Chapter 1 #3
Other than her doctor, Georgia hadn’t told a soul.
The life growing in her stomach was a secret too dangerous to be told.
Of course, Callie had guessed, and Georgia knew Callie had told Dante, but there was no way Dante had told Niccolo and no way in the world he would have told the Espositos.
Dante loved Niccolo like a brother and was as determined to protect him as Georgia was.
God, why did she even want to protect him?
Because he was the father of her baby, that’s why. The father of her baby, who must by now be married to another woman, might even at that very moment be consummating the marriage and making another child. A child who would be half Esposito.
How did the Espositos know about Georgia and her baby? Did they know? Or was it only the man who’d called her, whoever he was?
By the time she’d forced half the lasagne down, her head was spinning with so many thoughts and questions she felt dizzy and overcome with exhaustion.
Sleep had been elusive for so long she couldn’t remember what a proper night’s sleep felt like.
These past few days, she’d barely snatched any sleep at all.
There were four bedrooms, the beds all made up, but the thought of sleeping in one of them brought to mind the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
If someone came for her, she wanted to be prepared, and so instead of climbing into a bed, she stripped the duvet and pillows off one and made a nest for herself on a sofa in the living room.
Its position next to the door meant that if she kept the door open, anyone coming into the room wouldn’t see it… or her… to begin with.
After turning off all the lights except the landing light, Georgia climbed into her makeshift bed.
Less than a minute later, she was back on her feet and heading to the kitchen.
What use was positioning herself into the place she was least likely to be seen if she had nothing to protect herself with for when or if she was seen?
Arming herself with the biggest, sharpest knife she could find, she returned to the living room and put the knife on the floor at the side of her head.
Cocooned in the duvet, Georgia closed her eyes.
The soft click of a door had Georgia’s eyes pinging open a beat before her exhausted brain woke from the doze she’d finally fallen into and a beat before ice injected into her heart and her pulses set off in an accelerated canter.
Someone was in the flat.
The landing light switched off, plunging everything into full darkness.
Close to being petrified with fear, she strained her ears into the silence.
A floorboard creaked. Her heart jumped into her throat. In her mind’s eye, she could see the knife on the floor, but was too frozen with fear to move a muscle, never mind reach for it. She was too frightened to even breathe.
Another floorboard creaked, this one further away, coming from the direction of the kitchen, and as she heard it, soft fluttering ripples set off beneath the taut skin of her small bump.
Her baby was making its presence felt. The fluttering lasted barely ten seconds, but it was enough to inject Georgia with a needed dose of protective adrenaline.
Keeping her ears strained and making every effort to be as soundless as possible, she groped for the knife before forcing her jelly-legs upright and moving stealthily to hide behind the open door.
The footsteps were returning. The little breath she still had in her lungs caught, then the rest of her froze as movement from the intruder sounded on the other side of the door.
Her eyes, now adjusted to the dark and assisted by faint moonlight, widened in terror when a hand emerged holding a gun, followed by a shadowed arm and a shadowed face in profile.
The burst of adrenaline that had carried her from the sofa to hide behind the door was already dissolving. When it came to fight or flight, Georgia had always been a flight girl. Callie had always done her fighting for her.
Pressing herself tighter against the wall, she prayed harder than she’d ever prayed before for the power of invisibility.
It seemed her prayers had been answered when the intruder slipped back out of the living room and his footsteps treaded to the bedrooms. But she knew it was only a temporary reprieve.
She needed to get out of there. Right now. The intruder – an Esposito or one of their hired thugs, she was certain of it – would find the bedrooms empty and then he’d search again, more thoroughly, without bothering with stealth. And this time he would find her.
The living room door was directly opposite the entrance to the flat, separated by ten feet of hallway. If she could make it to the entrance door, she could escape down the stairs…
Gripping the knife even tighter in her clammy hand, Georgia pictured her unborn child, the baby she’d been protecting with every breath of her body since the pregnancy test had come back positive, and used the image to spur her body into action.
She’d barely crossed the threshold of the living room when a hand clamped around her mouth and a gun was pressed into her temple.
“Don’t fucking move,” a harsh, biting voice said into her ear.