367 Days

by Jessica Gadziala

  He trailed off because the code got punched in and the door pulled open to reveal Brock who took one look at us all cozied up and broke into a huge grin. "Can't say I'm not jealous," he said, walking in, hands tucked in his front pockets. "You look beautiful, Riya. Happiness looks really good on you."

  I felt those words seep into my skin and swirl around inside, knowing he was right. I was happy. And I felt like it said something that it was noticeable to those around me.

  "Brock is dog sitting because we're going to be late," Sawyer informed me.

  "We are going to have a Turner and Hooch situation. He's coming with me on a stakeout and I fully expect for him to eat the headrests out of my car."

  "It's a company car and I told you to bring him some bones."

  "I did. But he prefers leather. You know that."

  "Fuck yeah, I do," he agreed, sounding both frustrated and resigned to a lifetime of replacing everything leather.

  "Come on, Slim," he called, crossing over to where Sawyer kept the leash and taking it down. Slim sighed and got to his feet, moving across the room toward Brock and sitting down.

  I had never met a lazier dog in my life.

  "You kids have fun now," Brock said, using a silly dad-voice. "And, Riya, if he gets handsy, a dinner fork right into the thigh muscle."

  He left on that, followed by the sound of my chuckle.

  "Alright, let's get moving."

  We shuffled into his car and drove to Famiglia. I had been to Famiglia several times in the past, but I never before, even with a reservation, got called right to the podium and led right to one of the private booths in the back that sort-of closed in on themselves to offer the diners privacy.

  "Mr. Grassi will be over to greet you momentarily," the hostess said after a long eye-fuck of Sawyer that I found insulting.

  "You look like you want to poke her eyes out," he said, handing me my menu.

  "That was rude is all."

  "Yeah, she has a bit of a reputation for liking men who already have women. They're low maintenance or some shit like that."

  "How do you know that?"

  Sawyer laughed. "Worked a case for a wife who thought her husband was cheating. Guess who with?"

  "Oh, that's lovely," I said, folding up my menu without looking.

  "A woman who knows her mind. I like that."

  "They make the best fettuccine I have ever had. But we're starting with the calamari, just so you know."

  We got complimentary wine and ordered before a figure darkened our table. I knew Antony Grassi when I saw him. Hell, I knew him and both of his sons, Luca and Matteo, when I saw them. Antony was a silver fox if I ever saw one- tall and leanly built, wearing an impeccable suit, with eyelashes I would die for.

  "Sawyer, nice to see you again," he said as Sawyer slid out to take his hand. "And this lovely young lady would be Riya," he said, giving me a warm smile as he took my hand between both of his and squeezed. "I'm so glad you're doing well, my dear."

  "Ah, thank you," I said, slightly embarrassed about something that had been beyond my control. But there was no pity in Antony's voice and I took comfort in that.

  "I will leave you to enjoy your meal. Sawyer, I will be in touch."

  Sawyer slid back into the booth. "That almost sounded ominous. And, seeing as it is rumored the Grassi family is the local mob, I can't imagine that is a good thing."

  Sawyer snorted. "I don't get involved in the criminal shit around here. They do their thing, I do mine. That's not my business."

  "So you're okay with organized crime?"

  Sawyer's head tilted to the side. "It's not that easy. Every economy has its criminal empires. And, in a way, the world needs it."

  "So arms dealer and rapists and..."

  "You can't lump them all together like that, babe. A rapist is in a different league from the arms dealers. In general."

  "Arms dealers kill people."

  "I've killed people."

  That effectively took the wind out of my sails. I forgot that he was ex-military.

  "So has Brock. And Tig. Brock because he did it with me. Tig because he's got a past and some of that past was violent."

  "Tig? Big ole teddy bear Tig?" I asked, shaking my head.

  "Tig grew up in a shit area with a shit family with shit opportunities to get out of it. Shit happened."

  "You're very nonchalant about the whole thing."

