‘Will you help my baby?’ she asked, looking up at Dornan with eyes that wouldn’t be seeing this world for much longer. How did she even have the energy to form words? It was the strength of a mother’s love, he reasoned. She wouldn’t let go until she was sure her child would be safe.
Dornan nodded, feeling tears prick in his eyes. Goddamn, why did this have to happen now? Why had Viper called him? Why was it always his fucking problem when anything went wrong?
And why had he chosen this night, of all nights, to bring Mariana with him on a run, knowing she might be exposed to something like this, something that had the power to ruin everything between them. She’d never look at him the same way after this, and that realisation broke him inside. He’d done everything to protect her and she was probably going to end up hating him like every other woman he’d ever let in.
The woman’s eyes fluttered shut and she relaxed a little. ‘Promise me you’ll take him some place safe,’ she whispered. Dornan wiped a tear from his cheek, and another. He shouldn’t be upset. He didn’t have the right to be upset and he certainly didn’t deserve to get fucking emotional about this woman and her kid.
‘I promise,’ he said and he wasn’t lying. In that moment he made a decision. He didn’t know if it was wrong or right, but he did it because nobody deserved to suffer that much. He couldn’t take her to a hospital, couldn’t get her medical attention, because if she spoke – and they all spoke if they escaped, even the ones who promised they wouldn’t – she’d be able to lead the police right to them. She’d seen Dornan’s face, and Mariana’s and Viper’s. She’s seen the interior of the truck, knew there were more like her.
No, he couldn’t take her to hospital.
‘Dornan!’ Mariana protested, twisting in her seat.
‘It hurts so bad,’ the woman whimpered against his chest, opening her eyes again and peering up at him. ‘Please, make it stop hurting.’
He nodded, stroking her hair with one hand and reaching for his gun with the other. It had the silencer attached, a small mercy. He pressed the barrel to her chin.
He hugged the woman to his chest one last time, tears forming in his eyes as he looked down into hers.
If she knew what was about to happen, she didn’t show it. She didn’t panic. She didn’t struggle.
‘Stop!’ Mariana screamed.
A single, muffled shot rang out into the clear, soundless night. It was much too quiet, too controlled a noise to be the bang that ended a life, but it had ended it nonetheless.
She died instantly. Dornan made the sign of the cross above her face and let her sag onto the seat. He’d have to replace it. He’d have to replace the entire interior of the car, but it didn’t matter. She was dead and nothing else mattered.
Mariana held the baby to her chest and stared at him with dead, loveless eyes.
‘You fucking monster,’ she said, turning away from him.
The baby began to cry.
‘You could have taken her to the hospital.’ I’d said the words at least three times, but it was too late.
His eyes glistened. ‘She was going to die. Do you understand me? She was never going to make it to a hospital.’
We were parked in front of a 24-hour pharmacy. Dornan had just gone in and bought supplies at my insistence, despite him protesting that we really needed to get ‘the kid’ to a hospital. Diapers, bottles, a tin of formula and sterilised water were my list of demands and he didn’t argue with me for once in our relationship. The baby was suckling on my little finger impatiently as his mother lay dead in the backseat.
Dornan shook a bottle full of powder and water to mix it together.
‘How did you know to do all that?’ Dornan asked.
I looked down into the baby’s face, holding back tears. He’d just killed the baby’s mother to save her a long and protracted death. A mercy killing, but why did she have to die at all? It wasn’t fair.
Life wasn’t fair.
‘I watch a lot of television,’ I replied wearily, cradling the baby closer as I looked up at the pharmacy sign. My breasts ached as I remembered holding my own little son, feeding him from my body just one time before they took him away. If I could have nursed that baby in the car, I would have without hesitation. He might not have been mine, but the sad fact was, he no longer belonged to anyone. I wondered who his father had been, if he’d even known. If he was a good man, or if the woman had already been a captive when she fell pregnant. Was this baby the result of something pure or something evil?
Not that it mattered. He was a baby and by definition that made him innocent. He was brand new and sacred and exquisite. And he’d been born into the pits of hell.
