by LaQuette
She placed both hands on either side of his face and pulled him for a quick kiss. “Let’s just say Big Tony reminded me of some of the colossal mistakes I’ve made that contributed to all of this craziness too. It’s kind of hard to point fingers at people when your accusing thumb is looking back at you.”
Sanai winced again, another contraction stealing her breath for a few moments. She pursed her lips and breathed in long, slow breaths until her body seemed to relax.
“Dante, I don’t want the cause of the death of our relationship to be ‘lies you tell.’”
“Come again?” he queried.
“You know, the lies you tell when you think the truth will hurt too much. The small lies you think will comfort instead of hurt. If you tell enough of those kind of lies, they each tear little nicks into your foundation until eventually, you’ve got a big hole where your trust used to be. No matter how bad it is just talk to me.”
“My past is ugly, Sanai. I never wanted you to see me like that. Dirty, marred with the stink of my family’s crimes. I didn’t want that to be how you thought of me.”
“Are you telling me you murdered people? Is that what you mean by ugly?”
He sat up straight, trying his best to come up with an answer to her question. The truth was, Dante had many dead bodies assigned to his hands. When his father named Dante his successor, Dante had to prove himself. He had to make his bones in order to garner the respect of the DeLuca family. His job as Don DeLuca had been to speak the order. Once those words fell from his lips, they were made real by one of his underlings. But before Dante’s father had slipped the gold ring on his finger, Dante had been as ruthless as any of the men who worked for him when it came to getting a job done.
“Sanai, I don’t want to lie to you by giving you some half-truth that equals a whole lie. You can ask me about my past, but don’t ask me about specifics of what I did or didn’t do during my tenure as Don DeLuca. It’s not a time in my life I like to revisit.”
She relaxed into the bed and nodded. He understood then that she really didn’t want the cold hard facts. She just wanted to know that he’d be honest with her. He leaned in for another kiss and smiled at her. “I promise, no more lies.” He rubbed her belly and gave her a wink. “And to prove I mean what I say, I’m going to give you a truth that you may or may not be ready to hear.”
“What’s that?”
Dante pointed down at her stomach and smiled. “That wasn’t ten minutes between your contractions. It was more like three.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Sanai twisted in the hospital bed, reaching for the handrail. She needed something other than Dante’s hand to squeeze since she’d sent him to check on Nazario.
She was four centimeters, the magic number that would earn her a much-desired epidural. This was happening too quickly. With Nazario, she’d labored for days before she’d made it to four centimeters. Salvatore didn’t seem to have as much patience as his elder brother. This kid was coming soon.
She heard the door open and smiled when she saw her nurse.
“Hi, it’s just me, Janet. The anesthesiologist is a little backed up. I thought you might like a little Demerol.”
“God, yes.” She smiled as best she could through the current contraction. The nurse cleaned off a port in her IV line with an alcohol prep and screwed the syringe on. Within moments Sanai began to feel the effects of the pain reliever.
Sanai relaxed a bit until she noticed something strange. She felt tired. Really tired. Her limbs became heavy. Her eyelids began to droop.
“What?” Sanai slurred. She couldn’t get the rest of the sentence out. Something was wrong. She’d had Demerol before. It took the edge off the pain, but it shouldn’t make her feel as if she was going to pass out. Not in the proper dose anyway.
She tried to get the nurse’s attention but couldn’t seem to find her arms, couldn’t move them. It wasn’t until she pulled her eyes up to the nurse’s face and heard the woman whisper, “I’m so sorry,” that she realized she was in terrible danger.
Her last thought before the darkness claimed her was, Dante, help us.
* * * *
“Fucking Bernadino,” Dante hissed through his clenched teeth. He stood at the bank of elevators talking to Big Tony. “You try to be nice… I knew I should’ve ended that son of a bitch.”
“You sure it was him?” Tony questioned.
“Yeah, it was him.” Dante leaned against the wall trying to wrap his head around the fact that his once-trusted captain had just tried to stab him in the back.
