveries,’ Viper hissed, his normally tough demeanour dropped completely, replaced with horror. At first Dornan wanted to smash his fist into Viper’s face, kick him in the ribs until he bled, and beat the sense back into him. He was a Gypsy Brother, for fuck’s sake. What did he expect? Sometimes messed-up shit happened.
But now Dornan was here, and he could hear it too.
Screams that sounded like death cries.
He rushed to the back of the truck, holding his jacket up over his face to keep the rain off. The doors to the container had already been slightly propped open by Viper. The screams grew louder, more insistent, as Dornan walked down the narrow space in between stacks of containers that housed their flesh trades for the day.
He already knew which woman was screaming. Her eyes had been screaming at him inside his mind all goddamn day.
He got to the box, placed his hand on the lock and took a deep breath.
She’d been heavily pregnant. He had known that when he saw her earlier, but it didn’t matter. It never mattered. They always took the pregnant ones at least a month before they were due, to make sure they made it to their new owner before they gave birth.
He opened the lock and pulled at the door. His gaze landed on a naked newborn baby, its face a purplish-blue, covered in blood and gunk. Its umbilical cord trailed away between the woman’s legs. The woman’s face was ashen; she’d lost a lot of blood, more than she should have, judging by the way she was practically bathing in the stuff. She was almost unconscious, her head drooped to one side. She was sipping in little breaths of air, sweat dripping from her forehead. This had never happened before. They’d had women die before, but they’d never had one give birth. This was not supposed to happen.
‘Holy fuck,’ Viper said, over Dornan’s shoulder.
‘Get outside and keep watch,’ Dornan hissed, turning and shoving Viper. He scurried away, seemingly very happy to get away from the woman and her newborn.
‘Please,’ the woman whimpered. She was so pale, she looked like a corpse, but she was alive and she was still conscious. ‘Please help my baby,’ she said.
‘She needs a doctor,’ Mariana said behind him, taking off her coat. ‘That baby needs warmth.’
Dornan turned on her, towering over her. ‘What the fuck are you doing back here?’ he roared. He looked past her to Viper. ‘I said to fucking keep watch!’
Viper shrugged, clearly on the cusp of madness. Useless fuck. He’d deal with him later.
Mariana was dressed in just a thin striped tank top and black skirt, her cashmere coat bundled up in her outstretched hands as she glared at Dornan defiantly. ‘Are you going to help them? Because if you’re not, move.’
Speechless, Dornan moved aside so that Mariana could squeeze past him. The space between the containers was narrow, the air thick with horrors best left unseen, and Mariana was here in the middle of it. For so many years, he’d kept a wall up between the reality of what he did with these women and his Mariana, his secret, his dark lover. He’d drawn a line in the sand and made sure she never, ever knew of these things.
Except now she’d seen, and she knew, and would she ever forgive him? A hidden cellphone was nothing compared to this. Dornan knew this.
He watched wordlessly as she knelt down beside the woman and scooped the baby up. The baby wasn’t moving. Wasn’t crying. It was blue. She stuck her fingers in its mouth and made a scooping motion, then turned it over and hit it lightly on the back a couple of times. The baby started to pink up almost immediately, making a little mewling sound.
‘Pocketknife,’ Mariana said. ‘Sterilise it first.’
Moving on a mixture of autopilot and awe, Dornan unclipped his knife from his belt and clicked it open, taking his lighter and heating the blade for a few seconds to kill any germs. Luckily, he was obsessive about keeping it clean. It had seen its fair share of death and destruction, and you could never be too careful with pesky things like DNA. The knife was clean enough to eat your steak dinner with.
He handed it over to Mariana, pocketing his lighter as he watched her work. She balanced the wrapped baby on her knees and grasped the long, coiled cord that attached baby to mother, cutting through it in one swift motion. Dropping the knife, she stood and turned, thrusting the baby into Dornan’s arms. ‘Hold him,’ she said, and Dornan did. He was struggling to keep up with this. It was a him? This was already getting way too fucking personal.
