Phantom's Baby: A Mafia Secret Baby Romance (Mob City Book 3) (32 page)

When I was sure she was asleep, I leaned forward and whispered into her ear. "Weak? No, I think you're stronger than you know."

E
llie

I woke up, startled, to sirens blaring in the distance and found myself cold and alone. I reached over to the other side of the couch, but Roman was gone. The living room was dark as night, illuminated only by the city's night time glow being reflected off a carpet of fluffy white clouds and through the shuttered windows. The siren disappeared into the distance and my heartbeat returned to normal. For a second, my mind considered the option of running. No matter what way you sliced it, this was a crazy situation. I should be in hospital, not shacked up with a killer. Shit, there was probably a kidnapping task force looking for me.

I sat up, and as I did a soft blanket toppled off my shoulders and pooled on my lap. I blinked, I couldn't remember having put it there, or even think where it might have come from.
Roman
.

I stood up, needed to get moving. I'd been a passenger all this time, in hospital, then saved by someone else, and I needed to regain some small measure of control. I found a shiny silver Apple laptop lying on the black marble breakfast bar. As I opened it up, the illuminated Apple logo lit up and the light sparkled back off a thousand white specks in the black stone. I found myself transfixed, then wondering whether I was doing the right thing.

But I had to know.

I typed in the web address for the Alexandria Herald website, my fingers clucking across the keyboard like I had made this journey a hundred times and it loaded up in a flash. I don't know what I'd expected to see, maybe a giant headline with the title:
Murder at the Herald
, or perhaps a picture of my face. I saw none of that. There was a story on the city elections, hell, about the anything that wasn't a story on was the proverbial cat stuck in a tree. And me. I beat my palm against the counter in frustration.

A voice echoed from the darkness. "You're awake."

I jumped, and as I did my hand accidentally knocked against the laptop, sending it clattering to the floor.

Well, it would have gone clattering to the floor, except for the fact that Roman had the reflexes of a cat. He closed the last couple of yards between us in half a second and caught the expensive device before it hit the floor and smashed into a thousand pieces.

My heart was in my mouth. "Don't you use lights?"

I felt irrationally guilty, as though he'd caught me in the midst of a heist. I wasn't doing anything wrong, but I realized why I felt the way I did – I'd been looking for some proof that he was telling me the truth about who I was and why he'd had to save me.

If
he'd had to save me. I still wasn't entirely sure that this wasn't some kind of crazy, sociopathic game.

Trust
, I thought to myself,
but verify
. It was a motto that had served me well as a reporter, or at least I assumed that's where the phrase had jumped into my head from, and I could only hope that it would save me now.

"Find what you were looking for?" He asked, sidestepping my question as he returned to the laptop in front of me, without even looking at what was on the screen. I could have been emailing the police, for all he knew, yet he didn't seem to care.

"No," I answered honestly, and slightly angrily. I didn't know who I was more upset about – him, or the corrupt town that thought it was okay to ignore a murderous break-in at the city's only hospital. "There's not a single story about what happened at the hospital, you know that? And why don't you turn on a light, sometime?" I added, for good measure.

"Because I don't need to," he replied. "I see better at night."

"Better?" I asked skeptically.

"I'm not used to having people over." It wasn't an answer, and it was, all at once.

It irritated me. I'm not ashamed to admit it, either. "So what's the plan?"

"Plan?" He repeated, looking stupefied. "What are you talking about?"

The first tendrils of dawn began to creep into the room, and I realized I must've slept through the night. I'd slept off whatever drug had knocked me out to the hospital, I'd slept all night and I still felt dog tired. "This is it?" I asked, surprised. "Saving me and just bringing me here to do, what? Where even is
here
, anyway"

"We're about three blocks from the old Ford factory," he said. "In an old warehouse. I've been turning it into an apartment, but it takes time, doing it alone."