‘You can’t keep him,’ Dornan said, almost reading my thoughts. ‘Don’t get too attached.’
I turned my head up to face him as he handed me a small plastic bottle of formula. ‘Shut up,’ I snapped at him, my mother bear out in full force as I snatched the bottle from his outstretched hand.
‘Here, little baby,’ I cooed, placing the teat near his mouth. God knows how long he’d been lying on the floor of that horrid little death cell before we’d arrived. It couldn’t have been too long, because he hadn’t been getting air until I scooped the gunk out of his throat so he could breathe, but it had been long enough that he’d turned cold and blue next to his dying mother.
‘I mean it,’ he said.
‘I know,’ I said forcefully. ‘But what do you expect me to do? Leave him on the side of the road?’
Dornan scowled. ‘We’re dropping it off at the hospital.’
‘He,’ I clarified. ‘The baby is a he.’
Dornan started the truck and it roared to life. We drove for a long time. As the trees began to thicken, I looked around outside, the baby now asleep, nestled against my chest. I’d managed to get a few drops of the formula in and to warm him up, at least.
The road we were on looked . . . Familiar.
My stomach lurched as I saw where we were pulling into. The county morgue. The same place John and I had come to dispose of Murphy’s body. Christ. The Gypsy Brothers and the Il Sangue Cartel were really keeping this place in illegal after-hours business.
I couldn’t bear to watch as Dornan dragged the dead woman from the car and onto a waiting steel gurney. He paid the guy a wad of cash and then we were driving again. Pretty soon we were pulling into a dark corner of a run-down hospital parking lot. I could see why Dornan had chosen this place. It looked decrepit, and I doubted it had anything like surveillance cameras to record that we were ever there.
I hugged the baby tight. Was it terrible that I didn’t want to let him go? Dornan came around to my side of the truck and opened my door, holding his arms out.
I looked down into the little boy’s sweet face. He was still all squashed from having just been born, but his face would spring up soon, his nose would pop out, and he’d be cleaned up. He was going to be breathtaking.
‘Ana,’ Dornan urged.
With great reluctance, I handed the baby over. I didn’t meet Dornan’s gaze. I couldn’t.
I couldn’t bear to look at the man I loved, and see a monster instead.
An hour later, we were parked at an old warehouse by the wharf. It had started to rain again, gentle drops that pattered against the roof and windows with a soothing rhythm.
Me, I was exhausted. I’d been firing on adrenalin-fuelled cylinders for a couple of hours and I was ready to pass out and sleep for a year. I felt heavy. I felt so unbearably sad.
Plus, Dornan had just dropped a bomb in my lap the size of California. The drugs and guns weren’t the only things the Gypsy Brothers and the cartel had been trafficking and selling. In fact, those were just two small parts of the sickening empire Emilio was running, and the third, very large, very lucrative part of his game was people. Women, mostly. Girls. No wonder he’d been so keen to sell me.
It was his fucking specialty, selling girls as slaves.
Not for the first time, I was w
eirdly appreciative of my unorthodox upbringing, the way I’d had to keep my father’s finances afloat by money laundering and shady bookkeeping antics. It was those skills, self-taught and honed to a sharp edge, that had kept me alive all these years. It was those skills, dirty as they were, that had kept me out of the back of a truck on a one-way trip to hell itself.
I demanded answers as soon as we’d steered away from the hospital where he’d run in and deposited the baby on the reception desk. My heart still ached, knowing that little boy needed a mother, knowing he didn’t have anyone. At least he was someplace safe. At least now he had some kind of a chance at survival.
‘How could you do that?’ I asked Dornan as we both stared straight ahead through the front window of the truck. The rain was swiftly growing heavier, and I couldn’t help but remember the night I’d killed Murphy.
Dornan took off his shirt and offered it to me. ‘Put some water on it. Clean yourself up.’
‘Don’t you think about them?’ I continued, taking the balled-up shirt from his hand. ‘Don’t they haunt you?’
