Chapter 20 – Delphine
Chapter Twenty
Delphine
I don’t fight this time when Luigi takes my hand and drags me away from the only hotel room I’ve ever been in that smells like cigar smoke thanks to my captors. They’re young enough that I know I could beat their asses – if they weren’t armed.
Luigi takes perfect control over the situation and I’m too busy trying to stay alive and away from the weapon muzzles to pay attention to anything except his hand coming towards me when it’s all over.
My head hurts and I’m barely conscious, barely able to hear any of my captors.
I knew when they took me through the back entrance of the Marriott that I was both in grave danger and in the hands of wealthy, powerful men.
The guns made it impossible to fight back, so my only task until Luigi arrived was to stay calm.
I don’t hear much of the fight between Luigi and the guards. Just an argument. Clicking. Then the door bursts open without any gunshots fired. I didn’t know kidnapping could be so anticlimactic.
The biggest part of the whole event is looking into Luigi’s eyes when he opens the door and knowing with absolute certainty: I’m safe.
His eyes flicker with warmth that he has to immediately quell to drag me out of the room alive.
“Come,” he says to me with a deep, commanding voice that I wouldn’t dare to disobey. I’m not hurt from the bombing aside from a somewhat deep scrape on my thigh that I can’t even feel. I don’t dare reveal the bleeding scrape when he asks me if I’m hurt.
I want to get out of here without witnessing a murder and Luigi’s dark demeanor, not to mention the enormous weapon he cradles suggest to me that he might err towards being trigger happy.
“I’m fine.”
He seems doubtful, but responds with a stiff nod.
His firm palm closes around mine as he leads me out of the dark closet where the men held me captive and into the light.
I’m blinded from being in the dark for so long and my eyes run with thick tears, so heavy that I can’t even see my captor’s faces.
I just cling to Luigi, trusting that he’ll get me out of there.
Trusting that if I just hold onto him, he’ll protect me until it’s all over…
He warns the men. “Go back to Pittsburgh and tell your family the Tavianis will see them soon.”
Are we going to Pittsburgh? Is he?
It’s better to sit in the passenger seat of the Chevy Tahoe than the back, honestly. But it doesn’t feel good sitting next to Luigi. My hearing hasn’t come back all the way yet. I have cuts and scratches all over my arms. I lost my heels, so my feet are freezing cold…
I’m happy to be alive, but I’m scared and frankly… numb.
Luigi turns the heat up and he stays quiet for five minutes of our drive back to… I assume the lake house, but I don’t really know.
“I have to leave for Pittsburgh tonight,” Luigi says in a calm voice. There’s no room for negotiation or change. “You can’t come. Angela will look after you.”
“Are we going to the lake house?”
“Not yet. A meeting point.”
So it’s serious.
“Are you sure I wouldn’t be better off on my own?”
“I’m sure,” he says. “Angela will have a private security team by tomorrow morning and the lake house will be the safest place for both of you.”
“Fine.”
Pittsburgh is only three and a half hours away. He could be there and back in a couple of days at the latest.
“My job there will take at least ten weeks,” Luigi says, dropping the real bombshell. I’m still too numb from everything that happened tonight to process that he’ll be away for at least a third of my pregnancy. If I’m pregnant.
“Okay.”
“I won’t come back. I won’t be able to do anything except maybe… send emails.”
“Emails?”
“I’ll need updates on your well-being.”
He looks over at me with eyes that send a shiver straight through me. Attraction. Confusion. Desire. He makes me feel fucking everything, even if I want to deny Luigi any ability at all to influence my emotions. We have a fucked up baby contract. That’s it.
“Okay, sure. Send me an email.”
He sighs. “I’m glad you’re okay. If they hurt you… they would have been dead.”
Just when I find him so unbelievably frustrating, he does something that betrays his hidden feeling and yanks me right back into my own confusing maelstrom of emotions.
It shouldn’t be romantic that he wants to kill people at all, even if it’s for me, but in a world that doesn’t give a shit about protecting women like me, it’s mind-blowingly addictive to be around someone who does.
“Thanks for coming to get me.”
I don’t even throw in a sassy comment about how I could have handled the situation myself. I’ll give him the credit he deserves for the rescue.