  "He did some bad things but he became a good man. Can't hold his past against him any more than someone can hold mine against me."

  "But you were in the military."

  "There's military and there was what me and Brock were in. That's about all I can say about it without, say, being charged with treason. But let's just say, Tig looks like a saint if you compare our body counts. Yes, I did mine under orders. So did he. True, mine was supposedly for country and to keep all the innocents at home safe, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen and it doesn't mean I am better than Tig because I took my orders from a higher-up in the military instead of a drug dealer. Killing is killing."

  "Are the Grassis killers?"

  "You know," he said, giving me a small smile, "I've never asked," he laughed. "One would assume at least Antony has spilled some blood. I suspect they all have. But because I know them, I know none of that blood belonged to some innocent."

  "So it's okay when criminals kill other criminals."

  "For the most part, yeah. It's a system of checks and balances when the police force can't or won't do anything about any typical justice. The mob in particular have a pretty good record of keeping shit between them and the people they have a beef with, not attacking families or anything like that. The point is, there's no stopping crime. Junkies need drug dealers. Drug dealers need arms dealers. It goes on and on. And, let me tell you, 'cause I know a fuckuva lot of organized criminals, most of the time, they're better human beings than the shitheads who I work cases on."

  Again, he had a point.

  I couldn't claim to know a lot of good criminals, or any criminals at all, but I knew a lot of terrible human beings.

  And, well, I think I'd much rather rub shoulders with mob members than unconvicted rapists, racists, or wife beaters. Of which I knew a few in my life.

  "Why private investigation?" I asked as I took my wine. "It seems that after so much darkness, you'd want to go into something lighter."

  "See, that's the thing though, isn't it?" he asked, smiling. "You join up right after high school. You get normal training; you get LINE training; you get black ops training... it leaves you with a very specific skill set. And your choices back in this life are limited. There's private security, but I don't have it in me to play babysitter to million and billionaire assholes. You can open a gym and train other people your fighting skills. But I had enough of day-in and day-out training to last a lifetime. Or you can use the skills you used to track targets and learn to use it to track down missing people or cheating spouses."

  "Do you like your job?"

  "I like figuring shit out. Do I like sitting and listening to the same story about husbands on suspicious 'business trips' or weird hotel charges to the credit card? Fuck no. Sometimes you want to slap a client for their idiocy."

  "They're idiots because their spouses are cheating?" I bristled.

  "No, babe. They're idiots because they know their spouses are cheating. They come to me with some sad hope that I prove them wrong. I never prove them wrong. Chances are, if it seems like they're cheating, they are. Hell, even if it doesn't seem like they're cheating, they probably are. Very few people know loyalty anymore."

  "Do you?" I asked, needing for my own piece of mind to know.

  "Did I maybe start flirting with Shelly when I was still dating Meg in high school? Yeah, I did. I was sixteen and stupid as fuck. But I grew up. I watched countless families get torn apart by infidelity. I have had to comfort dozens of crying women in my office when I handed them the pictures they paid me to take. And I've gotten to witnes
s the awful thing that happens when they stop crying."

  "What's that?"

  "They make up their minds to never let themselves get hurt like that again. See, cheating doesn't just screw up that one relationship, it tends to screw up every single one later because the person gets bitter or scared or distrusting. It's a sad fucking thing to see. And it's not something I am ever willing to do to a woman." He paused and I let those words sink in.

  He was so right about that.

  Because of Derek, I never fully trusted Timir.

  And because of Michael, I was finding it hard to not be bitter.

  "Besides, if you can't learn to keep your fucking dick in your pants when you're over thirty goddamn years old, you're just a weakass, insecure beta who needs to have meaningless sport sex to validate your fragile ego. It's pathetic. Babe, no one would ever call me pathetic."

