Chapter 17
Birdie
He comes closer, slow enough to make it worse.
“Say it,” he says.
I shake my head once. “No.”
“Is. It. Russo’s?”
The question lands like a slap. My lungs seize. My hands curl into fists at my sides. For one wild second I think about laughing in his face. But my silence is already too loud, and it’s better that he thinks the baby is Dante’s than knowing it’s his.
His jaw hardens. “I knew it.”
“No, you didn’t,” I snap, finally finding my voice. “You made an assumption like you always do, and now you’re standing there acting like it’s fact.”
His eyes burn. “Then tell me I’m wrong.”
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out.
His laugh is low and furious and utterly without humor. “Christ.”
“Stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’ve betrayed you.”
That stills him for half a second.
Then something even darker moves over his face. “You were going to marry him.”
My temper flares hot enough to burn through the fear. “And whose fault is that?”
He flinches. It’s small. Almost nothing. But I see it.
I press on, shaking now with fury as much as panic. “You don’t get to drag me out of my new life, interrogate me in your office, and then act wounded because you don’t like what you’ve found. You’re fucking married, Lorenzo, or did you forget? So, please, tell me what else you want.”
He takes another step, close enough now that I can feel the heat coming off him. “I want the truth.”
“You can’t handle the truth.”
His mouth twists. “Show me, Elizabeth. Let me see your stomach.”
I laugh, and it comes out ragged. “No.”
His expression goes glacial.
“Fine,” he says.
The word is so calm it scares me more than shouting would have. He turns, snatches his phone off the desk, and hits a button.
My pulse jumps. “What are you doing?”
“Getting proof.”
Ice slides through me. “Lorenzo—”
He lifts a hand, silencing me without even looking over. “Find me a doctor. Tonight.”
My stomach drops. He ends the call and faces me again.
“No,” I say instantly.
“Yes.”
“You do not get to order a doctor in here like I’m some possession you’re having authenticated.”
His eyes flash. “If you’re carrying Russo’s heir, then that changes things. You are no longer something I lost but a pawn.”
A pawn? I want to laugh in his fucking face because he has no idea that this baby is his.
“I’m not taking a pregnancy test!”
“You’re the one who let another man touch you.” His voice sharpens for the first time, cracking like a whip. “So yes, Elizabeth, I am very serious about you taking a pregnancy test.”
I hate that a part of me understands his urgency. I hate even more that he’s wrong about the part that matters.
My chin lifts. “And if I refuse?”
He goes still.
When he answers, his voice is quiet. “I’ll get my answer one way or another.””
I stare at him, horrified.
He holds my gaze. “Your choice.”
Tears sting my eyes again, hot and humiliating. “I hate you.”
“I know,” he says.
My throat tightens. Because that isn’t what undoes me. What undoes me is that he looks wrecked too.
I close my eyes for one second, then say, “If I do this, you’re never going to touch me again. Understand? And, I want to go back to Dante.”
He doesn’t move.
“Lorenzo.”
His head dips once in agreement.
I take a step away from him and undo the first button of my blouse.
Tears stream down my face, but I hold his gaze because I want him to see what kind of monster he’s become.
To think there was a time when I thought I might love this man.
My breath catches. No, that’s the worst part.
I still love him, but this isn’t about me.
This is about the baby that he thinks is Dante’s.
I undo the rest of the buttons, letting my shirt fall open. My hand barely shakes as I undo my pants, letting them open, too. Then I put my hand over the slight swell of my stomach. I watch him clock my movements and I see the moment he sees my baby bump.
The room is silent enough that I can hear my own breathing.
His gaze remains locked on my stomach, as though looking away would let him deny what he’s seen.
I pull my blouse closed again with shaking hands. “You have your answer. Take me back to Dante.”
He moves closer, and I freeze. When his hand covers mine, I’m torn between fear that he knows the truth and anger than I’m even in this position.
When he speaks, his voice is rough. “How far along did you say you were?”