“You’re mine,” Luigi says. “I’ll always protect you. I mean… as long as we have this contract.”
But our eye contact lingers just long enough for me to feel like he meant it when he said ‘always’...
Luigi gets quiet as we close in on the meeting point with Angela. I don’t realize that’s what’s going on until he pulls off the highway and turns into a Mirabito gas station where two other black Chevy Tahoes sit outside along with a very distinct figure with dark red hair.
She jumps up and down and waves as she sees her brother’s car and a wave of realization hits me. We’re really going to be apart. For weeks. Maybe forever. We fucked in the club bathroom, almost lost our lives, and a few hours later… He’ll be far away from Buffalo, NY.
I don’t understand the way my body responds with immediate stress and panic at the thought of Luigi’s absence.
I’ve lived most of my life without him and there’s really no reason I can’t survive this time apart.
But I can also still feel his seed sloshing around inside me.
I have vivid memories of him holding me at the club.
And more importantly… he came to rescue me. I’m not disposable to him and I don’t believe for a second it’s because we have a so-called baby that barely exists as a clump of cells and a line on a pregnancy test. I think he cares… but after a long mission in Pittsburgh, will he even be alive?
I want to ask him questions about my captors and what he did to negotiate my freedom, but Luigi’s serious demeanor doesn’t exactly encourage me to push my luck with his potential moody backlash. I’m just happy to be alive at this point.
This kidnapping has made me realize that being associated with Luigi is downright dangerous. If any of the gang members, mobsters, whatever you want to call them, saw me with Luigi… I’m a target.
This goes beyond the contract now. If I want to survive, I need to trust that Luigi is the big bad wolf he acts like.
When he parks the car next to the black tahoes, I don’t even bother moving, expecting a lecture.
But Luigi just exhales slowly and leans his head back in the seat so his thick dark hair cascades down his neck.
“I’m happy that you are physically unharmed,” he says. “And not just because of the baby.”
He looks over at me with slow, meaningful eye contact. Just when I trust in the moment enough to say something back to him, Luigi stops the words before they leave my mouth.
“I’ll leave you a cellphone so you can contact your family. Please trust that leaving my secure compound will only put your life in more danger, so any efforts to run away and prove to the world that I’m some sort of monster will only lead to my enemies ending your life.”
Luigi’s excessive anger yanks me straight out of the brief moment I thought there was anything affectionate about him.
He’s a dangerous criminal totally obsessed with control, especially controlling my body and what I do with it.
I shouldn’t read into his words any deeper than that.
You can’t tame monsters, no matter how much every woman wishes she could.
“I’ll stay put,” I reassure him coldly.
“Good,” he says. “Now… go meet Angela. In ten weeks, I’ll be back.”
The abruptness shouldn’t surprise me, but it feels like Luigi owes me more than picking me up from the Marriott and dropping me off with some random men and his sister.
We survived an explosion. I still don’t know who threw that grenade – or why.
The men who kidnapped me dragged me outside after I was on the ground for about a minute, so they knew exactly who I was.
This scares me almost as much as Luigi’s sudden disinterest in a proper goodbye.
But he doesn’t budge, so I know he won’t. This is his stubborn reaction to any intimacy that threatens to emerge between us. He unlocks the car doors so I can walk towards the tahoe’s. Alone.
So this is it. No goodbye kiss. Nothing but his cold demands and confusing hot-and-cold emotions. I want to make a joke about him missing me, but it would hurt too much if he responded with something more scornful to remind me of my place in his life.
I’m just his surrogate.
“Thank you for saving my life,” I muster up, because it’s the best business casual response I can find to say to Luigi without cracking open some of my own buried emotions.
“You’re welcome.”
I get out of the car and try not to let it bother me that he doesn’t even walk me to the door. I’m pregnant with this man’s baby. He’s a stone cold monster and for the rest of our lives, I will be the mother of his child.
The shiver running through me is enough to scare me senseless. Should I disobey his commands and try to run away? Because the thought of putting a child through Luigi’s stony withholding bothers me almost as much as the entire circumstances of our bizarre arrangement.
What am I really doing here? And why do I struggle to entertain the thought of escaping him when ten weeks is plenty of time for me to wriggle free?