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No, he couldn’t take her to hospital.
‘Dornan!’ Mariana protested, twisting in her seat.
‘It hurts so bad,’ the woman whimpered against his chest, opening her eyes again and peering up at him. ‘Please, make it stop hurting.’
He nodded, stroking her hair with one hand and reaching for his gun with the other. It had the silencer attached, a small mercy. He pressed the barrel to her chin.
He hugged the woman to his chest one last time, tears forming in his eyes as he looked down into hers.
If she knew what was about to happen, she didn’t show it. She didn’t panic. She didn’t struggle.
‘Stop!’ Mariana screamed.
A single, muffled shot rang out into the clear, soundless night. It was much too quiet, too controlled a noise to be the bang that ended a life, but it had ended it nonetheless.
She died instantly. Dornan made the sign of the cross above her face and let her sag onto the seat. He’d have to replace it. He’d have to replace the entire interior of the car, but it didn’t matter. She was dead and nothing else mattered.
Mariana held the baby to her chest and stared at him with dead, loveless eyes.
‘You fucking monster,’ she said, turning away from him.
The baby began to cry.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
MARIANA
‘You could have taken her to the hospital.’ I’d said the words at least three times, but it was too late.
His eyes glistened. ‘She was going to die. Do you understand me? She was never going to make it to a hospital.’
We were parked in front of a 24-hour pharmacy. Dornan had just gone in and bought supplies at my insistence, despite him protesting that we really needed to get ‘the kid’ to a hospital. Diapers, bottles, a tin of formula and sterilised water were my list of demands and he didn’t argue with me for once in our relationship. The baby was suckling on my little finger impatiently as his mother lay dead in the backseat.
Dornan shook a bottle full of powder and water to mix it together.
‘How did you know to do all that?’ Dornan asked.
I looked down into the baby’s face, holding back tears. He’d just killed the baby’s mother to save her a long and protracted death. A mercy killing, but why did she have to die at all? It wasn’t fair.
Life wasn’t fair.
‘I watch a lot of television,’ I replied wearily, cradling the baby closer as I looked up at the pharmacy sign. My breasts ached as I remembered holding my own little son, feeding him from my body just one time before they took him away. If I could have nursed that baby in the car, I would have without hesitation. He might not have been mine, but the sad fact was, he no longer belonged to anyone. I wondered who his father had been, if he’d even known. If he was a good man, or if the woman had already been a captive when she fell pregnant. Was this baby the result of something pure or something evil?
Not that it mattered. He was a baby and by definition that made him innocent. He was brand new and sacred and exquisite. And he’d been born into the pits of hell.
‘You can’t keep him,’ Dornan said, almost reading my thoughts. ‘Don’t get too attached.’
I turned my head up to face him as he handed me a small plastic bottle of formula. ‘Shut up,’ I snapped at him, my mother bear out in full force as I snatched the bottle from his outstretched hand.
‘Here, little baby,’ I cooed, placing the teat near his mouth. God knows how long he’d been lying on the floor of that horrid little death cell before we’d arrived. It couldn’t have been too long, because he hadn’t been getting air until I scooped the gunk out of his throat so he could breathe, but it had been long enough that he’d turned cold and blue next to his dying mother.
‘I mean it,’ he said.
‘I know,’ I said forcefully. ‘But what do you expect me to do? Leave him on the side of the road?’
Dornan scowled. ‘We’re dropping it off at the hospital.’
‘He,’ I clarified. ‘The baby is a he.’
