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‘What should I wear?’ she asked softly.
‘Something warm,’ he said. ‘Bring your coat. And your sneakers. We might be digging a hole.’ He looked at her pointedly.
Her eyes went big and round, but she didn’t protest. She backed away, not letting him out of her sight until she was at her bedroom door.
He hated scaring her. He loved her. But a small part of him, the vengeful, suspicious man inside, was secretly pleased.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
DORNAN
FUCK.
It was the single thought that ran through his head.
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.
Viper was opening the back of the large trailer, his face ashen. And there was the muffled, yet unmistakable sound of a woman screaming.
Dornan hadn’t spoken a word to Mariana the entire way here. Almost an hour it had taken to arrive, and now she was sitting in the car, probably wondering why the hell she was suddenly privy to cartel activities. Well, until he found out where that fucking phone had come from, and what it was for, she’d be spending a lot of time with him. Fuck what anyone else thought. John might be the boss in name, but Dornan was the leader of this Gypsy pack.
‘Why the fuck did you call me out here?’ Dornan growled. ‘You go in there and you shut them up!’
He was angry. He was angry and so fucking tired of having to deal with this shit day in and day out, so tired of the souls who begged him to let them go – and worse, the ones who didn’t beg, the ones who sat in the deepest corners of their cages, defeated, having already given up on life. Yeah, he preferred the fighters. They still had a spark of something in their eyes. Hope.
Not that it ever did them any good.
‘I’ve got a truck full of fucking deliveries,’ Viper hissed, his normally tough demeanour dropped completely, replaced with horror. At first Dornan wanted to smash his fist into Viper’s face, kick him in the ribs until he bled, and beat the sense back into him. He was a Gypsy Brother, for fuck’s sake. What did he expect? Sometimes messed-up shit happened.
But now Dornan was here, and he could hear it too.
Screams that sounded like death cries.
He rushed to the back of the truck, holding his jacket up over his face to keep the rain off. The doors to the container had already been slightly propped open by Viper. The screams grew louder, more insistent, as Dornan walked down the narrow space in between stacks of containers that housed their flesh trades for the day.
He already knew which woman was screaming. Her eyes had been screaming at him inside his mind all goddamn day.
He got to the box, placed his hand on the lock and took a deep breath.
She’d been heavily pregnant. He had known that when he saw her earlier, but it didn’t matter. It never mattered. They always took the pregnant ones at least a month before they were due, to make sure they made it to their new owner before they gave birth.
He opened the lock and pulled at the door. His gaze landed on a naked newborn baby, its face a purplish-blue, covered in blood and gunk. Its umbilical cord trailed away between the woman’s legs. The woman’s face was ashen; she’d lost a lot of blood, more than she should have, judging by the way she was practically bathing in the stuff. She was almost unconscious, her head drooped to one side. She was sipping in little breaths of air, sweat dripping from her forehead. This had never happened before. They’d had women die before, but they’d never had one give birth. This was not supposed to happen.
‘Holy fuck,’ Viper said, over Dornan’s shoulder.
‘Get outside and keep watch,’ Dornan hissed, turning and shoving Viper. He scurried away, seemingly very happy to get away from the woman and her newborn.
‘Please,’ the woman whimpered. She was so pale, she looked like a corpse, but she was alive and she was still conscious. ‘Please help my baby,’ she said.
‘She needs a doctor,’ Mariana said behind him, taking off her coat. ‘That baby needs warmth.’
Dornan turned on her, towering over her. ‘What the fuck are you doing back here?’ he roared. He looked past her to Viper. ‘I said to fucking keep watch!’
Viper shrugged, clearly on the cusp of madness. Useless fuck. He’d deal with him later.
Mariana was dressed in just a thin striped tank top and black skirt, her cashmere coat bundled up in her outstretched hands as she glared at Dornan defiantly. ‘Are you going to help them? Because if you’re not, move.’
Speechless, Dornan moved aside so that Mariana could squeeze past him. The space between the containers was narrow, the air thick with horrors best left unseen, and Mariana was here in the middle of it. For so many years, he’d kept a wall up between the reality of what he did with these women and his Mariana, his secret, his dark lover. He’d drawn a line in the sand and made sure she never, ever knew of these things.
