Going Once, Taken Twice: A Dark Romance

by Claire St. Rose

  I felt her fidgeting in her sleep. She didn’t wake up, but I watched her for a while after she had stilled again. Her eyelashes were long and dark, like her hair.

  Mine, I thought.

  All mine.

  Her father gave her away at the wedding. She hadn’t lived under his roof for years, and she was now living under mine. ‘Til death do us part. She wasn’t mine like my car was mine, or the house that we lived in was mine. She was mine to protect. To have and to hold…and all that shit.

  All the calls I had made were dead ends. Nobody could tell me who was after Isa, or whether anyone actually was after her. It made me mad. It was fucking insulting. We didn’t need this. She didn’t need this. Who the hell was it? Did they know what the hell they had gotten themselves into, coming after someone connected to me?

  I heard a noise that sounded like it came from outside. I laid still and listened. I heard the faint ticking of a clock and Isa’s steady breathing. I held my breath.

  There was someone outside the room. I gently shifted Isa from on top of me and walked towards the window. Whoever was outside the room was out there…because the hallways on the other side were carpeted, so they wouldn’t make a sound when they walked. I listened as I approached the window. The sound was metallic…the fire escape.

  I reached into Isa’s purse and grabbed her handgun because it was closer than mine. I walked to the window again and held the gun up, close to my face. My heart was pounding and anger coursed through me as I thought about whoever might be out there. I moved the curtain back with the barrel of the gun and saw a shadowy figure outside the window. I scrambled to open the window, and they saw me.

  They took off down the fire escape. I swung a leg outside the window and pointed the gun at them but didn’t shoot. That would have caused more of a disturbance than was needed right then. If the hotel staff heard gunshots and traced it back to us, then we wouldn’t be able to get out of here, which was exactly what we had to do. I shut and locked the window and started putting my clothes on. All the movement must have bothered Isa. She stirred on the bed, but she didn’t wake up.

  I gently woke her, stroking her cheek. Her eyes fluttered open.

  “What is it?” she asked, “What time is it?”

  “There’s no time. Get dressed,” I told her. She sat up, her eyes wide with fear.

  “Lorenzo, what’s going on?” she asked. Her voice was shaking. I didn’t want to scare her more, but I also didn’t want to lie to her.

  “We can’t stay here anymore, whoever is after you knows that we’re here.”

  “What happened when I was sleeping? Lorenzo?” She had stood and wrapped the gown she had on earlier back around her. I couldn’t stand the look on her face. Her eyes were wide, and she had no color in her. I cupped her face and kissed her. I told myself it was for her, but I knew it was for me, too.

  “I’ll explain everything in the car. Get dressed, we have to leave.” She didn’t ask any more questions, and I was glad she didn’t. I was too angry to talk. I wanted to break something, punch someone. I wanted to punch whoever the punk was that was trying to get into our hotel room. What if I had been in the bathroom, or had left the room for whatever reason? What if Isa had been alone? I could have become a widower tonight. She could have been murdered right under my nose. This wasn’t a game any longer. This was war.

  Chapter Nine

  Isa

  On a scale of one to ten, how fucked up was it that the time during which Lorenzo and I had bonded the most was when we thought there was someone out there trying to make an attempt on my life?

  It was coming up on two weeks since we had been home, and I was torn. One part of me was sick of living in hotels, and the other loved the odd peace and bonding Lorenzo and I had experienced since the whole fiasco at the restaurant a couple weeks ago. It was sort of weird that I wanted to be back home. That house had been my prison, where Lorenzo kept me as he went about whatever he did all day. I couldn’t fucking wait to see the inside of that hell again.

  After leaving the first place in the dead of night, we had made our way somewhere else, staying there for a few nights, and then finally ending up where we were now. We had crossed the bridge and were in Brooklyn. At the front desk of this place, we had checked in as Mr. and Mrs. Valentino, which I didn’t even know was something that people did in real life.

  Lorenzo had been extremely attentive. People should be trying to kill me all the time if this was what it did to him. He was on edge, jumping whenever there was a knock at the door and staying up way past the time that I fell asleep, continuously waking to check that the windows and door to the suite were locked.

  It was tiresome to watch, but he wouldn’t stop it at my request. I didn’t hate it. In fact, it was sort of nice. I didn’t want him worrying himself sick about me, but I wasn’t going to turn away the additional attention and care. We had been getting along famously, which was strange. You would think that we would be our best selves in the home we shared, but really, the home was a biased space.

  Technically, it was his home and I had just moved in. It was the place where he came to rest after work, and it was the place where all my work was. At the hotels, we were in various small rooms together, forced to share the space. We were also both completely out of our comfort zones. I couldn’t hide from him when I was here, and he could leave for work, but he had to come back and face me sooner or later.