“What are you going to do about this, Dante? You gotta think hard. A wrong move, and your world blows up.”
“I know,” Dante replied. “For now, I’m just focusing on protecting my family. Something just feels off about all of this. I can’t put my finger on it yet, but something’s not right. I’m calling in some muscle to watch over Sanai and the kids. Mancini is lending me some of his men.”
“All right,” Big Tony conceded. “What do you need me to do?”
“Protect my son like he was your own.”
Big Tony opened his arms and pulled Dante into a tight embrace. “Brother—that? You don’t even have to ask.”
* * * *
Dante met the protection detail in the lobby and escorted one half to Nazario’s room. He made introductions with Big Tony and the medical staff, then had the remaining men follow him back to Sanai’s hospital ward.
As soon as he stepped into the room, the wrongness of it smacked him in the face. The hospital bed was missing, leaving a gaping hole in the center of the room. He ran out to the nurse’s station looking for Sanai’s nurse.
“Excuse me, is Janet around? Sanai Ward isn’t in her room. Did something happen?”
The young man in teal scrubs looked up from the chart in his hand and focused on Dante. “Hi, I’m Rick. I’m covering for Janet while she’s on break. Let me just go take a look.” The young man headed for Sanai’s room. He looked inside, his brow pinching as he encountered the empty room. He knocked on the en suite bathroom, opened the door, and found it empty too.
He checked around a few more places on the ward and still couldn’t find Sanai. He returned to the nurses’ station and picked up the telephone. “I’m sorry sir,” he said as his fingers frantically pressed the digits on the keypad. “I don’t know where Ms. Ward is.” He held a hand up to Dante and focused his attention on the call. “Please page hospital police to labor and delivery. We have a missing patient.”
Dante slammed his hand against the desk and turned to the men behind him. Before he could speak, his phone vibrated. He tapped on his messages and found a selfie of Sanai and Tomassa staring back at him. Before Dante had a chance to react a second message came through.
If you want her back in one piece, you’ll do exactly as I say.
Dante felt the heavy weight of the pistol he always kept strapped to his ankle. His little piece of security just in case he ever had a run-in with his not-so-distant past. He might have left the mob, but some of the old ways still stuck with him. He tried not to dwell on the dark way he’d lived his life for those lost years. Sanai and Nazario were more than enough to make him forget who he used to be. But knowing this crazed maniac had stolen the woman he loved and their unborn child forced him to turn his mental dial back to reset. Dante could feel Don DeLuca clicking into place.
Dante was a piece of work, yes. But Don DeLuca knew how to gut a bitch without flinching. A skill he planned to get plenty of practice executing tonight.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Please don’t do this,” Sanai begged.
Whatever the nurse had slipped into her IV must’ve been short acting. Slowly but surely Sanai was regaining feeling in her limbs.
She looked around to get her bearings. White walls and bright lights told her she was still in the hospital. She just needed to figure out which part. An X-ray machine parked against the corridor wall told her she was in the radiology su
ite. The emergency room possessed its own radiology room. These suites were for scheduled outpatient and inpatient X-rays that were only used during regular business hours.
Apparently her kidnappers had done their homework. If you were going to hold someone hostage in a hospital, this was the perfect place. It was secluded in an old wing of the hospital. There was no traffic, very little chance of being discovered, and the public exits were on the opposite side of the wing.
A familiar face walked into Sanai’s line of sight, raising her heart rate. Instinctively she tried to sit up in the bed, readying herself to protect her unborn child if need be, but she was still too weak and groggy from the drugs to do more than scoot up an inch or two.
“Stay away from me,” Sanai hissed.
“So you’re the real Sanai Ward?” Tomassa asked. “So glad to finally make your acquaintance.”
“He’ll never give you what you want, Tomassa.”
A finely arched eyebrow lifted with perfected skepticism. “Oh really? What exactly is it that you think I want?”
