Chapter Twenty
Sawyer
Pregnant.
To be perfectly honest, no matter how safe a man was in his sex life, that was a word that made him sweat. Anytime I got a call or a visit from a woman I had a fling with, even knowing I never fucked without a condom, it made a pit of worry settle in my stomach.
That being said, I didn’t feel that way about it when I walked in that room and she said that thing about her procedure being faulty, and I realized what that meant.
I always imagined myself with kids at some point. Whether they had my blood in their veins or they belonged to a woman I fell for and some jackass ex of hers who didn’t man up and do right by his kids, it didn’t matter. I saw myself raising kids at some point.
True, this was sooner than I planned, especially seeing as Riya and I were still in the ‘getting to know you’ stage. But I was plenty old enough. I made a good living. My life was in order. I was in a good position to start a family.
I was more worried about Riya than myself.
For someone who so adamantly didn’t want to have biological children to be forced into it, that had to have been taking a toll on her.
And, just as bad, an ex had taken her, held her, injected her with hormones to make her body perfect for reproduction, undid a decision she had made about her body, and betrayed her in every way but the eventual (and seemingly inevitable) implantation.
I had no fucking idea if he planned to manage that by test tubes and shit or if he was going to rape her unconscious body, but either fucking way, he was going to pay for even thinking about either.
“This is so fucked up,” Brock said, shaking his head as we made our way to the SUV and loaded in. “Leaps and bounds worse than some goddamn government testing shit. This was a man who supposedly loved her.”
“Just so we’re clear,” I said, turning to face him in the passenger seat and Tig in the back, “we’re not sitting outside his apartment.
I am breaking in, and I am finding that shithead and getting to the bottom of this.
If that means some blood gets spilled, it gets spilled.
No one is pulling me back unless I am about to kill the bastard. ”
“Got it,” Tig said automatically.
“Just like old times,” Brock said, giving me a smile, but it was strained.
It was just then that I was reminded what a good team I had. While we tried to stay above board most of the time, we all recognized there were times when that couldn’t happen, when we needed to get inventive. Or even, on a rare occasion, had a grudge to settle.
“Wouldn’t get your hopes too high up though,” Tig warned, often being a voice of reason. “We’ve been sitting on this place for days. Unless he’s some doomsday prepper with a stockpile of food, my money is on him having already cleared out of that place.”
“Yeah, and there’s no way he was able to keep Riya there either. He would have needed a sterile environment to do fucking surgery on her.”
True.
And I didn’t like that one bit.
But it was a reality I might have to accept.
I drove and parked out front of Riya’s old apartment building, all of us getting out in unison and crossing the street.
None of us had been inside, watching only from our cars outside.
So we weren’t prepared for it to be a complete shithole.
He was a fucking doctor, and there was garbage lining the hallways and holes in the walls.
“Jesus,” Brock hissed, shaking his head.
“Looks like my childhood apartment building,” Tig added.
We went up two floors and found his room among one of the ones that faced the street. Where he could look out his window and watch his ex’s comings and goings. The sick fuck.
“This is it,” Brock said, motioning to the third door. I nodded to him, and he knocked. We listened. Nothing. He knocked again, louder.
When we still heard nothing, I nodded at Brock, who reached into his back pocket for his lock-pick kit.
He didn’t even need it, honestly. He could open a door with a paperclip or bobby pin.
It wasn’t some skill he learned in training.
It was because he learned as a kid to pick his dad’s office door lock so he could sneak in and look at his nudie mags. He was a pro by the time he was eleven.
The door clicked quietly open, and we all shared a look before Brock moved inside.
What we found was chaos.
Michael’s place was a dimly lit one-room dungeon to begin with, nothing but an old, yellowed, dingy dome lamp hanging from the center of the ceiling to light it.
Which was probably good because it didn’t highlight the ratty brown carpet straight out of the fifties and the nicotine-chic look of the yellowed walls, pointing to some obvious heavy indoor smoking from some previous tenant.
There were cheap blinds on the windows, a few of the strips broken in places and caked with dust. A simple twin bed was butted up against a wall with a blue blanket and white sheets.
