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“Why?” I asked, watching as the maid came in the room past her employer, wearing her drab gray uniform dress with the white apron, and her pristine white sneakers.
That was the uniform for all the female staff.
There was a butler who wore an exact replica, but with slacks and a damn pocket watch on a chain.
The rest of his men, though—the ones who walked around with semiautomatic weapons in their hands or slung across their backs—wore all black.
Black, like their souls.
But, of course, they had to match their boss.
Warren Graves was, objectively, an attractive man.
It was my hatred that made him ugly in my eyes.
But he was tall and fit with dark brown hair and eyes somewhere between blue and gray. His face was all angles that were never softened by anything resembling a smile.
Not even when he looked at his son.
“You know why,” Warren said, snapping his fingers, making the maid move toward me.
I wanted her gaze to be apologetic and understanding. But her gray hair meant she’d been working under the overbearing Warren Graves most of her life. He’d crushed anything resembling empathy out of her long ago.
This was a job.
I wasn’t a person with feelings to worry about.
Which made handing over my son to her all the harder.
But it wasn’t like I had any sort of choice in the matter.
Besides, I knew he would be safe. The staff would bend over backward to make sure he didn’t cry for any longer than a moment or two. Because if we came home to find him snotty and red-eyed, Warren would backhand—or worse—anyone around who did not take care of Judah properly.
So the staff would sing and play and ply with sweets. Anything at all to keep Judah from crying, from throwing a fit, from hurting himself.
I knew he would be okay. But I hated to have him out of my sight for even a moment.
These were the rules, though.
I knew them all too well.
If Warren was leaving the house, I had to go with him.
It was another way he enacted control over me. I could not be alone in the house with Judah. Warren believed that, given the chance, I would grab my baby and run for our lives.
He was right about that.
I’d been planning and plotting the escape since the day he’d shown up at the hospital after I’d given birth and we’d been discharged, forcing us into his waiting SUV. Then never letting me leave again.
I couldn’t describe the panic I’d felt as I’d been grabbed around my arm and dragged out of that SUV, my body sore in all kinds of new, upsetting ways, my baby’s carrier in the hand of one of Warren’s henchmen.
Because I knew he would never release us.
It was why I’d worked so hard to hide my pregnancy, to stay out of his sight, out of his grasp.
His name wasn’t even on the birth certificate.
Not that it mattered.