“Dante will never come back to you. It doesn’t matter what you do to me…he won’t come back to you.”
Tomassa shrugged her shoulders and leaned down closer into Sanai’s personal space. “I want my power back. Only Dante can give that to me. And now that I have you, he’s going to do whatever I tell him to.”
Tomassa walked around the perimeter of the bed, watching Sanai, seemingly categorizing every inch of her being before she spoke again. “I can’t say I really understand what his attachment to you is. You’re pretty average looking, and that motherland hairstyle you’re wearing really isn’t all that appealing. I mean, would it kill you to see a hairdresser every now and again? No matter, whatever it is that makes him so crazy about you, it’s the very thing that’s going to ensure that I get exactly what I want.”
Sanai shook her head. “Love,” Sanai uttered. “That’s what binds Dante to me, and the only thing it’s going to get you is killed. If you harm me or this baby, Dante will never stop until he squeezes the life out of you.”
Tomassa swallowed hard and bit the corner of her bottom lip. Sanai didn’t know the woman beyond her penchant for homicidal tendencies, but she’d wager that was an exhibition of fear. Sanai might’ve been the one taken without her consent, but Tomassa was the one who was scared.
* * * *
Sanai breathed through another contraction. Whatever Janet had given her earlier was beginning to wear off, and her contractions were coming back with a vengeance. “At least your water hasn’t broken yet,” Sanai mumbled to herself. As long as her membranes remained intact, she knew she had a chance to deliver this baby as she’d originally planned.
Sanai watched her nurse, Janet, enter the room. Less than an hour ago she would’ve been relieved to see the woman. Now, her instincts had her sitting up in the bed, watching the other woman carefully.
“Come to drug me again?”
Janet hung her head as she shook it gently. She folded her arms around herself and moved from one nervous foot to the other. “I didn’t want to. They took my daughter. I couldn’t refuse.”
Some of the fire left Sanai. She was still angry, but at the moment her anger wasn’t directed at this woman. Another victim in a madwoman’s deranged plans. “How old is your daughter?”
“Seven,” she answered.
“Listen, we’re going to get out of this. All of us. As soon as my boyfriend shows up, he will handle this.
“Unless he’s some sort of secret superhero, I don’t see how any of that matters.”
Sanai smiled as she found the first moment of humor in this entire situation. “That’s because you don’t know Dante DeLuca. He’s my hero, and he’ll set the world ablaze to find me.”
Sanai winced as another contraction radiated from the base of her spine and wrapped around the expanse of her stomach. They were getting stronger. If she didn’t get out of this mess soon her baby could very well be born into all this chaos. She closed her eyes, forcing her thoughts to focus on the thing she loved most—her family. They’d made unbelievable strides in the last year. They’d make more in the future. She had to hold on to that if she was going to remain sane throughout this ordeal.
She was scared and worried out of her fucking brain, but the one thing she didn’t doubt was Dante saving her from this mess. He’d promised to protect their family at all costs. She knew he would do it somehow.
Sanai heard footsteps clicking against the tiled floor and opened her eyes. Her captor stepped inside pushing a wheelchair. “Get her in the chair,” she directed the nurse.
“She’s in labor. Her contractions are really close. Please let me keep her here. I can monitor her here,” Janet responded.
Tomassa pulled a black pistol from behind her back and smiled as if it were normal to point guns at people in a hospital. “I don’t care if she spits that baby out on the curb. I said get her ready, and that’s exactly what I meant.”
Janet moved carefully but quickly, pushing the chair beside the bed, locking it into place, then helping Sanai from the bed onto the chair. Once she was secured, Tomassa stood over her. “Come on, Ms. Ward. We’ve got an audience scheduled with your man, Dante.”
* * * *
Dante walked slowly through the underground parking lot. He could make out several lights that were broken, leaving too many shadowed places for the unknown to hide. He walked down the center lane alone, just as Tomassa had demanded.