A kitchenette was to the far left, just a straight counter against the wall with an apartment-size fridge, a small sink, and a cooktop.
To the side of the end of the counter was a door to the bathroom that had broken tiles, mold in the grout, and a broken mirror.
There was a desk set directly in front of the windows facing the street, piled with mail, newspapers, and old festering cups of drinks.
The chaos was in the fact that the office chair, a solid wooden thing, was broken into six pieces all over the floor.
Takeaway containers, crumbled papers, and food wrappers were everywhere, likely because the garbage looked like it had been thrown at the wall.
A saucepan, two glasses, and a plate were in pieces all over the kitchen area.
“Break in?” Brock asked, shrugging.
“Nah,” Tig said, shaking his head. “Looks like someone blew his lid,” he said, waving a hand toward where a fist-sized hole was in the Sheetrock.
But I wasn’t looking at the mess.
I wasn’t even looking at the shitty kitchen and bathroom and general squalor.
What I was looking at was the wall above his bed.
Because the entire goddamn thing was a creepy stalker collage of Riya. Some were pictures they had taken while together—in New York at the tree, in Chaz’s bar with a margarita in her hand, a huge smile on her face, one of them kissing at a New Year’s party.
Most of them, though, were shots of her that were taken without her knowing.
There was one of her in full workout gear—super tight magenta leggings and a black sports bra, her face still flushed from the gym.
Another had her mussing up her hair on her way to her car.
Another had her smiling at a puppy walking past her on the street.
“Binoculars, digital camera, portable printer, and,” Brock said, looking at the desk area, “yup, a telescope pointing right into her windows. Looks like we got the right guy.”
“Yeah, but why is she in your place?” Tig asked, looking at me, his dark eyes probing. “If he is this obsessed with her, if he had been injecting her with hormones for a year, if he reversed her tube tie, if he had some sick bigger picture plan… why did he dump her at Famiglia?”
That was a good point. Nothing about what he had done seemed to indicate he wanted to let her go.
He seemed devoted to making his sick plan play out, convinced she would magically change her mind about him if he got his baby inside her, that she would forget the betrayal and live happily ever after with him.
Why was she in my apartment with my baby in her belly?
“Goddamn it,” I hissed, kicking the side of the bed in frustration.
“We’ll get him,” Brock said, steadily sifting through the mail on the desk.
“I’ll get Barrett back on his financials,” Tig said, pulling out his cell. “If he’s got another place where he kept her, he had to have paid for it somehow.”
I nodded at both of them, going for my own phone to look for the email Barrett had sent me.
“I want to talk to the wife,” I said, scanning the email for the address.
“If he has been in contact at all, she had to have noticed how off his rocker he is. And she might be able to point me to any other property he might have had.”
With that, we all flicked through his paperwork, seeing nothing but bills and an invite to his twenty-year high school reunion.
“Coffee and over to the wife’s place,” I said, knowing it was going to be a late night and that we all got nasty if we weren’t caffeinated.
Shannon Robinson was a typical silver spoon-fed woman from the right side of town who got herself attached to a man heading into the medical field, knowing it would guarantee her a comfortable life if she could stick it out for the seven years of schooling, residency, and specialty training.
During that time, she worked part-time at her father’s company as a marketing exec despite not having gone to college for it.
She was the kind of woman who was used to her pretty face getting her everything she wanted.
And she was pretty.
The pictures Barrett had found of her online showed a very posh strawberry blonde woman with a svelte body, coiffed hair, flawless makeup, impeccable clothes, expensive jewelry, and a fresh manicure at all times. She had a delicate face, all petite and understated with ice-blue eyes.
She was different from Riya in almost every way, but still gorgeous.
As soon as Michael went to work full-time as a doctor, she quit working and committed herself to full-time housewifery. Which, seeing as they had no children and she had a team of housekeepers and groundskeepers, meant she really just had fancy luncheons and wrote checks to the help.
Though, by all accounts, she didn’t seem like the typical ‘rich bitch’ type. All her status updates online and texts that Barrett had hacked made her seem sweet, if a bit naive and sheltered. She had just never been raised to pursue her own independence, so she didn’t.