  We had been having sex nearly every other night. It was a revelation. I knew it shocked him, too. Most of the time we didn’t even need alcohol to suitably lubricate the situation and get us in the mood. More than once he had kissed me. Just kissed me, for no particular reason. He was sometimes leaving the room, or had just seen me after I had come out of the shower or something and kissed me. It was nice. In fact, it was kind of great.

  There was no way it would last. I knew we would fall into our old patterns once the present danger was over and we went back home. Maybe—once we were there—he wouldn’t piss me off enough to make me sleep in another bed again. All his stressing and irregular sleep had meant that he was tired during the day. The first day he had come back to the room, tired, and he slumped into the bed, I had silently joined him and he hadn’t pushed me away. He had cuddled me to his side, and we had taken a nap together. It was very juvenile and disgustingly cute, but it felt amazing. Real or not…it was the two of us being peaceful and nice to each other—and that was all that mattered. He looked beautiful when he was asleep. Younger than his twenty-eight years and a lot less worldly and hard. Much more innocent and soft.

  We were like that now. Asleep in the middle of the day together, because why not, except I was awake. I couldn’t sleep. Something was bothering me. We had had sex the night before. Amazing, passionate sex, and after, when I had gone to clean up in the bathroom, it had occurred to me that I had not gotten my period since before the wedding. I was due, in fact, past due by this point. I hadn’t had to run by a drugstore or use one of the emergency tampon I had in my purse.

  It could have been a lot of things. Just because my period was late didn’t mean I was pregnant. No. That was, of course, a possibility, but it wasn’t the only thing that it could be. I wracked my brain for excuses. I had been regular since my late teens. I could track my period like clockwork. I was rarely late, and when I was, it was only ever about three days tops. Three days had come and gone and had turned into a full week.

  Had I felt any other symptoms?

  Nausea? Increased appetite? Decreased appetite? Fatigue? Weight gain?

  No. None of them. Well… I had been feeling sort of bloated and heavy lately, but I attributed that to all the rich hotel food we had been eating since we hadn’t been home for a while. The other symptoms could easily be caused by something else, but the period loss was by far the most damning. Maybe it was the stress of all the moving around we had been doing lately. Maybe it was the stress of being targeted by some sort of mob hitman.

  I took a few deep
breaths. Trying to calm myself down. Lorenzo was asleep on the bed beside me in all his clothes. If there was ever a time to do this, it was now. He was completely worn out. There had to be a drugstore somewhere. I’d be gone and back in under half an hour. I quietly left the hotel room and made my way out of the hotel. Lorenzo would be so mad if he found out that I had left without telling him.

  He would probably be madder if he found out where it was that I was going, though.

  My mind was racing. This could not be the truth. I wasn’t going to take the test in order to confirm the pregnancy. I was going to take it in order to make sure what I believed was actually the case. I was not pregnant. I just wanted confirmation that that was true.

  Picking up the home pregnancy test, I paid for it and got back to the hotel. I stopped on my way up to our suite. If Lorenzo found the home pregnancy test… how would he react? It would likely depend on what the result turned out to be. If it was negative, he would probably have nothing to say. If there was no baby, there was no problem.

  We had never used condoms any of the times that we had had sex. Never. Part of me—whenever it happened—just thought why bother? We were married. How would Lorenzo have reacted if we were in the heat of the moment and I stopped him to ask him to please put a rubber on? Was he one of those guys who didn’t believe in their use? Claimed he couldn’t feel anything when he had one on? Our backgrounds were similar, so did he also have a dogmatic list of Catholic “don’ts” that he lived by? Thou shalt not use contraception?

  I actually marveled at how irresponsible that was of me. I knew my own sexual history, but I had no idea about Lorenzo’s. With the number of women he tended to have over at the house, I thought it was safe to go ahead and call him something of a playboy. The moment we slept together, was I exposing myself to every single one of the birds he had slept with? I shuddered at the thought. Did I have to get tested?

  My thoughts were running away with me. The ladies’ restroom in the hotel lobby was the perfect place to administer the test. I could trash it once it was used and it would be untraceable to me. No matter what the result, Lorenzo would never stumble upon it and see whatever the result was.

  The three-minute wait dragged by with painful slowness. I knew it felt like it took eons because I just wanted to know what the result was, but my anxiety was building up in my head and tumbling down at a rate that was making my palms sweat. I picked the test up and looked at it after the alert on my phone sounded, indicating three minutes had passed. Squeezing my eyes shut, I counted to three and opened them.

  Three black letters spelling the word “YES” and a tiny “+” sign next to it.

  Yes.

  Yes.

  The answer to the question was that I was pregnant. The answer was YES.

  I felt like a hole had opened up in the pit of my stomach. My hand went instinctively to my belly. My eyes filled with tears and my eyesight became blurry, but I didn’t know what or who I was crying for. Was it because I was scared? Was I happy? Was I overwhelmed? Was I all of those things? Regardless of whether I was or I wasn’t, I was pregnant. I was pregnant with my husband’s baby.