‘Never thought about it,’ he said quietly. ‘Never let myself. Never made eye contact. God gave me sons and I was grateful. I never had to worry about them. I knew they’d be alright. I knew they’d never be a part of that world. At least, not the part that suffers.’
‘You mean, the way you don’t suffer? Because you’re covered in the blood of a woman you just killed, and I’m pretty sure that look on your face is suffering.’
He smiled sadly. I took a section of his shirt and poured bottled water on it, offering it to him first. He had more blood on him than me. I’d only been dirtied by the blood that was on the baby from his birth. Dornan was soaked from head to toe in the blood of a woman he’d cradled in his arms as he shot her in the head. The gun might have been silenced, but a silencer didn’t stop the blood spatter. Luckily, he was wearing dark clothes, and being soaked in blood didn’t look too different from being soaked from the rain unless you looked closely.
‘What made you realise what you were doing was wrong?’ I asked.
Dornan flexed his blood-stained hands, took the wet shirt I was holding out and started to rub at his skin. I saw the twitch in his jaw, the way he ground down on his teeth. He was suffering. ‘Always knew it was wrong,’ he replied quietly, so quietly I almost couldn’t hear him above the torrential downpour outside. ‘Just never gave it much thought. Never really wanted to think about what happened to them. Where they ended up. If they survived.’
‘So what changed?’ I asked.
He cleared his throat, then examined one relatively blood-free hand before switching to the other. ‘John went to prison. Caroline was pregnant when he was arrested and she just went completely fucking psychotic without him there to watch her every day. I had her committed twice. That bitch charmed the pants off those fucking doctors, convinced them she was on the straight and narrow. They let her out. They always did. By the time the baby was due, I was letting her shoot up on the couch in my office just so I knew she wasn’t lying dead in a gutter somewhere with John’s baby inside her.’
‘Juliette,’ I said.
He nodded.
‘Caroline had that baby. And then she disappeared. Left the hospital, stole a car and drove away. And guess who was left holding a baby girl?’
My stomach twisted anxiously. ‘You.’
He shrugged, dropping the shirt between us. ‘Babies are all the same, boys or girls. They cry, they eat, they sleep. But she could’ve been my daughter. That’s when shit got hard.’
Something about that made me angry. So, so angry.
‘Then why do you do it?’ I snapped. ‘Because Emilio says you have to? Tell him you can’t. Tell him you won’t.’
‘I’ve got too much to lose,’ he replied, squeezing the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. ‘I have responsibilities. Much as I’d like to, I can’t ever tell him no.’
He stared at me pointedly, maybe the first time he’d looked at me since he’d started recounting his story. His dark eyes glimmered as lightning lit up the car and I felt a lump rise in my throat.
‘I do what I do and I get what I get,’ he said, reaching across and taking my chin in his hand, brushing his thumb along my lower lip. Something about what he had said – I get what I get – stabbed at me painfully, demanding more answers. A creeping suspicion suddenly flooded me and I felt sick.
Me. He was talking about me.
I swallowed thickly, my voice momentarily frozen. I opened my mouth to speak and nothing came out. I felt his eyes drilling twin holes into mine.
‘Don’t tell me you’re talking about me,’ I said, tears forming in my eyes. ‘Please.’
‘I’ve never lied to you,’ he said, taking my hand and squeezing it, almost to the point of pain. ‘So if you don’t want me to tell you . . . don’t ask.’
So it was me. I brought my hand up to my mouth, intending to muffle a sob, but Dornan took hold of it at the last moment. He held it up to the dim light in the truck. There were fine specks of blood. I watched, sobbing openly, as he took my hand and used a clean section of the shirt to gently wipe my skin.
I didn’t stop crying. I was so damn emotional all of a sudden, and I didn’t know why.
He loves me enough that he’ll damn everyone else in the world just to keep me safe. And I hate him for it, but I love him for it more.