She was sitting on the hood of a black sedan with her legs crossed, dangling one foot casually as she waited for him.
“Where is she, Tomassa?”
She leaned back, bracing herself on a flattened palm against the hood. Her full lips spread into a smile that made ice slide down the length of his spine.
“Dante?” she cooed. “Is that any way to greet your wife? Asking about another woman?”
“I’m not playing games with you, Tomassa. If you’ve hurt her or our baby, there won’t be a grave deep enough to bury you in.”
The smile slid off of her face, and he watched her throat contract. She might have the upper hand in this situation, but they both knew who’d always held the real power.
“I’m running this show,” she uttered, her voice shakier than she’d intended. She cleared her throat, probably in hopes of regaining some of the ground her obvious fear of him had cost her.
He smiled. Tomassa was good at giving orders, telling others to do the dirty work she assigned. Getting her own hands dirty was another matter. Yeah, she’d killed Eli Rosen, but only because he’d smacked her around after they’d had sex. Dante never believed it was her intention to have Eli die that night, but once it happened, she knew she couldn’t come forward. The posturing she was standing here doing wasn’t her style. Making a phone call or two to get something done was. Her maniacal ability to plan shit out made her lethal and kept most of her underlings in check. But she’d never been able to completely control Dante for one reason—he ran his family like a man who had nothing to live for, and Tomassa feared that kind of desperation.
“Tomassa, you ain’t running shit, and I think we both know that. End this bullshit; give me Sanai, and I’ll let you live. Otherwise, all bets are off.”
She slid off the hood, placing her designer heels on the concrete floor. “You are not Don DeLuca,” she screamed. “You gave that up to chase after a piece of ass in Brooklyn. You don’t get to talk to me like that ever again.”
He laughed. Partly to keep his cool, but mostly because she was unraveling right in front of him. As much as he enjoyed watching her falter, he had more pressing matters at the forefront of his mind. “I will always be Don DeLuca. It doesn’t matter whether I head the family or not. The power, the prowess, was something I was born with, not something I had to beg like a dog for.”
She flinched. His blow hit its mark dead center. That little part of her that screamed to be accepted and acknowledged by her daddy faltered under his words.
“So because you deserve to be the head of your own family, you’ve kidnapped the woman I love while she’s in the delivery room? What sense does that make?” he asked.
“You wouldn’t listen to me. You just tossed me aside. I tried over and over again to keep your focus where it belonged—on the family, not her.” She pointed behind her as she spat her words out. “Not on that sickening little brat you call a godson, not on anyone or anything that would possibly take you away from your legacy.”
Dante swallowed the bile crawling up his throat as he made the connection to what she was unknowingly admitting.
“Anthony Jr.’s accident—you were behind it,” he stated. He didn’t need to ask the question. Her rant confirmed his assumption.
“Every time that little twerp would call, you’d go running to New York, forgetting about your duties to the family. I knew before too long he’d be begging you to stay in New York forever, and you’d be too whipped to deny him. I couldn’t have that. I needed your head on straight.”
“So a teenaged boy’s life was worth less than your blind ambition?” When she shrugged and smiled at him as if anything about this fucked situation was funny, he clasped his fist so hard he could feel his nails tearing into the skin on his palm. “You are a monster, and I’ve had my fill of talking to you. I don’t want to hear any more of the crazy shit that rolls around in your head. Last chance,” he growled. “Where is Sanai?”
“She’s right here.”
A familiar voice curved the dark corner before its owner followed. There stood Bernadino pushing Sanai in a wheelchair.
Dante felt fire slide down his throat into his chest at the image of Sanai hunched over in pain while Bernadino pointed a handgun at her.
“I should’ve killed you when I had the chance,” Dante spewed through the tightened muscles of his jaw.
“Probably,” Bernadino answered. “That’s exactly the problem, Dante. Before you were so wrapped up with Sanai, you would never have left a potential threat the chance for retaliation. Sanai makes you soft.”