When I glance up, he’s looking at my stomach and not me.
“Does it matter?”
“I’m putting together the timeline,” he says. “I’d like to know whether this happened quickly, or whether it’s been going on longer than I thought.”
For a second I don’t understand. Then I do, and the implication hits like a slap. My breath hitches and something vicious rises in me. So I decide to hurt him in the only way I know. With the truth.
“The funny thing is this is your fault. If you hadn’t tampered with my birth control, then I would have been protected from an unexpected pregnancy.”
In a voice so flat it chills me, he says, “There are ways to deal with unwanted pregnancies.”
Then I bark out a laugh, wild and disbelieving and edged with disgust.
“I said unexpected,” I snap. “Not unwanted.”
That lands. I see it. Something falters in his face that I don’t have the mercy to soften. I press a hand to my stomach again, not to shield it from him, but to claim it in front of him.
“This baby is wanted,” I say. “Very much.”
My lips curve, though it feels more like baring my teeth. And because he deserves pain, because he has earned every drop of it, I tilt my head and deliver the final blow.
“I do wonder,” I say softly, “if this baby will have my eyes or his.”
This time, the silence is not empty. It’s annihilation.
“Now,” I say, though my voice trembles, “call Dante and tell him when he can pick me up.”
Something detonates in the space between us.
Lorenzo doesn’t move. His face is carved into cold, unforgiving lines, but his eyes—God, his eyes—are a storm barely being held back by force.
Rage. Hurt. Possession. All of it churning so violently beneath the surface that for one irrational second I think the room itself might split under the pressure of it.
Then he smiles.
“That, cara,” he says softly, “will not be happening.”
My lips part. “What?” The word comes out thin, disbelieving. “But you said—”
“I know exactly what I said.”
His voice cuts across mine like a blade.
The promise he made already broken. He takes one slow step closer, and every instinct in me screams to back away, but I refuse to give him that too.
I stand there shaking instead, hands clenched at my sides, my blouse still half-buttoned and my dignity in tatters.
“I wonder,” he says, each word precise and poisonous, “what your precious fiancé would say if he knew how easily you gave in to me in that dressing room.”
The blood drains from my face. And because he cannot bear to bleed alone, he presses harder.
“If he knew,” Lorenzo continues, his voice dropping to something low and devastating, “how you moaned my name when I was so deep inside of you. How you looked at me. How quickly your hatred blurred into something else.”
My heart lurches against my ribs.
“You bastard.”
“Yes,” he says with no denial or shame. “I am.”
He tilts his head, studying me as if he can peel back skin and bone and look straight at the worst parts of me.
“But what does that make you, cara?”
The question lands like a slap. Hot tears fill my eyes so fast it burns. But if Lorenzo expects me to collapse, he’s forgotten who I am.
I lift my chin, even as tears spill over. “It makes me a woman you cornered,” I say, my voice shaking with fury. “A woman you lied to. Manipulated. Trapped.”
I step closer before he can recover, close enough that he has to actually look at what he’s done to me—to the tears, the trembling mouth, the hatred blazing through all the wreckage.
“You don’t get to stand there and sneer at me for breaking under pressure you created,” I whisper. “You don’t get to weaponize my worst moment because you don’t like the truth.”
His jaw flexes but I keep going.
“You think this gives you power?” A bitter laugh breaks out of me. “No, Lorenzo. It just proves exactly what kind of man you are.”
His eyes darken. “And what kind is that?”
“The kind,” I say, “who would rather blackmail a woman than face the fact that she still chooses someone else.”
He goes utterly still, and the storm in his eyes turns black. I should probably stop but I don’t.
“You want to know what that makes me?” My tears are falling freely now, but I don’t wipe them away. I want him to see every single one. “It makes me stupid enough to have once loved you.”
His face empties and for one shattering second, I think I see it—see the blow land somewhere deep enough to matter.
“Call Dante,” I say again, quieter now, but steadier somehow. “Or admit this was never about protecting me. It was only ever about possession.”