Viper appeared with a large woollen blanket he’d retrieved from the cab of the truck. Mariana made a crude knot in the baby’s umbilical cord with bloodied fingers.
‘We need to get them to a hospital,’ Mariana said, addressing Dornan and Viper.
Viper looked between Dornan and Mariana with a mixture of shock and brutality on his features. ‘We ain’t taking anyone to a fucking hospital,’ he said. ‘This is a one-way ticket.’
Mariana ignored him. ‘Dornan,’ she said, stepping closer to him and peering at the tiny baby, nestled safely in her cashmere coat. ‘We have to help this woman. The baby needs to go get checked out, he’s cold. He needs warming up.’
Dornan fixed his gaze down at her, frustrated and ready to fucking explode. ‘How about I decide?’
Mariana’s face twisted into a look of disgust as she reached for the baby and nestled him against her own chest protectively. Dornan was relieved to be free of the baby, who felt like a ticking time bomb in his arms, a burden that was going to be dire no matter which way he played this shitty set of cards he’d been dealt.
‘Maybe decide before they both die,’ she said pointedly, turning to look at the woman. The mother. The dying woman. Dornan made a mental note to chat to Mariana after he’d sorted this situation. She was getting far too mouthy for his liking. He thought of the hidden phone again and his gut twisted uncomfortably.
The bleeding woman, the product that was holding this entire gig up, was still slumped in the corner. She looked completely fucked. Dornan had to move her, couldn’t deal with her in this tiny, confined space. And this truck needed to move, now, before the goddamn highway patrol drove past or something.
‘Viper, help me move her into my car.’ Mariana looked visibly relieved. Viper opened his mouth to protest and Dornan shook his head emphatically.
‘Wait in my truck,’ he said, offering his car keys to Mariana. She looked at them for a long moment before taking them. ‘Put the heat on,’ he added. She didn’t answer, just made for the truck’s cab and slid into the driver’s seat, holding the baby close to her the entire time. A moment later he heard the engine of his truck turn over. Fuck. This was the worst situation he could have imagined.
‘Dee, why the fuck are we putting this broad in your truck? She’s made us both, and the accountant,’ Viper said, pointing towards the truck wher
e Mariana waited. ‘And you know Daddy Dearest would never let a live one go, even if we could help the bitch.’
Dornan levelled his gaze at Viper. ‘Shut the fuck-up,’ he hissed. ‘Do not question me. I will handle this. Now. Help me pick this woman up, and for fuck’s sake wrap her up first so we don’t get blood all over us.’
They got blood all over them anyway, despite the carefully wrapped blanket. Lucky they both wore black almost all the time. It came in handy when you didn’t have time to change your clothes in between all the bloodshed and chaos.
A few minutes later Dornan was in the backseat, holding the woman who’d just birthed her baby and who was now dying in his lap in the back of his truck. She’d started to wail as soon as they moved her. It was obvious she was in a lot of pain and her noise was affecting the baby. He was bellowing as well, and it was enough to make Dornan want to eat his own gun just to get some fucking peace and quiet for five seconds.
‘You want me to come back there so you can drive?’ Mariana asked quietly, twisting in her seat to address him. ‘Or I can drive them to the hospital.’
Dornan smiled at her, at his beautiful Mariana. This could be her in his arms, if things had played out differently. He’d saved her, but he’d learned a long time ago that you couldn’t save them all. In fact, she was the one and only he’d ever managed to grip tight and raise out of the vicious fate she’d been careening towards, and there had been thousands.
He didn’t speak. He didn’t have to. He saw the recognition on her face as she clutched the baby tighter.
‘Dornan,’ she whispered. Pleaded. He felt his heart shatter and burst under the pressure of her horrified gaze.
Her horror would have to wait. The woman in his arms was bleeding to death, and she was dying in pain, and he just wanted to take some of her suffering away.
He put a hand to her neck and felt her pulse. It was erratic, all over the place. She cried out again and her back arched off his lap. Her eyes were full of anguish and the shock was starting to wear off. The woman was suffering.