  The tears spilled down my face, hot and fast. I quickly threw the positive test and the box the test came in into the trash—as if the result would stop being positive if I couldn’t see the test anymore. I washed my face in the sink and tried to compose myself. I still had to go back upstairs to the suite. I still had to face Lorenzo as if nothing was the matter.

  Since the beginning, as soon as I had accepted that I was going to be married to someone I didn’t know, there was one thing that had kept me going. As awful as it was to think, marriage was not permanent. It wasn’t. There was an out—and that was called divorce. That was always an option for me. Our parents had not stipulated that we had to be together for any minimum amount of time. That meant we could just call it quits when they had no more use for us anymore. Hell, maybe they would even do us the courtesy of informing us when they no longer needed our service and pay for the divorce proceedings the way they had paid for the wedding.

  We had said “‘til death do us part” but how many other people had said that and still proceeded to dissolve their marriages. Marriages that had been built on foundations much stronger than ours was. That had been my saving grace. This was not my forever. It was my right now, but it was not my forever. I could leave. If I really wanted to, I could leave. If I really had to, that was an option for me. That was true up until that little test in the trash had told me that the decisions I was going to make from now on were not only going to affect me.

  I had to tell Lorenzo.

  Could I do that? Should I do that? I mean, I had to tell him. It was his. I had been single for years before our marriage, so there was no way in hell the baby was someone else’s. The tears came back, angrier and more urgent when I thought about telling my husband the news. What would he do? Did he want kids? What if he thought I was lying to him and was just trying to trap him in a loveless marriage to punish him for what our fathers had made us do? What if he… oh my god, what if he demanded I get rid of it? What if he demanded I give it up when it was born so we couldn’t raise it?

  Every thought was even more horrible than the last. I couldn’t take it. Everything was ruined. Ruined. The past two weeks had been so great, almost blissful, and they were about to come to a crashing halt because there was no way he would be happy to hear about this. We had been making each other so happy for the past two weeks…and this was going to undo it completely.

  He was a powerful and connected man in the mob circles. Was a newborn baby going to be an asset to him? How the hell would I be able to go back to work now? When would I be able to? I shuddered when I thought about his reaction. No matter what it would be, happy or sad, it didn’t matter because no matter what he felt, the inescapable truth was he and I were stuck together now. For the long haul.

  Chapter Ten

  Lorenzo

  The suite was empty when I woke up. I must have dozed off. She had been right there. She had fallen asleep beside me. I didn’t feel her weight on me. I ran my hands over the bed to my left and right hoping to come into contact with her sleeping form. I shot upright. The bed was empty.

  I panicked.

  Where was Isa?

  As if she had heard me, she came out of the bathroom with her purse. She must have been in there putting her makeup on or something. I didn’t ask her. I greeted her instead.

  “Hi,” I said to her.

  “Hey, did you sleep well?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Great,” I said distractedly as I heard my phone buzz. I took the call on the balcony, leaving her in the room. I waited until I had slid the balcony door shut before I started talking.

  “What do you have for me?” I asked shortly.

  “Where are you?” one of my guys asked.

  “We moved hotels a couple times. What happened? Did you get the guy?”

  “We don’t have an ID on him, but we do know that he won’t be bothering you guys anymore.”

  “What happened?”

  “He’s dead.”

  I blinked a couple times.

  “He’s what?”

  “Dead. You guys can go back home.”

  “Who killed him? Who was it?” I demanded.

  “No one of importance. He was probably working solo. He’s dead now, so there’s nothing to worry about.”

  I sighed. Most of the men weren’t attached. If they had families, they would care a little more about things like this. They might be able to have some empathy and understand that there was nearly nothing more painful to think of than my wife being murdered because I had failed to protect her.

  “I’m not going home until there’s a patrol around the house. You set that up. Every hour of the day I want at least one person patrolling the house. If my wife gets hurt, I’m coming after you personally. Do you understand?” I snarled, surprised at my own insistence.

  “Consider it done. You t
wo can go home. I’m sending someone to your house right now.”

  I ended the call and paced up and down the balcony a couple times.

  It was done. Just like that. We were in the clear. We could go back home. I wanted to be happier about the news than I was, but I couldn’t help feel iffy about it. Who was the guy? Why didn’t the guys get an ID on him? What conceivable reason was there for him to be after Isa, besides to get my attention? Hitmen were taken out all the time, but this one was special. This one had made the crucial mistake of fucking with the wrong man’s woman.

  I reentered the room. Isa was just sitting on the bed. She looked up when she heard me.

  “Any news?” she asked casually.

  “Yeah. We’re clear. We can go back home.”

  Her brow furrowed, as her clear, green eyes looked at me.