I was secretly impressed. The place was unfinished, that was clear, but where the work was complete, like the bedroom, it was
finished
to perfection. The marble was seated so precisely that if I had to guess I'd estimate that it was mounted at precisely ninety degrees to the wall, without even a smudge of sealant betraying where it was joined. The apartment bore the hallmarks of a craftsman, an artisan: someone who was positively obsessed with perfection.
Or a control freak…

"But you must've had a plan," I repeated. "Okay, not a plan, but an idea of what was going to happen after you brought me here? I can't to stay in your apartment for the rest of my life, can I?"

He shook his head. "No."

Is that it?

R
oman

I shouldn't have done it. I'd taken it for her, not for me, and there were no excuses, anyway. The warning was right there on the top of the folder:
Medical Professionals Only
. But I couldn't resist it. I felt awful, the lowest of the low as I pulled the folder out of my rucksack. It was about an inch and a half thick, and stacked with densely printed pages of white legal paper, often annotated with almost illegible medical scribbles in the margins.

Ellie's medical records.

It was hard to believe that anyone could have suffered enough injury and pain in one life to fill the entire folder, but apparently Ellie was one of those sorry people. I didn't know what made me do it, but I started at the back. The first record was dated December 2010. Ellie had broken her collarbone skiing. May 2011, she'd fractured her eye socket falling in the driveway. November 2011…

I blinked, looking away. I could barely bring myself to read the account of Ellie’s torture that lay so innocently in my hands. Because torture is what it was.

I bristled with anger as I read the passionless, impartial medical text. It was so devoid of heart that it may as well have been another language. It was so clear to me what had happened to her, I couldn't understand why nobody else seemed to have picked up on what, to me, seemed like obvious signs of domestic abuse. I was no stranger to violence, I had meted it out every day of my life, but never to women, never to children, never to anyone who didn't deserve it.

It was a strange moral code, that was for sure, but it was all I had.

The man who had done this to her? He was another kettle of fish entirely. A bully, an abuser, a
man
, if you could even call him that, who got his kicks from hurting women. And not just any woman, but Ellie.

Finally, after pages and pages and pages of heartless record-keeping, something made sense. The hastily scribbled note read:
referral, adult protective services?
I almost tossed the papers in the air for joy, but the relief was short-lived, for there was no record of anything actually progressing for the better from there. It was a good thing I didn't. The whole folder read like a horrific catalog of abuse, and a timeline of a woman sinking ever deeper into a spiral of depression.

There was one question in my mind, though. This was a woman who had stood over me with a kitchen knife, ready to plunge it into my heart, and she'd only been around me for a matter of hours. How had she lived through years of unrelenting, unremitting violence without breaking? It beggared belief.

A record from June 2014, broken finger, mentioned:
Stockholm syndrome?
But again, nothing was actually
done
. I drummed my fingers against the marble counter, up and down, up and down, pounding out a relentless beat of frustration. It was scarcely possible to believe that, in this day and age, no one had said anything, no one had done anything, and above all – nobody had stood up and stopped it from happening.

I grabbed my laptop. The Alexandria Herald's website was still up from when Ellie had used the Internet. I closed it down and opened a private browsing window. Like everything in my life, I liked order. The computer was no exception. I never had more than one tab running at any time, never any more than one program active. Simplicity had been drummed into me at an early age, and the virtue of cutting everything and everyone that wasn't absolutely necessary from one's life had been made entirely clear. I knew exactly why Ellie had never torn herself free, why she'd allowed herself to become a punching bag for a broken, bitter man. I understood it all. The reason was simple.

The same thing had happened to me.

My brother Timothy, Tim was standing in front of me, his hands tied behind his back around the wooden post. His lips were tight, and white with fear. "Hit him, Roman," dad slurred, his words barely audible through the drink. It was a game our father had made us play a hundred times, but the word game didn't do the reality of it any justice. There was no justice in that basement. That dark basement, where hope disappeared as quickly as the light when the door to the hallway upstairs swung shut.

