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Chapter Thirty-Five
My mouth was dry. That was the first thing I realized as I came to. My very first though was how badly I needed a drink of water.
I groaned and tried to sit up, only to realize that I couldn’t. “What the…” I trailed off. My eyes opened quickly looking around. The last thing I remembered was running into my father on the streets of the city.
“You’re awake.” Speaking of my father, I turned to see him sitting at a small table.
“Dad?” I asked. I was on a thin mattress, and when I tried to sit up once more, I was pulled back down. “What the hell is this?” I pulled my arm slightly. I was handcuffed to the bed.
My father looked almost exactly as he had when I was a child. It was eerie and made my skin crawl. He walked towards me, and I pulled as far away from him as possible, pressing my back against the iron headboard I was currently chained up to.
“You don’t have to worry,” my father said, a crease of concern on his brow. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
I snorted and lifted my chained arm. The sound of metal on metal made my teeth clench slightly. “You knocked me out and chained me up. That doesn’t really put a person at ease.”
My father didn’t bat an eye at the comment. It was almost odd how calm he was. I shivered at his behavior. I hadn’t seen my father since I was a kid, and yet, here he was, standing before me, eyeing me as though there were things to say between us.
“I didn’t want you to hurt yourself,” he said. “You were hysterical.”
I said nothing. He wasn’t exactly wrong on that front. I had been hysterical in some regards. But my hysterics were because I had recently found out that I was pregnant, and I had no idea if my husband would want a child.
Thinking of Marco, I felt my heart go cold. “Where’s Alex?” I asked. I looked around the room, half expecting to see Alex chained up somewhere. He never would have just let my father take me.
“The man chasing after you?”
I nodded. My tongue was sticking to the roof of my mouth as my fear became even greater.
“I took care of him,” my father said.
I froze, sure that I had not heard him correctly. “What does that mean?” I asked when I was able to finally find my voice. I could feel my heat slamming against my chest in fear. I wanted away from Alex, but I didn’t want him dead.
“He’s fine,” my father said. “He’s just going to have a bruise on his head.”
I felt my brow crinkle as I tried to piece all of this together. The father who abandoned me was standing before me after having just knocked me out. Apparently, he’d also knocked out Alex, which seemed unlikely.
“I’ve been trying to get you alone for weeks…”
“You could have spoken to me at any point over the last few years,” I reminded him. “We still live in the same house.” It was what had pissed me off so badly when Marco showed me his picture. At any point, my father could have come for me, for Mikey, but he hadn’t. Not until I’d married Marco.``What do you want?” I asked.
“To see you.”
“You can do better than that,” I said. “You want something.” For a long time, I had a very romanticized version of my father. My mother was a mess, but she was at least there, sometimes. As I thought more about the possibility of being a mother, I knew that I would never abandon my child. Good parents didn’t do that.
My father rubbed the back of his neck, and I knew I had been right. “How much do you need?” I asked. The more I had thought about it, the more I knew what my father was coming around after my marriage to Marco. He needed money, and I now had it.
“It’s more complicated than that.”
I snorted and shook my head. “It always is,” I muttered. I sighed. My father had frightened me at first. After all, he was a stranger who had knocked me out and chained me to a bed in a nasty motel.
I lifted my arm. “Can you at least unchain me?”
My father looked at me, his green eyes, a mirror of my own, looked cold and lifeless. “I can’t,” he said.
“Why?” While I wasn’t scared of my father, I was worried about what he might do to me to get what he needed. His addictions had been bad when I was a kid. He’d squandered every penny we had and came home beaten and bloodied more than once when he couldn’t pay his bookie.
“I owe a lot of money to a lot of of very dangerous men,” he told me.
I was taken aback by his honesty, but only for a moment. “What does that have to do with me?” I asked, worried about what his answer was going to be.