  The conversation turned to lighter subjects- Sawyer's childhood where it sounded like he truly tested his mother's patience and made his little brother's life harder. He told me about Brock as a kid and what Brock was like when he first came back from overseas. He told me all the horror stories of what it was like to have Barrett working for him, most of which I laughed at because they meshed very well with my own experiences with him.

  Sawyer asked me about my time in the system, most of which was full of a lot of changing homes, but I was lucky enough for most of them to be decent. Granted, they were all wholly devoid of any real love for me and that was why I took every ounce of the love my adoptive parents poured into me so greedily.

  We ate.

  We had dessert.

  We drove home.

  We had sex.

  We fell asleep.

  Everything was perfect.

  And everything stayed that way for the next week.

  Until I woke up one morning after some takeout with food poisoning.

  NINETEEN

  Riya- 17 days

  "Come on, you're going to the doctor," Sawyer demanded, watching me like I might vomit all over him. Which, well, was a possibility. I started to object, but he shook his head at me, moving to the kitchen to grab a cleaning bucket from under the kitchen sink and lining it with a plastic grocery store bag before coming back to me with the puke bucket and dragging me onto my feet. "No. I don't want to hear it. This is insane. You need to get on some fluids or something."

  So we drove to Sawyer's doctor, me fretting the whole time because I didn't have medical insurance and I didn't want to have to sink all my savings into medical bills.

  But Sawyer was right. I had been throwing up for two days. I needed to make sure I wasn't dehydrated.

  So we went into the typical doctor's office and Sawyer sat in the waiting room while I went into the back, meeting an elderly man with big glasses named Dr. Maddox who had apparently known Sawyer since he was a little boy and filled me in on a couple antidotes about him while I got a couple tests run.

  If I lived a thousand years, I could never be prepared for the answers.

  "Congratulations, Ms. Sweeney," he said, looking down at his paper in his folder. "You don't have food poisoning; you have morning sickness."

  "Morning sickness?" I choked out, all the air squeezed from my lungs.

  "You're pregnant."

  "Yeah, no. That's not possible."

  "Well, even the best birth control is only..."

  "No, doctor. I'm not on birth control. I had my tubes tied at eighteen."

  His head snapped up at that, his brows drawing together. Then he reached for my folder again and flipped through my records. "Oh, yes. I see that here."

  "So I can't be pregnant."

  "But you are."

  "No, that's just... you need to run another test. Besides, this is too soon for morning sickness, isn't it? We've only been, ah, intimate for a week."

  He paused at that, thinking. "Not necessarily. Most women don't start until about a month. But there are many women who swear they knew it the morning after they conceived because they started getting morning sickness. But let me go find the ultrasound machine. We can get a clearer idea on your tubal ligation. Maybe it wasn't done properly."

  A moment later, there was a tap at the door and Sawyer let himself in. Obviously still clueless about the test results, he froze when he saw my face. "What is it?" he asked.

  "It's not food poisoning," I said past the lump in my throat.

  "Okay," he said, his voice deceptively calm, but everything in him tensed, like he was worried it was cancer or something like that.

  "Dr. Maddox went to get an ultrasound machine because he's worried my tubal ligation might not have been done properly."

  "Your tubal..." he started as he walked toward me. Then it hit him, making him freeze two feet away from the exam table. "You're pregnant."

  "That's what the test said."

  He stood there for all of two seconds before he closed the last two feet, sat down beside my hip, and wrapped an arm around me.

  "Alright," he said, squeezing me. "Well, either way, false test result or positive test result, we'll figure it all out."

  Figure it all out.

  We had known each other seventeen days. Seventeen.

  We had only been having sex for about ten.

  That was just insane. How could anything be figured out?

  That wasn't even taking into consideration that I never wanted to have children, not biological ones anyway. Suddenly, I felt horrible thinking that with the possibility of one already in me. But that was how I had always felt. I wanted to adopt. That was why I made that decision to tie when I was eighteen. It had honestly been the easiest decision of my life. It was what I wanted.

