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1
ISABELLA
For a few moments, when I first start to wake up, I feel like I’m in heaven.
The bed beneath me is huge and cloudlike, the pillows downy, a nest of softness around my face and tangled hair. The room is pleasantly cool, making me want to burrow down into the thick duvet and slip back into a deep, peaceful, uninterrupted sleep. The best sleep I’ve had in ages.
It hasn’t been that long since I was in my own luxurious bedroom, not so different from this, but it feels like it’s been years. Something feels like it’s pulling at me, a reminder of why I want to burrow back into sleep, and as I blink awake blearily, I remember why.
The glint of my thin gold wedding band catches my eye. I’m someone’s wife now, but I’m still all alone in this big, gorgeous bed.
My eyes feel sore and sticky from crying last night, until I finally fell asleep. I’d managed to hold back the tears until I was safely in my room, Niall in his down the hall, muffling them with a hand over my mouth as I’d sank onto the bed. This is far from the worst circumstances I’ve been in now, but I feel more alone than ever.
I’m half a continent away from my family, with no way to contact them or speak to them or even let them know I’m safe. I’m in a stranger’s house, another mob boss of an organization called the Bratva, where he lives with his family. My husband is sleeping in another room, away from me.
Niall says I can trust these people. And last night at dinner, I wanted to believe him. Viktor seemed a bit stiff and distrustful, but that didn’t seem odd to me—not so unlike my father with strangers, which I am here. His wife Caterina was kind enough, their four children adorable. I slide my hand under the covers to press against my own stomach as I think about meeting them. In a matter of months, I’ll have a baby of my own to hold.
I can’t say how I feel about that, just now. Everything I’d imagined is different now. None of it has turned out how I thought.
There were others that I met, too. Sasha Federova, a pretty Russian girl who apparently is the live-in nanny. Maximilian Agosti, the former priest that Niall mentioned to me before we left Mexico. People who, according to Niall, wish to help me.
I just don’t entirely understand why.
It has something to do with the deal Niall and the men he works for made with my father, a deal I’m not privy to. I just have to trust in it, and so far, Niall hasn’t given me any reason not to. In fact, I’ve given him every reason not to trustme, to abandon me to my own fate, and he hasn’t.
He even married me to keep me safe. Not a real marriage, not a lasting one—but a marriage nonetheless. We said vows.
We did more than just that.
I close my eyes against the hot pressure of tears behind my eyes, not wanting to start crying all over again. I can’t let myself think about my wedding night with Niall, or any of the nights before or after that one, or the way we fucked on the floor of the cargo plane, hot and passionate and just glad to be alive as bullets chased us into the air.
I won’t be able to make it through this if I do. And Ihaveto make it through, because none of this is really about me anymore.
I have a child to worry about now. Someone to keep safe, someone that Niall and I have created. I don’t know if I can call it love, what we did that made this baby, but it was something extraordinary. I know that he knows that as well as I do.
It just doesn’t matter now.
I push myself upright in bed, rubbing the heels of my hands against my eyes. I need a shower—I’d been too exhausted to take one last night. I glance at the vintage-looking alarm clock next to the bed and see that it’s after eleven in the morning, the latest I’ve woken up in a long time—maybe ever. I’m sure the household is up and moving by now—I think I can hear footsteps and the faint cry of a baby from somewhere else in the house—but they were kind enough to let me sleep in.
The bathroom is attached to my bedroom, for which I’m glad. I’m not prepared to go out into the house yet and risk running into Niall.
Goodnight, Isabella.
He’d looked into my eyes as he said it, firm and assured, and then disappeared into his room, a brutal reminder that everything he’d said to me about the ending of our relationship once we got to Boston, he’d meant.
We left all of that back in Mexico, our last hurrah on the hard steel floor of a cargo plane as it soared above everyone who wanted us dead, taking us to freedom and breaking my heart all in the space of minutes. Everything I loved is there still—my parents, my sister, the memory of Niall and I before everything between us fell apart. The only thing I have here to love is the baby that I’m going to have, a baby that I can barely imagine the existence of at this moment. Aside from the constant nausea, nothing really feels different yet. My body hasn’t really changed at all.
All I feel right now is loss, instead of love.
I leave the light off in the bathroom, enjoying the cool darkness and the faint daylight coming through the opaque window high up on the far wall. When the shower runs hot, I step into the glass-walled cube, tilting my head back under the hot spray and letting it sink into my tense muscles. There’s greenery hanging under the showerhead, and the steamy air quickly fills with the scent of eucalyptus, refreshing my senses. It’s like being at a mini spa, but it’s still hard to relax.
Everything feels so strange.
I linger for a little while in the shower, surrounded by the luxurious scents of eucalyptus, rose and lavender as I wash my hair and my body, finding a spare razor still in its wrapping to shave my legs with. I avoid the stubble between my legs, wincing at the memory of what Javier did to me—and how I kept it up afterwards, for Niall. The way he’d overwritten all that awfulness with the new sensations of his lips on my shaven, sensitive skin, groaning with pleasure at the unfettered, bare access to my needy pussy.
I don’t have any reason to bother with it now. Niall made it clear last night with his actions that he means to put space between us. That what we were back in Mexico we can never be again. And if it’s not Niall—
It won’t be anyone. I don’twantanyone else, and I can’t imagine ever wanting that. It wasn’t a desire for sex that kept me from wanting to be shipped off to a Catholic sisterhood, it was the desire to keep my baby, to raise them myself.