The rules were simple. Simple, but unyielding. If either of us refused to play, neither of us ate. If I failed to make my brother cry, I didn't eat that night. If my brother cried, he didn't eat. We had to do it, my father said, to toughen us up, to make us the instruments of death that we were born to be. We'd learned a long time ago that it was best to do as my father ordered. Tim would cry, and he'd wince bending over for a week, and the next week it would be my turn.

But if we didn't do it, then there was no food at all. If we did, at least we could share a couple of hurried bites in secret.

My body was stiff, tense with remembered hatred and fear. I hadn't thought of
him
in a long time, yet it was a measure of the power the man still held over me, and over my emotions that within seconds my heart was racing as fast as if I just finished a hundred meter Olympic sprint. We'd had a thousand opportunities to escape, my brother and I, but neither of us took them, not for years, not until it was too late.

Abuse doesn't start out as abuse. At the beginning, the flashes of anger and the beatings, they're rare, understandable. They only come out when you've done something wrong, and the rest of the time you're smothered by love, care and affection. Only, the longer it goes on, the less frequent the affection becomes, and the more accurate the anger. And then, after a while you start to crave those brief flashes of affection.

I kept reading. Anything to take my mind off the memories.

I walked to a drawer, pulled it open, hands white with tense, clenched anger. The drawer was stacked with cheap cardboard packages. Ten dollar cell phones, burners. I didn't want a smart phone, didn't need one and wouldn't use one, even if I had it. In my line of work, you keep using the same phone, you're not long for the world. I powered the cheap black plastic device up and punched in a number off by heart. It rang twice, and a man's voice answered, simply. "Go."

"Gregory," I replied gruffly. My voice was hoarse with barely contained anger. "It's Roman. I need some information."

I needed to know that whoever had done this to Ellie, to my Ellie, wasn't walking the streets. If he was, then one thing was absolutely clear in my mind.

He wouldn't last long.

E
llie

A nagging sense of emptiness filled me wherever I went and whatever I did, and this, coupled with Roman's sudden disappearance had me feeling both bored and jumpy.

I might not have known who I was before the vast majority of my memories were scrubbed away in the accident, but I was pretty sure I knew what I wasn't lazy. I knew instinctively that I wasn't the kind of gal who could be happy to just sit around browsing the Internet all day.

I paced around the apartment, looking for something to do. I opened a cupboard, more out of absent-minded boredom than for any other, real reason. The dark closet contained enough cleaning supplies to manage an office building, let alone a small apartment, and like everything else in Roman's domain, it was neatly organized with military precision.

My mouth curled into a slight grin as I briefly considered cleaning the place, just for something to do, but I dismissed the thought as soon as it had arrived. "Yeah right," I said to no one in particular. "I'm not going to pretend to be some kind of perfect wife for this guy."
No matter how hot, or mysterious he is
… The last bit I kept entirely for the privacy of my own head. I wasn't even sure I wanted to admit to myself how much I fancied the reserved Russian, as much because of what falling for a man who was, in essence, my kidnapper said about me as for anything else.

As I restlessly paced through the apartment, I began to notice a divide that hadn't been apparent at first glance. Where the construction and decoration was complete, the rooms were immaculately clean, tidy and organized; but where Roman hadn't yet managed to finish painting, or putting up drywall, the exact opposite held true. Trays of dried paint, full pots and planks of wood were haphazardly piled up, begging for an accident.

I felt as though it represented two halves of a single, fractured globe. Still pacing, but locked up in my own head, I accidentally stubbed my bare toe against a heavy pot of light gray emulsion paint. I hopped around the room on one foot, holding the other tightly to ward off the pain and hurling obscenities into the air. But even as I catapulted myself around the room, just trying to keep moving, to keep my mind off the pain, I began to have the beginnings of an idea.

What if I smartened this place up?
I thought. I couldn't help but imagine the surprised, yet gratified smile that would form on Roman's face when he walked through the door, back from wherever he had disappeared off to. The thought warmed me up inside, and besides, I thought, rationalizing away the cheesy, fuzzy warmth that had begun to brew in my stomach, it would give me something to do.

