Phantom's Baby: A Mafia Secret Baby Romance (Mob City Book 3) (26 page)

E
llie

I was already regretting my scant choice of clothing. I couldn’t help but think about what Rick would have said if he could see me rocking it.

"Who’re you trying to fuck wearing that?"

I picked up the cold bottle of beer, watching as droplets of condensation formed and then fell down its green glass sides, and brought it to my mouth with my hand trembling. Sometimes it was hard to remind myself that he wasn't here anymore, and that he couldn't hurt me.

For now, anyway.

Maybe forever, if the detective does his job
.

The ice cold beer flowed easily down my throat, and it wasn't long before I felt a pleasant, warming glow spreading throughout my body. Bars weren't my scene, not recently anyway, they hadn't been since Rick –

Cut it out, Ellie. Stop thinking about him
.

A couple of bar napkins took flight, zooming off the wooden bar and fluttering down to the floor as the door opened and a group of rowdy off-duty construction workers staggered in, letting a draft in with them. I turned round at the interruption in the quiet bar, but barely noticed them. Instead, my attention was taken by a brooding mountain of a man sitting in a dark corner of the bar. I couldn't make out much about him, but his posture told a story all of its own. He was slumped forward, his body contorted into a position that masked his true height, which had to be six foot or more.

"Hey, get us some beers," one of the construction workers shouted. I didn't pay them any attention.

"Hey, lady, I said get us some beers, will ya?"

I turned my head jerkily to the source of the sound, confused. "Are you," I stammered to the rowdy leader of the pack. "Are you talking to me? I don't work here."

The air in the leather cushion of barstool next to me hissed as he sat down next to me. He put out his hand, grinning, and his boys howled with delight. "Mikey. And you are?"

I realized that coming here had been a mistake. I wasn’t ready for it. Not yet. Maybe never.

Why won't he just leave me alone?

I stared nervously at him, stuck like a rabbit in the headlights.

"Look," Mikey said, turning to his construction crew, who were standing around me in a loose half circle. "The little lady's sweating bullets. Do I look that bad?"

His crew hollered out a slew of whooped insults and encouragements. My blood ran cold. I knew I wouldn't find any help in that quarter…

I mopped my brow. Mikey was right, I'd come out in a cold sweat. "Listen," I said. My voice cracked with nervousness, and I hated my body for betraying me. I could feel myself shutting down, that familiar stretch in my back as my shoulders hunched over to make myself small. My brain was just doing what it thought it had to do to protect me, to survive. Turning off was the only way I had managed to escape Rick's attentions for years, but sometimes it wasn't the right option. Like right now. What I
needed
to do was make myself big, imposing, and to take no shit from these predatory thugs.

But I couldn't. Any courage I'd ever had had been sanded away by my ex's abusive, abrasive temper. Now, all I could do was shrink from Mikey's assault, and beg helplessly for his mercy.

"Can you just leave me alone? I've had a bad day." I squeaked. My stomach dropped like a stone as I heard how weak I sounded and, on cue, the huddle of men around me collectively licked their lips, as if they had realized I wouldn't, or couldn't, fight back. Their expressions turned from rowdily drunk to sly and predatory – leaning forward, eyes narrowing, bared teeth.

Make that a bad decade
.

Mikey leaned in and threaded his arm around my shoulder. His breath smelled rancid, and he had flecks of chewing tobacco caught between his yellow stained teeth. "Aw, come on now. Big Mikey can make all that better…"

I squirmed and tried to escape, but his arm felt like it weighed a hundred tons and pushed me down onto my stool. His crew took an ominous step forward, and my eyes flickered around the faded bar, searching for someone, anyone to help. But none was forthcoming. I kicked myself for ever coming here. This wasn't the kind of place where white knights lurked in dark corners, ready to help damsels in distress like me. Not by a long shot.

"That's right," Mikey breathed into my ear. "We're going to have a good time, you and me."

I closed my eyes.
Not again
.

I shuddered reflexively as Mikey's hot, rancid breath invaded my nostrils, foreshadowing the wicked things that he wanted to do to me. My brain was screaming at me to pull away, dumping adrenaline into my bloodstream to force me into action. But instead, my body froze, all that adrenaline only serving to muddy the waters. It amped my mind up to full throttle, while hitting the pause button on my limbs. "What do you want?" I groaned, my eyes still firmly shut.