I thought of the kiss with John, and shame burned deep inside me. I was a horrible person. How could I be thinking about him while Dornan was shipping people off to their deaths in exchange for my life? I’d called him a monster, and he’d been doing all this for me? So that I was safe? So that Emilio didn’t make good on his threats to sell me off as a slave, too?
‘You should stop,’ I whispered.
He took the shirt from my skin and placed it on the dash.
‘No, I mean, you should stop . . . whatever it is you’re doing with these people – and if he gets rid of me, at least you’ll be able to sleep at night. I’m not worth all this, Dornan. I’m not worth any of it.’
His head jerked to face me, and then his hands were coming at me, wrapping around my waist, pulling me to him. It was awkward, but the truck was spacious enough that he could drag me onto his lap without me getting jammed between him and the steering wheel. I ended up facing him, one knee on each side of his legs, our noses inches from each other.
I looked up at the roof of the truck. It was grey felt. I attached my gaze to a small tear in the fabric and held it there, trying to stop the tears from flowing down my face even as I felt my teeth chattering.
‘Ana.’
I shook my head.
‘Mariana.’
I tore my eyes from the roof and looked at him, because I knew if I didn’t he’d wait all night for me to meet his gaze.
‘You want to know what I wished for on my birthday?’ I asked him. I couldn’t even see anymore, everything warping and bending through the film of my tears.
I felt his warm hand cup my cheek, his thumb brushing away a steady stream of tears as he waited for me to speak.
‘I wished that things were different,’ I whispered. ‘I wished that we could be free.’
He chuckled mirthlessly. ‘You’d still love me if we were free?’
I nodded. ‘So much,’ I replied. ‘More than you’ll ever know.’
His face softened, almost as if my words had relieved some worry inside him. ‘I can’t imagine why,’ he responded, his voice low and husky, cutting through the continual buzz outside as the rain continued to fall.
I tilted my head. ‘You saved my life,’ I whispered, shaken by the veracity of my words. ‘You didn’t even know me and you did that. You’re still doing that. I’m sorry I called you a monster. You’re not a monster. You’re the reason I’m alive.’ And I don’t deserve you.
He moved his thumb along my lips, his gaze shifting between my eyes and my mouth. Something stirred within me and I had the sudden urge to kiss
him.
So I did. I placed my hands on either side of his face, his stubble deliciously rough against my cold hands, and leaned down, covering his mouth with mine. He responded immediately, one of his hands fisting my loose hair, the other curling possessively around the back of my neck, pulling me even closer. His tongue met with mine, and a shiver ran down my spine. Our love was electric. Always had been. It was the rest of our lives that was the problem. But right here, right now, in the howling wind, with the metal and glass the only thing between us and the pouring rain, it was almost too easy to pretend that nothing else existed. I melted into him, wanting more, always wanting more. It was like we wanted to devour each other, and maybe one day one of us finally would. But until then, we were here, together, the windows fogging up under the pressure of our heavy breathing and the rain raging on outside. I felt wetness pool between my legs as my heart pounded faster, begging to get closer, to get rid of these annoying layers of fabric that separated us so that we could be together again.
I could feel him beneath me, hard already. Hard for me. And I wanted him. I needed him.
We didn’t even need to speak to know what came next. Ours was a dance so finely tuned, we were in perfect sync. We needed each other like we needed air to breathe, and when time forced us apart, it made the world a dull place. Until we met again. And then sparks flew when we collided.
It had been like this for nine years, and I didn’t ever want it to stop.
He placed both hands on my hips and lifted me off his lap. I braced myself against the steering wheel as he unzipped his jeans and reached into his boxers, gripping his cock with one hand as he brought his other hand up my thigh, underneath my skirt. I moaned softly as he pushed my panties to the side, his fingers pressing against my wetness. I moaned again, louder this time, when he pushed two fingers inside me.
My noise seemed to be enough to drive him over the edge. He slid his fingers from me, and I ached from the sudden loss. I needed him. I needed him inside of me, around me, possessing me in every way, and I needed it now. His mouth found mine again as he jerked me closer, my legs straddling him, the swollen head of his erection pressing impatiently against my entrance.