Chapter 7
Eight weeks.
Ethan’s child.
I laughed when the doctor told me.
Then I vomited.
Then I sat on the examination table and stared at the ultrasound monitor while a faint heartbeat flickered on the screen.
My dead son’s father had put another child inside me.
I did not know whether to call it mercy or cruelty.
Roman waited in the parking lot.
I had not told him why I was seeing a doctor.
When I got into the car, he looked at my face.
“Bad news?”
“I’m pregnant.”
His expression did not change immediately.
Then he looked away.
Not disgust.
Not disappointment.
Calculation.
“What do you need?”
I blinked.
“That’s your question?”
“What should it be?”
“I don’t know.”
I began crying.
Again.
I hated how often I cried then.
“I don’t know anything anymore.”
Roman reached for my hand but stopped before touching it.
That was becoming his habit.
He always stopped.
I always chose.
This time I placed my hand in his.
“I can’t lose another child.”
“You won’t be alone.”
“You can’t promise that.”
“No.”
His fingers closed gently around mine.
“But I can promise you won’t face whatever happens alone.”
I moved from the guesthouse into the east wing after someone fired two shots through the guesthouse windows three nights later.
Nobody was hurt.
Roman’s security team found one cartridge and tire tracks.
Vanessa was still missing.
Detective Greene believed she had hired someone to frighten me.
Roman believed differently.
“She doesn’t want to frighten you,” he said.
We were in his kitchen at two in the morning.
I wore one of his shirts because I had spilled tea down my pajamas.
He had made grilled cheese.
Badly.
“She wants you gone.”
I looked at the blackened sandwich.
“Is that what you people eat in organized crime?”
Roman glanced at it.
“No. Usually the chef prevents this humiliation.”
I laughed.
Actually laughed.
The sound shocked both of us.
Roman smiled.
He was dangerous when angry.
But smiling, he looked younger.
Lonelier.
Over the following weeks, he did exactly what the gossip magazines later claimed.
He spoiled me rotten.
Except they never understood what that meant.
Yes, there were dresses.
Too many.
A personal driver appeared because I had panic attacks behind the wheel.
A nutritionist stocked the refrigerator after morning sickness made me lose twelve pounds.
When I complained the mattress was too hard, three new mattresses arrived the next day.
When I said that was insane, Roman returned two of them and personally dragged the third into place while arguing that a pregnant woman who had survived trauma deserved decent lumbar support.
There were shoes I never asked for.
A cashmere coat.
May you like
A ridiculous heated blanket.
A bathtub filled with lavender salts after nightmares.