"What do
I
want?" Mikey hissed. "I would have thought that would be obvious, with a pretty little thing like you." He stroked the back of my neck with hands that were rough from a lifetime spent outside, and filthy from a day spent digging up roads. I shivered with horror as he touched me, and a sensation of unbridled fear began to gnaw away at my stomach. The drunk construction worker's touch was every bit as terrifying as Rick's had been. If I'd opened my eyes, I would have seen his fluorescent orange road crew jacket reflected in my glass.

I'd also have seen another set of eyes focused intently on the scene, drinking in every little detail.

"Please, I'll give you whatever you want," I begged. "Just leave me alone." I was sick with worry, and even sicker with myself. I wanted to rise up, to turn round and smash a glass bottle against the bar and charge at the man, like you see in the movies, but my legs didn't want to work, and my arms felt like jelly. My brain flashed rapidly through a hundred memories, a hundred nights where Rick had come home stinking of booze from a night spent hitting the bars with his friends, a hundred nights when sleep had evaded me as a creeping sense of fear seeped from every pore in my body as I worried and waited and wept for what was to come.

My body bore the scars of every one of those nights, marks that I'd carry to my grave.

No
.
Not again
. I sat up straighter on my stool, not that my assailants seemed to notice. Their attention was too busily occupied elsewhere, their eyes raking across my body like I was a piece of meat on their plate, bought and paid for and ready for them to enjoy.

"Now boys," Mikey laughed, standing up and playing to the crowd. "It looks like little missy here didn't read the playbook. You see," he said, leaning back down and placing his mouth right up next to my ear, "what my friends and I want is, well, how can I put this?"

He paused, deliberately stringing out the sentence as long and threateningly as he could. "Is you."

By the time he'd finished talking, I was barely listening to a word that came out of his putrid mouth. My eyes flickered open, and I began to take stock of my options. I resolved, right then and there, that I wasn't going to be a rubber duck anymore, just bobbing on the waves generated as someone stepped into the tub. I was going to be better,
had
to be better.

I weighed up my options, brain settling on just two.

And neither of them were good.

Option number one: I could run. Mikey and his crew were pushing forty, each and every one of them, and they had all spent a long day working under the hot sun. They'd be tired and drained from their efforts, and there was every chance that if I made a break for it, they wouldn't bother rousing themselves to follow. Even if they did, I had a runner's frame, and I'd worked hard to get it. I had no doubt that I could outpace them.

But
…

But they had me surrounded, and it wasn't outpacing them once I hit the asphalt that I was worried about, it was slipping their noose in the first place.

Option number two: I could call for help. I read this article once, about a woman who got stabbed on the streets of New York, stabbed more than twenty times, and when the police interviewed the neighbors, more than fifty people recalled hearing her scream in pain, then sob and slowly slip away into the cold embrace of death. I remember how sick I felt, that nobody so much as lifted a finger to help, all trusting that someone else would, and the journalist's final sentence seeped into my head. "If you ever find yourself in an emergency, point at someone, make eye contact, and order them to do something about it." Looking around, I didn’t think anyone would help.

Of course, there was a third option, too. It wasn't a good one, and it was the riskiest of the bunch – a plan that offered just as much a chance of ending up in hospital, again, as it did with me getting out of here scot-free. I trembled just thinking about it, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up with worry. For half a second, I considered just letting them do what they wanted to me, with me. But no sooner had the foul thought appeared in my brain that I dismissed it. I was done with being that kind of girl, done with letting men just walk all over me.

I felt Mikey's hand sidling down my body, looked at it, seeing the dirt trapped under his fingernails, and a cold shaft of rage erupted inside my brain. All conscious thought disappeared, and my primal mind took over. "Get your filthy hands off me, you pig." I spat with rage. Mikey jerked his face back and his cheeks drained of color, then erupted in a violent, angry red as he processed what I'd said. I got the sense that women didn't talk to him like that very often.

"What the fuck did you just say to me?" He growled, and thick droplets of his enraged spittle landed on my bare shoulders. My face wrinkled with distaste, and I reflexively brushed the offending fluid off myself. Mikey grimaced, as though I had somehow committed a grievous offense, and pushed me hard, half rocking me off the stool.