I looked for a paintbrush, but that was the one thing that wasn't stacked untidily in a pile, waiting for its chance to deal someone's careless toes a heavy helping of pain. I went looking for a paintbrush, but instead I found the truth.

A part of it, anyway. I breezed through the kitchen, idly pulling out drawers. Almost every one of them were empty, a far cry from my own home, which was filled to the rafters with useless,
must-have
knickknacks. Almost every drawer, that is, except for the one that wasn't. That one was filled with old-school, black cell phones, from a world back before apps and smart phones. My reporter's brain supplied the word.
Burners
.

My fingers jumped back off the drawer like I'd been scalded, and my brain filled with an overwhelming sense of betrayal. Air hissed out of my lungs, and the word "No," escaped my lips. The second I saw my medical records, stuffed in a drawer and hidden away, I knew that I'd been deceived.

I might not have understood the full extent of what was going on, or why I was being hidden away like Rapunzel in her tower, but I understood one thing very clearly: I was being lied to. Roman was lying to me, and had been for some time.

Maybe he's just a
sicko
…

I leafed through the brown manila folder, suddenly desperate to discover the truth. When I found it, what I read bowled me over. My heart rate quickened, then doubled in speed, accelerating every second as my eyes greedily devoured the text. The words were troubling, no, devastating. All at once I fully understood the aching sense of emptiness, loneliness and abandonment that I'd been carrying around since I awoke from my coma, one question answered, but another dozen doors opened.

"No," I cried in anguish. "That can't be right, it just can't…"

Now, there was only one thought on my mind. One place I needed to be.

And it wasn't here.

* * *

"
A
lice
," I hissed. I was skulking in the shadows, near the staff entrance to Alexandria General, a place that I'd watched out of my hospital window many times, but never visited. The friendly middle-age nurse turned with a smile, aware that she'd heard a familiar voice, but so far unable to precisely place the source. After spending four hours lurking outside the hospital, making sure that nobody spotted that I was there, I was cold, wet and tired, with an unfamiliar ache in legs that, for all my vain attempts to exercise them, were still unaccustomed to hard work. But I didn't feel any of it. A burning sense of duty carried me forward, as powerful as any soldier's in the line of duty, because
my
duty was the most powerful goal for any woman in any time. If I had ever allowed myself to be weak before, to bob like a rudderless dinghy on the surface of waves that I didn't understand and couldn't control, then that time was gone.

Alice turned, and recoiled with surprise as she saw me, all color draining from her face. I had spent many long hours talking to her over the course of my recovery, and knew that above all, she was a strong, passionate, proud person, for whom her chosen profession was a calling, rather than a career.

Yet, in a city like Alexandria, only a fool would be happy to see a mob target turning up out of the blue for a chat. Her hand trembled as she lifted it up to wave at me, before seeming to recognize the nervous message it conveyed. "Ellie…" She stammered, struggling for words. "What are you doing here? Are you…" She paused. "Are you okay?"

As she drew closer to me, I could see that the skin around her eyes was drawn, and wrinkled with tiredness. Perhaps the color hadn't drained from her face, so much as it had never been there in the first place. I saw all that, and yet I still couldn't contain myself.

"How could you not tell me, Alice? How could you?" I broke off, my voice disappearing under the immense strain of the anguish.

She pulled me nervously into a concrete alcove beside the hospital entrance, and, my subconscious mind noticed, underneath but out of sight of a CCTV camera. "Ellie," she said, layering a professional veneer over a voice that was still ruled by stress and sorrow. "What are you doing here? Where have you been? The police –"

I cut her off. "Answer me, Alice," I burst out. "Do you think I'm here for a social call?" There was a hard edge to my voice that I didn't recognize. But if I had to be a different person, had to take up a role to survive, and to protect my own, then I knew without a doubt that I was up to the task.

