Page 67 of Modern Romance September 2026 Books 5-8

A family building.

What does he mean?

I don’t have time to contemplate it. I have to keep fighting.

I yell, and it’s true; not a single door opens. No one in the apartment building seems worried about the woman yelling like she’s being killed.

One door opens, and a man comes out, his eyes meet mine, and he looks worried.

I want to scream at him, Imagine how I feel! But I don’t.

“Help me!” I say.

“This is a Corretti building,” my assailant says to my would-be helper. “And I am a Corretti.”

The man shuts the door as quickly as he opened it.

Corretti. I don’t know that name. And yet, there’s an instinctive echo of fear inside of me.

The way that he says it, like he might have told someone he was carrying a bomb.

But I don’t give up. Because I’m not so easily cowed. I keep screaming, kicking at him, hitting him with my fists.

“I’m losing my temper,” he says.

“Good,” I say. “Far be it from me to make a kidnapping easy for you.”

“But it is easy,” he says. “It is not…my first rodeo.”

The expression, and his accented English, feels pointedly sardonic, and designed to make it clear that he knows about me. That he knows I’m American. And likely much more besides.

He doesn’t take me in the elevator. He carries me down the stairs, onto the street, where there’s a dark black car pulled up to the curb.

I fight for my life, because that’s exactly what I’m doing. He opens up the car door, and shoves me inside, all the while I am hissing and scratching. He gets near me, and I strike at him, my fingernails making a connection with his face.

“Enough,” he says, closing the car door. The driver pulls away from the curb immediately, but I don’t stop struggling.

He grabs hold of me, twists me away from him, pinning my arms down in front of me. “You’re going to hurt yourself.” His growl reverberates through me, and I ignore the shiver it sends down my spine that doesn’t feel exactly like fear.

“Good,” I say. “Better than waiting for you to do it.”

“I will not hurt you,” he says.

“Weird, I don’t really trust the word of a heavily tattooed gym rat removing me from my apartment against my will.”

“You should trust my word,” he says. “It is as iron. When I make a promise, I do not break it.”

Fucking men. I’m supposed to believe him because he says, while he’s actively kidnapping me? I should probably fawn on him, do something that suggests I have a modicum of self-preservation but he’s too ridiculous. “Forgive me for not instantly believing every word that comes out of your well-formed mouth because you say that you’re so honest. You know what they say about people who have to announce their good qualities.”

He smiles at me with that same well-formed mouth. A smile so cruel and stunning that I’m frozen with it. “Did I say it was a good quality? It is part of who I am. I’m not a man who needs to lie, cara.”

Part of me wants to keep the baby a secret, because it might make me seem more vulnerable to him, but I realize then that vulnerability might be the only real strength I can use against him. Depending on how depraved he is.

“I’m pregnant.”

“I know,” he says.

“How…?”