"Hey," the bartender interrupted for the first time, wiping his hands nervously on a towel as he cowered behind the thick wooden bar. "No fighting in here, you okay. You break anything, even a glass, and I'm calling the police, you hear?"

I would have apologized, but he hadn't been all that helpful when I'd first, silently, begged him for help. I shrugged.
You made your bed
, I thought,
now lie in it
. Besides, that was the whole point. I
wanted
him to call the police...

When I'd looked around the room for help, I'd seen nothing but a dozen cowering heads, a dozen people studiously studying the table in front of them as if they'd never seen anything more interesting in all their lives. Cowards, every one of them.

Mikey's crew were getting restless, and the tallest of the bunch, a spindly, sallow cheeked man wearing a dark green Alexandria Eagles jersey under his fluorescent orange jacket, spoke up for the first time. He spat dismissively onto the floor, a huge glob of chewing tobacco, and spoke with a voice that reminded me of sandpaper.

"Enough of your talk, Mikey, you always talk too much." He stuffed his hand in his pocket, and I shrank back, knowing even then that that couldn't mean anything good.

I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. It was clear that I'd made a terrible mistake. I wished that I could back away, but I was still stuck to my stool.

And that's when the guy with the Alexandria Eagles jersey pulled out a knife.

R
oman

Pretty blonde girls with hair down their back and an ass that begs to be stared at, they're like kryptonite to men. Politicians, sports stars, and me.

The second she walked into the bar, I couldn't keep my eyes off her. She walked with the shaky, uncertain stride of a woman who didn't know whether she was making the right decision, like a caged animal being released into the wild. There was hurt there, I could see it plain as day, knew the smell of it the same as I knew the lines that criss-crossed the back of my own palm.

I watched the whole thing unfold, from start to finish. Or at least, from start to now. I chose dive bars like this - ones in shitty parts of town - for two reasons: nobody bothered me, and they never had anyone interesting enough to distract me from the important business of drinking the pain away.

When
she
walked in, it was like a candle being lit in the darkness, or a toddler sketching the Mona Lisa in a kindergarten art period. My heart skipped a beat, my eyes widened and I put down my whiskey. The single, melting ice cube rocked from side to side like a metronome. Right then, not even an earthquake would have distracted me.

Beauties like
her
weren't supposed to hang around in places like this.

I sat, mesmerized by her beauty, and then a bunch of brutes dressed like fluorescent traffic cones got in my way. That was bad enough. I never did have much control over my emotions. Sometimes I get the feeling that my anger is somehow a bigger part of me than even
I've
ever been, like it overshadows me, and I'm just its servant. I watched, and I simmered. My jaw tightened, and I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself. "Not your fight, Roman," I grunted softly to myself.

Not your circus, not your monkeys.

I almost believed it, too.

And then the asshole pulled out a knife. My legs stood up before my brain had even fully processed what was going on. My heartbeat slowed to almost nothing, and I was in the zone. Details disappeared, and all that was left was what mattered. Saving the girl. The why didn't matter, and I didn't know the answer, anyway. All that I knew was that they weren't going to hurt her, not on my watch.

Eagles jumper's voice carried across the room. "Ain't no one coming to help you now, girl." A wide, smug, self-indulgent smile filled his face, the look of a man who was entirely at peace with himself, regardless of the fact that his soul was black and decaying. The mere sight of him made me clench my fist, and flooded me with an intense, visceral wave of rage. I bit back down on it, taking conscious control of myself.

"Anger is the enemy," I muttered to myself as I circled the room, careful to stay out of the road crew's sight, using the dark bar's many hidden corners as cover. "Breathe deep, relax, be at peace."

It sounded like some kind of new age, hippie mantra, but nothing could have been further from the truth. It was the only thing that kept me sane, the thing that kept me moving, and the thing that kept me
killing
. I had the taste of it now, a pungent metallic urge that would only disappear if it was sated, preferably by blood. And Eagles jumper, whatever his real name was, his would more than fit the bill.

Of the four members of the road crew, only two were directly involved in intimidating the pretty blonde. Eagles jumper, and his boss. The other two were, much like bullies anywhere, sheep – they'd follow wherever they were led.

