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Dornan started the truck and it roared to life. We drove for a long time. As the trees began to thicken, I looked around outside, the baby now asleep, nestled against my chest. I’d managed to get a few drops of the formula in and to warm him up, at least.
The road we were on looked . . . Familiar.
My stomach lurched as I saw where we were pulling into. The county morgue. The same place John and I had come to dispose of Murphy’s body. Christ. The Gypsy Brothers and the Il Sangue Cartel were really keeping this place in illegal after-hours business.
I couldn’t bear to watch as Dornan dragged the dead woman from the car and onto a waiting steel gurney. He paid the guy a wad of cash and then we were driving again. Pretty soon we were pulling into a dark corner of a run-down hospital parking lot. I could see why Dornan had chosen this place. It looked decrepit, and I doubted it had anything like surveillance cameras to record that we were ever there.
I hugged the baby tight. Was it terrible that I didn’t want to let him go? Dornan came around to my side of the truck and opened my door, holding his arms out.
I looked down into the little boy’s sweet face. He was still all squashed from having just been born, but his face would spring up soon, his nose would pop out, and he’d be cleaned up. He was going to be breathtaking.
‘Ana,’ Dornan urged.
With great reluctance, I handed the baby over. I didn’t meet Dornan’s gaze. I couldn’t.
I couldn’t bear to look at the man I loved, and see a monster instead.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
MARIANA
An hour later, we were parked at an old warehouse by the wharf. It had started to rain again, gentle drops that pattered against the roof and windows with a soothing rhythm.
Me, I was exhausted. I’d been firing on adrenalin-fuelled cylinders for a couple of hours and I was ready to pass out and sleep for a year. I felt heavy. I felt so unbearably sad.
Plus, Dornan had just dropped a bomb in my lap the size of California. The drugs and guns weren’t the only things the Gypsy Brothers and the cartel had been trafficking and selling. In fact, those were just two small parts of the sickening empire Emilio was running, and the third, very large, very lucrative part of his game was people. Women, mostly. Girls. No wonder he’d been so keen to sell me.
It was his fucking specialty, selling girls as slaves.
Not for the first time, I was weirdly appreciative of my unorthodox upbringing, the way I’d had to keep my father’s finances afloat by money laundering and shady bookkeeping antics. It was those skills, self-taught and honed to a sharp edge, that had kept me alive all these years. It was those skills, dirty as they were, that had kept me out of the back of a truck on a one-way trip to hell itself.
I demanded answers as soon as we’d steered away from the hospital where he’d run in and deposited the baby on the reception desk. My heart still ached, knowing that little boy needed a mother, knowing he didn’t have anyone. At least he was someplace safe. At least now he had some kind of a chance at survival.
‘How could you do that?’ I asked Dornan as we both stared straight ahead through the front window of the truck. The rain was swiftly growing heavier, and I couldn’t help but remember the night I’d killed Murphy.
Dornan took off his shirt and offered it to me. ‘Put some water on it. Clean yourself up.’
‘Don’t you think about them?’ I continued, taking the balled-up shirt from his hand. ‘Don’t they haunt you?’
‘Never thought about it,’ he said quietly. ‘Never let myself. Never made eye contact. God gave me sons and I was grateful. I never had to worry about them. I knew they’d be alright. I knew they’d never be a part of that world. At least, not the part that suffers.’
‘You mean, the way you don’t suffer? Because you’re covered in the blood of a woman you just killed, and I’m pretty sure that look on your face is suffering.’
He smiled sadly. I took a section of his shirt and poured bottled water on it, offering it to him first. He had more blood on him than me. I’d only been dirtied by the blood that was on the baby from his birth. Dornan was soaked from head to toe in the blood of a woman he’d cradled in his arms as he shot her in the head. The gun might have been silenced, but a silencer didn’t stop the blood spatter. Luckily, he was wearing dark clothes, and being soaked in blood didn’t look too different from being soaked from the rain unless you looked closely.
‘What made you realise what you were doing was wrong?’ I asked.
Dornan flexed his blood-stained hands, took the wet shirt I was holding out and started to rub at his skin. I saw the twitch in his jaw, the way he ground down on his teeth. He was suffering. ‘Always knew it was wrong,’ he replied quietly, so quietly I almost couldn’t hear him above the torrential downpour outside. ‘Just never gave it much thought. Never really wanted to think about what happened to them. Where they ended up. If they survived.’
‘So what changed?’ I asked.
He cleared his throat, then examined one relatively blood-free hand before switching to the other. ‘John went to prison. Caroline was pregnant when he was arrested and she just went completely fucking psychotic without him there to watch her every day. I had her committed twice. That bitch charmed the pants off those fucking doctors, convinced them she was on the straight and narrow. They let her out. They always did. By the time the baby was due, I was letting her shoot up on the couch in my office just so I knew she wasn’t lying dead in a gutter somewhere with John’s baby inside her.’
‘Juliette,’ I said.
He nodded.
‘Caroline had that baby. And then she disappeared. Left the hospital, stole a car and drove away. And guess who was left holding a baby girl?’
