HIS BABY: A Bad Boy Hitman Romance

by April Lust

  “In the bathroom.”

  “Miguel can get it.”

  She shook her head. “There are a lot of prescriptions. My dad was dying, remember? If you really want to be out of here before the cops, I’ll need to grab it.”

  Miguel smirked. “Yeah, daddy went and killed himself with cigars before I could do it with my gun. Shame. All right, Miguel, go with the girl. Michael, you hold onto the dog. If she tries anything stupid, kill it.”

  Michael made a small sound that made Emma’s stomach feel queasy. She shuddered. She took one careful step towards Gabriel, and then another, until she was walking around him. He made no move to stop her. Miguel, the other man, was waiting for her near the hallway when she made it out of the kitchen.

  She opened the medicine cabinet. Her fingers shook as she looked through the bottles. No one had bothered cleaning these out.

  “What’s that?” Miguel asked, looking at the plastic stick sitting on the counter.

  Emma didn’t see a reason to lie. Wasn’t there something in Catholicism that said that life was sacred? Maybe they wouldn’t hurt her. Then again, they did shoot people, so maybe they didn’t stick to close to the tenants of the faith. “Pregnancy test.”

  “You pregnant.”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  He eyed the stick. “You want to know?”

  She nodded, her hands going still on the medication.

  “Then look.”

  She picked up the test and glanced at the symbol glaring out of the little plastic window.

  “Well?”

  “Nope,” she tossed it into the garbage can. “Not pregnant.”

  “Maybe next time.”

  It was possibly the weirdest conversation she had ever had. “Yeah, maybe next time.”

  There were about twelve or so orange bottles lined up on the medicine cabinet shelf. She glanced over each one in turn, and found the one with the most worn label. Her father’s name was invisible. She held it up for Miguel to see, and then made to tuck it in her pocket. Her fingers dipped and the prescription clattered to the ground, following a path similar to that of her dropped cell.

  “Shoot.”

  Miguel looked frustrated. “Hurry up.”

  “Okay,” she said, holding up her hands, trying to look as innocent as possible. “Not a problem.”

  She bent, sure to point her ass in his general direction. There was every possibility that he’d look at that before watching her swipe the bottle and her phone. She tucked the cell between her breasts and stood up, holding up the bottle. “Success.”

  “Come on.” He grabbed her wrist and hauled her after him. She put up only the most minimal of fights.

  “Let’s go,” Gabriel ordered.

  “Where are we going?” Emma asked.

  “My place.”

  “I don’t know where that is.”

  He pulled a black bag out of his back pocket. “And you won’t.”

  Emma hadn’t known what to expect, but it hadn’t been that. She didn’t know why the idea of being tucked into that dark bag for an indeterminate amount of time made her shiver, but it did.

  “Can…can I help the dog?”

  “No,” Gabriel said. He made a motion to Michael. “Kill the dog, let’s go.”

  “No!” She was diving for Rocco before she knew what she was doing. Miguel wrapped an arm around her middle and hauled her back. She struggled until the two of them fell to the floor. “Don’t!”

  Michael’s hands wrapped around the mutt’s thick throat. Rocco kicked out with his back feet, struggling to get away from his killer. He wasn’t watching the dog, though. He was watching her. She looked up into his face. His dark eyes were bright. They had that soft light that a man got when he was looking at something he wanted, something he loved. She saw his tendons strain as Rocco tried to bark through the ever tightening grasp.

  “Please, please stop,” she begged.

  No one said anything to her. Rocco kept kicking, kept shaking his head. He kicked and struggled. His back leg caught Michael across the arm, and down the side. Michael cursed in his native tongue and threw Rocco across the room. Rocco fell against the ground, and didn’t move.

  “No!” she screamed. She struggled to get to the ugly mutt. She wanted to check him, to help him. Miguel grabbed her and she kicked out. Her bare foot caught him across the face. She felt his nose crunch beneath her heel. He growled.

  A hand wrapped in her hair and yanked her back. She looked up and up and into Gabriel’s dark eyes. They were oddly beautiful. They weren’t just brown. They were the color of whiskey and copper and earth. They were tucked into a strikingly angular face with high cheekbones and full lips. In another time, another place, he might have been handsome, but his features were contorted with his cold anger. He just looked hard.

  “Stop it.” It wasn’t a request. He shook her hair. Her roots burned. She felt some of the strands rip beneath his palm. “Stop moving or I’ll shoot you right here.”

  She didn’t listen. Her body fought against his hold. She reached up and grabbed his elbow, raking her nails down his wrist. He snarled and slammed her head forward. Her head rang with the impact of her brow against the ground.

  At that moment her cell phone went off. The screen light up inside of her blouse followed by a cheerful trill.

  All three men went still.

  Gabriel jammed his hand inside her shirt. He didn’t grope her. His anger was well past perversion. He held up the screen. She caught a brief glimpse of Rudy’s name. She didn’t fight anymore.