In a war, it's always best to pick the weak ones off first, better still if you don't even have to fight them. I sidled up to the nearest orange-jacketed road worker and he flinched before he'd even properly seen me, pulling back and turning nervously to face the intrusion into his personal space. "Who," his voice quavered. "Who the hell are you?"

"I'm asking the questions, tough guy," I whispered in his ear, prodding two knuckles into his wobbly, rotund belly as hard as I could. "And that's a Beretta thirty-eight I've got pressed up against your fat stomach, so one wrong move…"

I left the thought hanging, and was immediately pleased to watch as the man's knees almost gave way with fear.

Not so tough, are you
.

"I'll give you a choice," I murmured into his ear. "You leave, now, I'll let you live." I said it as threateningly as I could manage, letting just enough of my old Russian accent intrude back into my voice to reinforce the message. I hadn't spoken like that in a long time. To the rest of the world I sounded as American as apple pie. But every now and then, I grinned, a little Russian could be plenty intimidating.

"You walk straight out that door, no looking back, you understand? One glance and I blow your brains out."

The man quivered, and I knew I had him. "Okay, okay," he muttered, desperate to escape. "I'll do whatever you want." I prodded him in his soft gut one more time to reinforce the message, and pushed him firmly towards the door. He scurried out like a terrified little church mouse, without so much as a stolen glance backwards.

Atta boy
.

The movement must've caught the leader of the group's eye because a couple of seconds later, I heard a surprised, gravelly voice. "Hey, Billy, where ya going?"

The only answer he got was the door slamming shut behind his cowardly friend. That was when he turned his attention to me, flinching in confusion as he was forced to readjust, and to look up at me. I got the sense that this was a man who didn't often come across men that were bigger than him "Who the fuck are you?"

My neck and back tensed up as he swore at me, and I made a conscious effort to relax, repeating my silent mantra in my head.
Anger is the enemy
…

"Gentlemen, I don't want any trouble." I said with a broad, forced smile stretched across my gums. And it was true; trouble was the exact last thing I wanted. They should have had a sign at Hitman School, not that such a place existed, that read: 'don't make a scene', because really that's the only skill you need in this line of work. "So how about you let this pretty lady free, and we can all go about our days.
No trouble
," I emphasized.

The leader's face stretched out into an unpleasant grin. "Nobody tells Mikey what to do," he scoffed, talking about himself in the third person.
Who does this guy think he is
, I wondered.

"So if you don't want no trouble, then how about you get your interfering ass out of here."

My shoulders sagged, and I let out a long-suffering sigh. Not because I had any plans of giving up, but because I should have known it wouldn't be that easy. "Come on, Mikey," I improvised. "What is it you want out of all this, a woman?"

I pulled a roll of banknotes out of my back pocket, a couple of thousand bucks worth of crisp, clean hundred dollar bills and peeled off five or six of them. "If that's what you want, be my guest." I didn't approve of the flesh trade, not really, but if that's what it took to distract him from the blonde who'd inexplicably caught my eye, then it was an evil I was willing to go along with.

Mikey's eyes lit up at the sight of the money, and he took a greedy step forward.

"How 'bout I take that money of yours, rich boy, and the girl too. Any fancy last words on that?"

My jaw clenched with anger, and a slight hiss of air escaped through my front teeth.
Is he an idiot?
Could he not see that I was standing with all my weight balanced on the balls of my feet, knees half-bent, shoulders packed? In short, couldn't he see that I was prepared to fight? A predator, as comfortable as a lion prowling the African savanna.

The simple answer was no. Of course he couldn't. He was a road worker, an idiot, but most importantly – a bully, not a fighter, and I'd make short work of him.

"Hey, Mikey," a nervous voice said to my left. "Maybe we just leave this girl alone, you know. This guy's pretty big. I didn't sign up for no fight."

A snarling, animalistic grin formed on my lips before I knew it, and my teeth were bared in a primal snarl. At least one of them had more than one brain cell to rub together, I thought. "Hey Mikey," I mocked, copying the speaker and too far provoked by his leader's cocky arrogance to hold back. "How about you listen to your boy before I beat all three of you to a pulp." The initial speaker backed away the moment he heard that, his hands raised up, open-palmed, to the height of his shoulders in the universal sign for: 'this isn't my fight'.