She recoiled as though she'd been stung, and for a second I thought that I'd gone too far. But no sooner had I prepared to broach the uncomfortable, tense silence than her shoulders slumped forward, and she seemed to age a dozen years in a moment. "We were going to, Ellie," she began. "Believe me, 100 times, believe me. You don't know how hard it was for me –"

"How hard it was for you?" I exclaimed, feeling the cold flame of anger beginning to lick around my stomach.

She raised her hand to stop me before I got into my stride. I had enough of
me
left to hold back from the edge. I hadn't come here for a fight, I'd come here for a path out of this mess, and attacking Alice wasn't going to get me the answers that I wanted. "I know, I know," she said, with the pallid color of a defeated woman. "I'm sorry, please, please believe me. Will you listen?" She asked.

I nodded.

"With a case like yours…" She started, bouncing nervously from foot to foot. "A traumatic brain injury of that magnitude, that extent," she paused, weighing up the words. "It's almost unprecedented. And of course, that's not even mentioning your condition."

"My condition?" I questioned dangerously. "I was pregnant. I was pregnant, and nobody said a damn thing. Not even you, Alice. A month, was it, that I was awake, and
even you
didn't tell me?"

Alice eyed me up, with the same nervous look that a beaten dog might give its master. "Six weeks. You know that… You know the child survived?"

The child
. Hearing her say it brought it home to me, that I was a mother, and that I didn't know whether I'd given birth to a son or daughter, didn't even know their name. I might never have known that I was pregnant, even, couldn't trust my feeble, damaged brain to give me that tiny comfort.

I nodded. "That's why I'm here, Alice. Like I said, not a social call, huh. Where is –." I fell silent, my brain struggling to grasp the fact that I didn't know whether to call my child a
he
, or
she
. I thought of saying
it
, but that felt cold, and impersonal. What kind of mother would talk about their child like that?

"Can I tell you something?" Alice asked softly, her chin falling almost to her chest. She seemed small now, not the same confident, capable woman who'd held my hand through an awakening and recovery that had been so terrifying and fragile that it almost mirrored a baby's entrance into this cold, cruel world.

She didn't wait for a reply, just started talking in a sad, defeated monotone. "Almost a year," she said quietly. "Almost a year you were in that coma, a tiny bit more actually. I remember the day they wheeled you into the TBI ward, and I sat by your bedside every month, as the leaves began to fall, and grew backagain.." She laughed sadly." You've got to understand, Ellie, no one wakes up after an injury like yours, it just doesn't happen. You were
pregnant
when they brought you in, and you wouldn't believe how many arguments we had about what to do about it, about you."

My hand jumped reflexively to my belly, though it's inhabitant was long gone. I felt sick with worry, and pained by the thought that my child's life had once been up in the air, at the mercy of a bunch of uninvolved, emotionless doctors. "What are you talking about?" I croaked.

"I rubbed cocoa butter on your stomach every day, you know that?" Alice whispered, talking in riddles. "

"How could I not have known?" I wailed, tackling the knotted, tough meat of the issue for the first time. Fickle waves of temperature coursed through my body, like a fever breaking and then roaring back ever stronger – only dozens of times a second as my brain struggled to process what Alice was saying.

"What kind of mother,” my voice cracked. “What kind of mother forgets her own damn kid? What kind of
person
does that make me?”

“It’s not your fault. None of it is. The brain protects itself," Alice said, more confidently now that she was back on the familiar ground of her medical expertise. "From things it's not yet ready to confront. That would be my guess, anyhow. But you, Ellie? I gave up trying to guess with you a long time ago... You're an enigma, a cipher,
a miracle
. The things that have happened to you, they just shouldn't happen." She looked up, flushed as she realized what she was implying. "But I'm glad they did."

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a pair of heavyset, grim-faced man in cheap blue overcoats exiting the staff parking garage. My heart began to beat faster, hitting irregular, terrified notes in a symphony of fear. I turned to look at them more carefully.
They aren't doctors
, I thought. "Alice," I shouted. "Run!"