  And now, more than a decade later, they were going to tell me it wasn't effective? How was that possible?

  "Okay," Dr. Maddox said as he rolled in the ultrasound machine, an old thing that he must have had laying around for years. "Sawyer," he said, nodding. "Good. Riya, dear, I will need you to roll up your shirt and roll down your pants and lie back."

  Sawyer gave me another squeeze and got down, moving toward the end of the bed near my head and, once I followed instructions, reached for and grabbed my hand.

  The doctor squeezed some freezing jelly on my stomach and pulled out the wand while turning the machine to face him.

  Watching him roll that thing around my belly was quite possibly one of the scariest moments of my life.

  "Doc," Sawyer called when he had just been sitting there, squinting at the screen for a long minute. His voice had been firm and impatient and the doctor's gaze flew up to his, confused, before he looked over at me.

  "Ms. Sweeney, it appears that while you may have had a tubal ligation when you were eighteen, you have since had it reversed."

  "What!" I shrieked, moving to bolt upward, but the doctor's hand pushed me down as he reached for scratchy paper towels to wipe the jelly off my belly.

  I rolled down my shirt and shot up. "I never had it reversed, Dr. Maddox. You have to be wrong. That's not poss..." my gaze found Sawyer's and I saw the truth reflected there.

  It was possible.

  It was possible because I had no idea what happened to me over the course of a year.

  "Oh, God," I groaned, burying my face in my hands.

  Stealing a year of my life was bad enough. But someone had invaded my body, had done things to it without my permission.

  The table moved as Sawyer sat down beside me again. But he reached for me and pulled me into his lap, my head tucked under his chin, his arms squeezing me so tight that it was hard to believe.

  "You definitely are pregnant, Ms. Sweeney. For what it's worth, very newly," he said, giving me an option I had no idea how I felt about. It had never been a factor in my life.

  "How early?" Sawyer asked, and it hadn't occurred to me to worry about the possibility of it not being his.

  "Hard to tell that right now. But, judging by the morning sickness suddenly, just days."

  Okay.

  I
exhaled slow, the breath coming out shaky.

  Alright.

  At least it was his.

  Not that that was in any way a comfort in and of itself, but at least it wasn't some random kidnapping psycho's.

  "Thanks, Dr. Maddox," Sawyer said, somewhat dismissively. "We are just going to keep the room for a few and then we will be out of here. Mail the bill to my address and I'll settle it."

  "Okay," the doctor said, clearly confused and likely thankful for an easy out. "Ms. Sweeney, if you need to come to see me for any reason, please do."

  With that, we were alone.

  No silence had ever been so loud before.

  "Riya," Sawyer said a long couple of minutes later. I shook my head, not ready to talk, not knowing what to say. "Riya," he said, a little more firmly, making me pull back to look up at him. "You've made the connection, right?"

  The connection to...

  Oh, God.

  "Michael," I choked out, feeling sick all over again, but for completely different reasons.

  "It's the only explanation. He could have kept you down. That shit you had in your system, it's used for lethal injections at high doses. In lower doses, it is used for medically-induced comas. He could have untied your tubes. And the hormones in your system..."

  "Oh, God," I squeaked, burying my face in my hands again.

  The hormones.

  And a reversal of my tubal ligation.

  He was trying to get me pregnant while I was unconscious.

  "Why?" I said, shaking my head, not understanding.

  "He probably snapped, babe," Sawyer said, his hand rubbing up and down my back. "Lost his wife. Lost you. He had some sort of fucking breakdown. Maybe he thought if he took you and got a baby in you, that he could get you back or some crazy shit like that."

  "Then why drop me off?" I asked, looking over at him. "I wasn't raped so he hadn't even... gotten to the impregnating me part."

  "I don't have that answer yet, babe, but I swear to fuck, I am going to figure it out."

  I nodded at that, seeing the determination there.

  I looked away, blinking at the tears filling my eyes. "I'm so sorry."