Lorenzo stares at me for a long moment, so still he barely looks human. Then he says, very quietly, “No.”
I blink at him. “No?”
“No,” he repeats. “You will not be calling him tonight. You will not be going anywhere with him. And you will stop speaking as if this is a negotiation you still control.”
Fresh anger surges through the hurt. “You promised.”
His expression doesn’t change. “And then you told me you were carrying another man’s child.”
My breath catches. He sees it and keeps going, relentless.
“A man,” he says, “who was in an impossible hurry to marry you. A man whose first instinct was not diplomacy, not explanation, but threats. Men. Bloodshed. A private army at the gates.” His voice hardens. “Do you know what that sounds like to me?”
He answers himself anyway. “Guilt.”
The word hangs between us like a blade.
“No,” I whisper.
His eyes flash. “If Dante Russo is the man who had you taken—if he put his hands on you, moved you, drugged you, and then wrapped himself in virtue while he waited to marry you—then this is no longer a private matter between men who dislike each other.” He takes a step closer. “It is war.”
The room seems to shrink around us.
I shake my head, but it feels futile. “You’re wrong.”
“Then prove it.”
“I can’t prove something I don’t remember.”
“Convenient.”
“Damn you.” My voice cracks. “You don’t know him.”
“No,” Lorenzo says, and now the fury in him is cold enough to frost over. “But I know men. I know power. I know timing. And I know exactly what kind of man starts gathering soldiers the second his secrets are threatened.”
“He was trying to get me back.”
“Or keep me from asking the right questions.”
I stare at him, horrified by how deeply he believes this. By how quickly he has built a battlefield out of scraps and suspicion and rage.
“This is insane.”
His mouth curves, but there is nothing kind in it. “Perhaps. But until I know who took you, I assume the worst.”
My arms fold around myself, less for warmth than because I suddenly feel exposed in every possible way. “So that’s it? You’ve decided Dante is guilty and now you’ll burn the world down?”
“If I must.”
The simplicity of it chills me. I search his face for some crack, some hesitation, some sign that he hears himself. There is none. Only violence held on a leash and the terrible promise of what he’ll do if that leash slips.
Then, as if he’s merely changing the subject, he says, “We leave for Chicago in a week.”
For a second I just stare at him. “What?”
“One week,” he repeats. “That gives me time to settle things here.”
My pulse spikes. “No.”
His gaze doesn’t waver. “Yes.”
“I’m not going to Chicago with you.”
“You are.”
“I said no.”
“And I said yes.”
I laugh, and it comes out sharp and unbelieving. “You really do think your word is law.”
“In my world,” he says, “it is.”
I wipe at my face with angry fingers. “Why Chicago?”
“Because I can protect you there.”
“From Dante?” I snap.
“From everyone.”
The answer should comfort me. Instead it feels like another cage.
“I don’t want your protection.”
“Your wants are no longer the deciding factor.”
I go very still. “You do hear yourself, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And that doesn’t disgust you?”
For the first time, something in his face shifts. Not enough to soften him. Just enough to make him look tired. Hollowed out in places no one else would ever notice.
“I stopped caring what disgusted me,” he says quietly, “the day I realized what it costs to lose you.”
I refuse to let those words matter. So I lift my chin and say the cruelest thing I can think of.
“You already lost me.”
He absorbs that without blinking.
“Then I will settle for keeping you alive.”
He looks at me as if the matter is closed, as if Chicago is already decided, as if war is already being mapped in the back of his mind.
And maybe it is.
“Get some rest,” he says at last. “Tomorrow will be unpleasant.”
My laugh is bitter. “That might be the most honest thing you’ve said to me all day.”
I move to brush past him but pause at the doorway and turn back.
“For the record, you’re wrong about Dante,” I say, my voice raw, “and I can’t wait for the moment that you see it.”
His expression turns to stone again.
“And if I’m right,” he says, “then there won’t be a corner of the earth he can hide in.”