“Isabella?”
He rushes over the door and swings it open, which is very unusual. Dimitry is a man who usually has everything done for him.
“Fuck sake, Isabella, finally you’re home.”
He embraces me.
It’s a very weird feeling.
“Where the fuck have you been? What happened? Shit, word on the street has been hard to follow. There have been so many rumors.”
God I’m tired.
Exhausted actually.
I don’t know if I can do this with Dad right now.
“Yeah, I was kidnapped. I don’t know what you heard…”
“Who by? The Falescos? The Genoveses?”
I shake my head. “No, nothing to do with your world, Dad. This was just a guy from the clinic. Someone with mental issues who grew a little too obsessed with me.”
Why am I protecting Dominic after he abandoned me?
Who knows, but I am.
“Wait, so not someone affiliated?” Dad seems stunned by this. “Because I have had people out there infiltrating all the families to try and find out who had you.”
“Just bad luck, I guess.”
I smile thinly.
“I have heard something though. I have a recording. Anonymous source.” I hand over the phone that Dominic had left in the car.
I had looked through it when I realized that he had left me. He had cleared everything on it except the recording. There’s no way to track him down. No information, calls…nothing.
“Whose phone is this? Where did you get it?”
I shrug. “The person handed it to me on the street and left quickly. They were wearing a hood or something. Just listen.” I don’t think my father believes me, but he listens to the conversation between Risty and Henry. His face darkens when he hears the way my so called husband to be speaks about me.
Good.
I need him to understand that I will not commit to a life with him.
Risty doesn’t give a shit about me anyway.
He just wants to knock me up to strengthen his standing in Ireland.
“I also want you to know that someone called Vincenzo Lucchese wanted to kidnap me. To sell me. For some debt.”
Now Dad looks really fucking mad.
“Lucchese? Really? That fucking piece of shit.” He bangs his fist down hard on the desk. “I will kill him.”
He mutters pretty much under his breath, but I pick up a few choice words.
He’s fuming and someone is going to pay.
I don’t care who, as long as it isn’t Dominic.
“Go to your room, Isabella,” he eventually snaps. “I need you cleaned up and ready. Get rested so we can put on a united front for the rest of the world. Now that you’re back, I need the other Families to see us strong as ever.”
I resist the urge to sigh.
That isn’t what I came for.
But where else am I going to go?
“Yeah, okay. Well I guess I will see you soon then.”
“I’ll call you when I need you, Isabella.”
Because of his reaction, I don’t have the strength to see anyone else in the family.
Dad has disappointed me.
I don’t want my brothers to do the same thing.
So I do head up the stairs, with something in mind. Something I haven’t managed to tackle until now, but I suppose I should do this sooner rather than later.
I still haven’t had the time to take those other pregnancy tests yet.
It’ll be even harder now with Dominic out of the picture.
But I suppose I need to know.
I have my own bathroom in this house, which means I can do this in private, but that doesn’t make it any less unnerving as I prepare myself for what’s next.
“It might just be stress,” I try to tell myself as I pull out the pregnancy test to take it, trying to calm myself down just a little. “You have just been kidnapped after all.”
But there’s just a small part of me that already knows which way this is going to go. I’ve always been able to rely on my cycle, it’s never let me down before.
I don’t think this is going to be good news.
With a deep breath, before I collapse and sleep for days, I pee on the stick. It feels like an out of body experience, like none of this is really happening, but in a bad way.
Two lines.
Positive.
Holy fuck.
I take another.
And another.
There’s no way they are all false positives.
I’m having a baby with a man who’s vanished, in a world where everyone is fighting over me, wanting to treat me like a fucking commodity.
What the hell do I do now?
I leave the bathroom and sag onto my bed. I close my eyes, but I don’t even get respite. Instead, all I see is horrible images of Dominic covered in blood somewhere. Dead. And there’s nothing I can do about it.
I don’t want him to die.
I want him back here in my arms.
Especially now.
“Isabella, did you know that…”
Ice cold blood trickles down my spine as my father bursts into my room, uninvited and without even bothering to knock.
I’ve been away from him for so long that I’ve forgotten his bad habits, especially this one.
Privacy isnota thing around that man.
He stares at me, then at the bunch of pregnancy tests in my hand.
The color drains from his cheeks as he clicks onto what’s happening here.
“Isabella, are you…?”
He can’t even finish his sentence.
I don’t really need him to.
“Okay, well now Ineedyou to tell me everything that happened while you were kidnapped. Or I will kill every single man that walks the streets of New York.”
Oh God, how the fuck am I supposed to keep Dominic alivenow?
I’m going to have to try.
Everything is relying on me right now.