  “Load her into the car.”

  They tucked her in the backseat, and then into the black bag. She slumped in her spot. Someone put the seatbelt on her. It almost made her laugh. They were willing to invade her house, hurt her dog, and beat her up, but going around without a seatbelt was just too holy of a law to break. She snorted inside the pitch blackness of her hood.

  “What’s so funny, bitch?” It must have been Miguel who asked. The rhythm of his words sounded a little off because of the broken nose.

  “Why do I need a seatbelt?” she asked.

  “Gotta protect the merchandise.” It was Michael this time. She knew the voice. A hand patted her thigh, lingering on her hip.

  She shivered.

  Gabriel said something in Spanish. Michael responded. It sounded like he was whining about something. Gabriel gave him an order and the hand lifted away from her hip. Apparently she wasn’t going to be sexually assaulted in the back of the car just yet.

  It was a very small comfort. Right this moment, she’d take it.

  Chapter 14

  The cops and the fire department were at Mac Ketchum’s old place when Kellan’s bike came roaring up the street. Had he been thinking straight he would have turned around as soon as he saw the flashing lights. But he wasn’t, and he didn’t. He was already parked and charging across the perimeter of uniformed bodies when strong arms hauled him backwards.

  The house was on fire. Big clouds of dark smoke filled the air.

  “Emma!” he screamed out. “Emma!’

  “Sir!” someone repeated with the determination and authority of a police officer pig.

  He whirled towards the voice. “What?” he snarled.

  “Is this your house?” The police officer was tall and well built, but it wasn’t the person holding him. Kellan turned again and found himself facing Rudy, who still had a firm hold on his shoulder.

  “Let me go, man.” Kellan shoved against Rudy.

  “No,” Rudy said. “You can’t do anything, Kellan. You gotta let them work. You gotta let them do something.”

  He shook his head. He didn’t want to let them do their job. He wanted to find Emma. Was she in there? Was she dead? “I gotta help Emma.”

  “You can’t.” Rudy gave him a shake. “Kellan, listen to me, you can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Look around you!”

  Kellan blinked and tried to take in his surroundings. His
breath felt too loud in his ears. A half dozen firemen were waiving hoses across the roof of the house. The water seemed to evaporate before it hit anything. As many police officers were wandering around the lawn. A few were talking to a couple that Kellan recognized as neighbors. They were motioning towards the house, and then towards the road.

  “Sir,” the officer repeated. One of his hands was resting causally near his sidearm. It made Kellan angrier. The officer’s eyes weren’t on Kellan’s face, but resting on his vest and the patches that it sported. “Is this your house?”

  “No,” he snapped out. “It’s my wife’s house.”

  The word felt strange on his tongue. He didn’t think he’d ever called Emma that. They had been married for a month and going to bed together for the better part of that. He should have called her wife before now. He should have said a hundred other things too. What if she was dead? What if he never got to tell her?

  “You don’t live with your wife?”

  “It was her father’s place. He died a few weeks ago from cancer. It’s hers now,” Rudy explained.

  “Was she here?”

  Kellan shook his head. “I don’t know. I think so. We got into a fight.”

  “What did you get into a fight over?” He plucked a pad of paper and a pen from his front pocket.

  Kellan became aware of the fact that this was a cop, and everything that was said and done could be used in a court of law. He was pretty sure you didn’t go to jail for a house catching on fire, but he didn’t think it couldn’t be used against him somehow. Kellan wanted to ask why that mattered, why any of it mattered. He didn’t. “Having kids.” It was close enough to the truth.

  The officer nodded in mock sympathy. Kellan wanted to hit him. Only Rudy’s cool hand on his shoulder kept him from doing just that.

  “So you guys fought, she left, and you think she came here?”

  “I left,” Kellan corrected. “I was mad so I left. I didn’t want to talk to her anymore. I don’t know where she went or what she did. I haven’t talked to her since the fight.”

  “Does she make a habit of running out when you guys fight?”

  Kellan swept a hand through his hair. “I don’t know. I…we’ve only been married a month.”

  “Already fighting?” The officer’s eyes stayed level on Kellan.

  “What the hell does it matter? Is she in there?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  There was a commotion. Raised voices. Kellan charged towards them. He dimly heard “alive” and “injured.” A fireman, dressed in the bright yellow suit, came out of the front door. In the curve of his arms was a dark mutt with a big head.

  “Rocco!”

  He took another step forward. The officer tailed his steps. “Is that your dog?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Is he dead?”

  The fireman shook his head. “Hurt pretty bad, though.”

  “Emma’s a vet,” he said stupidly. He reached a hand out and touched the dog. He felt warm. His chest rose and fell slowly. “Almost a vet. She’s got one more semester of college left.”

