As memories of what had me admitted slowly roll into my head, my heart dives down low. So deep, I feel its thuds in my toes when I ask, “Is Audrey okay?”
“She’s alive,” Dimitri answers calmly. “Thanks to you.”
“Did she…” I don’t want to finish my sentence. I’ve given Dimitri enough reasons to hate me. I don’t want more added to the stack. My parents hurt his wife. They treated his daughter like scum, so I really don’t want to tell him everything isn’t as it seems.
Dimitri scoops up my hand in his in an almost-nurturing manner.Almost.He still has a little bit to go in regard to being gentle. I don’t mind. I like him rough and ready. His dominance is one of his most alluring features. “She told me everything.”
“Everything?” I shouldn’t be interrogating him. I’m neither his wife nor the mother of his child, but I can’t help myself. The connection between us has always been explosive, and even with me being laid up in a hospital bed, it is the most blistering it’s ever been. It has me thinking I can do no wrong and more than willing to risk punishment just to see how far my newfound abilities extend.
My heart sinks even lower than my toes when Dimitri signals for us to be left alone. Rocco and Smith are his closest confidants, so for him to want privacy from them means this must be big. It honestly makes me feel ill, like more than my life is on the line right now.
Dimitri waits for Estelle to press her lips to my temple and join the boys outside before he says way too casually, “Audrey told me everything. How India forced her to come to Hopeton to gather semen samples. The surrogacy. India’s last-minute change of heart when she held on longer than expected after Fien’s birth, and how you tried to save her even knowing she could one day be your competition.” His gaze clings to my face as the slightest smirk curves his lips. “She even told me how India tried to kill her when she confessed to pouring a mixture of tomato soup, baby oil, and corn starch over your nightgown when you passed out so Maestro would believe you had miscarried.”
What is he saying?
I don’t understand what he means.
Dimitri doesn’t laugh, joke, or glower at the shocked mask slipped over my face. He merely clears it away with the quickest brush of his fingers. It’s a callous yet gentle touch that makes my heart rate soar as much as his murmured comment, “You didn’t miscarry, Roxanne.”
If he’s about to say I didn’t miscarry because I was never pregnant, he can stop right now. I saw our baby, clear as day, directly in front of me. I’m not skilled at pregnancy, and I’ve never trained to be a sonographer, but I know what I saw. Deep down in my heart, I know that the little black blob on the screen was our baby.
It looked almost identical to the jellybean on the strip of images Dimitri dangles in front of me. “Does this look familiar?”
I clamp my hand over my mouth to hold back my sob before nodding. “Is that...”
I can’t talk through the frantic throbbing of my pulse. It’s thumping out a crazy tune, stunned by the date and name on the ultrasound images in Dimitri’s hand. If the date on Smith’s watch is anything to go by, my scan was yesterday. Nine days after I was freed from the hell that killed our baby, and four days after learning Fien’s true paternity.
It takes me a couple of seconds to talk, but when I do, my voice is so full of hope, I may very well die if I don’t hear the answer I want. “Is thatourbaby?”
There’s no chance in hell I can hold back my sob when Dimitri smirks, then nods. His response is almost too surreal, too calm, too fucking outrageous ever to believe it’s true.
How is he not freaking out?
Why isn’t he fuming mad?
I trapped him exactly how India tried and failed. Shouldn’t that make him angry?
I take a mental note to have Smith scan me for mindreading devices when Dimitri mutters, “You can’t snare a man in the trap he set, Roxanne.” There’s no trace of emotion in his voice when he says, “You can congratulate him on his victory, then hope like hell your stroke of his ego gives you a couple of months of freedom before he traps you again.” He bites on my lower lip, slides his tongue across his teeth marks to soothe the sting, then presses his curved mouth to my ear. “The future belongs to those unscared to make it theirs. My future is with you, Roxanne, and whether you agree or not, yours is with me.”
His comment should fill me with dread. It should make me panicked. I’m in love with a mass murderer who’d rather slay me than see me with any man who isn’t him, but that isn’t close to what I am feeling.
He killed my boyfriend, tortured my parents, and has threatened to kill me more than once, but I love him, and at the end of the day, that’s all that matters.
Dimitri
Four Months Later…
Atap sounds at my office door before Roxanne’s head pops through the gap. “Hey, Smith said you wanted to see me.”
I gesture for her to enter, loving that even walking past dozens of women paid to cater to our ‘guests’ every whim hasn’t dampened the sparkle in her eyes I re-lit when I told her our baby had survived both the carnage of her captivity and his mother being shot in the stomach without the slightest scratch. She knows whores are a part of this industry, but she also accepts that I have no interest in them.
The latter is responsible for her blasé response.
No fear.
Even with my son growing in her stomach, and my daughter on her hip, Roxanne doesn’t hesitate to put the women who step over the line she deems unacceptable into place.
If you touch what is hers, expect to pay for your stupidity with your life.