Another one bites the dust
, I thought with satisfaction. Two left. Unfortunately, I hadn't managed to scare away either the Alexandria Eagles guy, or his leader, Mikey. Perhaps that was asking too much. More importantly,
from this distance
I could see the whites of Eagles' eyes as he stared greedily at the girl. And even more importantly, from this distance, I could tell that he was on something.

I locked eyes with the pretty blonde girl at the epicenter of this testosterone-fueled clash for the first time. A puff of air blew out of my mouth and I felt like I'd been punched by a bolt of lightning. She was way more beautiful than I'd allowed myself to imagine, and I'd allowed myself to imagine
a lot
. But she wasn't just looking at me, no, there was a message in those eyes. It was a universal one, an SOS, a cry for help. But it wasn't a request I'd ever fulfilled before, not that anyone had asked.

I was more used to getting kill orders sent directly to my phone than being asked to save someone. I shivered. It felt kind of nice, like it was warming me inside, instead of the cold knot of anger that usually carried me through a mission. I shot her a glance to say,
hey, don't worry, it'll all be okay
.

"Hey, Eagles," I called, and the guy turned slowly, stupidly to face me. His eyelids were drawn back, and the eyes themselves flickered wildly from side to side, as though afraid to catch my gaze. I knew it wasn't personal. He was high on meth, or something like PCP. At least, that would be my guess. It meant two things, he'd come at me wildly, without inhibition, and throw everything he could at me, which was bad; but it took his intelligence out of the equation, which was good. Even the stupidest man on earth is, at heart, the finest killing machine that nature has ever developed.

"Catch."

I wasn't going to wait another second. I'd seen the way he was looking at her, and there was no way I was going to risk it. I flung a half empty beer bottle directly at his forehead, and his hands floundered slowly in the middle of the air as he attempted to catch it. I didn't stand around watching. Every ounce of adrenaline left in me was being pumped into my bloodstream as fast as my body could handle.

Even my sense of smell kicked into overdrive, bringing to my attention things I would never have noticed in the normal world. Mikey's dead, fearful scent, led with the reek of body odor was most obvious, powerful, kicking itself head and shoulders above every other background scent. Eagles' drug-fueled chemical aroma was next on the agenda as my brain ran through every sense, detecting every threat; but there was something else too, a perfume that I felt like I could touch, taste and hold rather than just smell. I filed it away to deal with later, but it was her, I knew it. I hungered for it.

Time had slowed, and as I heard the beer bottle crashing against the floor, exploding into a thousand tiny shards of shattered glass, I drove my elbow into Mikey's gut. As I listened to the air hissing out of his lungs, a sense of satisfaction shimmered at the edge of my consciousness, but I didn't dwell on it. That was for amateurs. I span around him, using his body for leverage and brought my hand down against the back of his neck, out cold. He toppled to the floor, and I was about to finish him with a kick to the throat when a scream ripped the air apart.

My stomach clenched and I felt like throwing up.
How could I have been so stupid
, I thought. I turned as quickly as I could, and saw Mikey's compatriot approaching the blonde, a trickle of blood dribbling down his forehead from where the bottle had collided with it, and a wild-eyed manic look stretched across his thin, ugly face. Every muscle in my body tensed, and my brain sent a single message down every nerve way open to it. The message was simple,
save her
.

I cursed myself for not bringing a gun, or even a knife. It wasn't like me, but I just wanted to escape the life, just one night.

"Eagles," I shouted desperately. "Freeze!" I just needed a second, and I got it. He hesitated briefly, half turning his head to check whether I was carrying a weapon. The second he saw that I wasn't, he charged forward at the blonde, but I'd bought myself a time I needed. I threw myself forward toward him, lancing my body like an NFL linebacker. I hit him just above the hip, and sped through him, knocking him to the floor with an almighty hit. It didn't take a doctor to realize he wouldn't be getting up from that one for a while.

I picked myself up off the floor, feeling my thigh twinge with discomfort as it finally registered the pain of the fight. I cracked my neck, just to relieve the nerves. "So," I asked, as casually as I could with my blood thundering through my veins at lightspeed.

"What's your name?"