  That didn’t matter, but he found himself talking about it anyway. The officer wrote it down. Apparently it mattered somehow.

  “She wouldn’t have left him alone. She doesn’t like leaving him alone. Keeps telling me dogs are pack creatures. They don’t understand why people leave.”

  The officer nodded again, and kept writing.

  “Is she in there?”

  The police officer and the fireman exchanged a glance. Kellan didn’t need to hear them say it. No one was inside. Kellan’s legs gave out and he crumpled to the ground. “She wouldn’t just leave him.”

  “Even if she were mad at you?”

  Kellan gave the officer a bitter look. “What do you think happened? You think my wife was so mad about kids that she brought the dog to her dad’s house and lit it on fire?”

  “Is that what you think happened?”

  Kellan jerked his head to one side, and then the other. “No. Hell no. If Emma were that mad, she’d just take the dog and stop talking to me.” He snorted and found that he could stand again. “She gives a wicked cold shoulder.”

  The officer asked more questions. Rudy answered most of them. Phantom never said a word. Kellan was too busy deciding what he was going to do when he got his hands on Gabriel. There was no doubt in his mind that the drug dealer had everything to do with Emma’s disappearance. Kellan already owed him for sending a hit squad to shoot up the clubhouse.

  The firefighter gave Kellan a small pump and a dog-sized facemask to tend to Rocco. Kellan held it over his face and slowly pumped some life back into the animal. There was something wrong with the mutt. It wasn’t just breathing in bad air, his leg hung at a funny angle and he wasn’t lifting his head very much. Though he managed a whimper when Kellan asked him if he was all right.

  “Did you hear what I said, sir?”

  Kellan looked up. “No,” he admitted.

  “I asked if you knew if someone had a reason to attack your wife.”

  Kellan kept his face blank when he said, “No.”

  The officer clearly didn’t believe him.

  “Why?” Rudy asked.

  “Apparently some neighbors heard a confrontation before the fire started. The door was kicked in.”

  Kellan ran his tongue over his lips. “I gotta go.”

  “You aren’t going anywhere.”

  Kellan kept walking. “You can’t stop me.”

  “The hell I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “You admitted to you fought with your wife, and now it seems she’s missing. That makes you a suspect.”

  Kellan snorted. “Being a suspect isn’t the same as taking me into custody. You haven’t got shit for that.”

  Kellan got on his bike and started it. He didn’t hear what the cop said as he went roaring off into the evening. Nothing the man said would have mattered anyway. He knew where Emma was, and he was going to go get her. He heard Phantom and Rudy start up their own bikes. It didn’t take them very long to figure out exactly where Kellan was going.

  Chapter 15

  Not being able to see while the car drove over a road that curved more than it was straight made Emma feel sick to her stomach. Then again, maybe that was getting hit in the head. A nice head wound was bound to make a person queasy. She didn’t know how good her vision was, since everything was dark, but she was pretty sure she was nursing a minor concussion.

  “How much farther?” she asked.

  At first no one said anything to her. They had spoken, but almost all of it was in Spanish. She knew only a few very basic words like girl and home. Those were repeated often enough that she assumed they were talking about her.

  She distracted herself by focusing on a line of visibility at the very edge of the bag. She could see her thumbs, and a sliver of her lap, but nothing else. It was at least something to focus on as she moved, a knowledge that the world wasn’t swallowed up by dark fabric. “Seriously,” she said, “I think I’m going to throw up.”

  “You’d better swallow,” Gabriel ordered.

  She wondered if Gabriel ever just talked. Was everything he said a directive? She recalled a half-remembered statement that people who were too comfortable ordering other people around had sociopathic tendencies. That wasn’t a nice thought. It disappeared when they took another curve. She felt the burning taste of bile in the back of her throat.

  Michael made a joke, and the others burst out laughing. There was another turn and then the car came to a stop. She held still while doors opened. Strong hands guided her out of the car. Her head smacked against the doorframe. The wave of sickness became worse.

  The black bag stayed on as she was led over a driveway of crushed seashells and up a set of stairs so white they glittered beneath her feet. She heard more voices, all speaking Spanish. Gabriel’s domineering tone followed by recitations and information. It was amazing how much a question sounded like
a question no matter what language it was said in.

  She tried to concentrate on every sound she heard, every sensation she felt. The sound of a sliding glass door, the scent of chlorinated water, and the feel of air conditioning. The heat of the sunlight spilling across her back. Her bare feet walked over expensive flooring. She took it all in.

  She was led up winding stairs, and away from the warmth of the sunlight. When the bag was finally yanked off her head she was shoved into a room with no windows. It should have been dark, but a series of three incredibly bright lights were fixed into a ceiling to bright for her to reach. The only furniture was a cheap plastic chair, like the kind that would sit around a colorful kiddie pool. There wasn’t even a bucket to do her business in. Not that she would have been able to do that anyway.