Traded to His Enemy, Pregnant With His Heir novel · Chapter 2 of 48

Chapter 2: The Key

A 2 a.m. text tells Shona to behave, the pakhan hands her the only key to her room, and at dawn an unknown number sends a photo of Donatella barefoot in her husband's shirt.

The doctor left me a glass of water and two crackers on a napkin.

I didn't touch either one.

I sat on the edge of a stranger's bed in a stranger's cashmere sweater and stared at my phone.

They'd let me keep it.

Lazarev had said I could call anybody I wanted.

There was only one person I wanted, and he hadn't called.

I met Gianluca at three in the morning in Trauma Bay Four.

I was twenty-three and on my eleventh night shift in a row.

He walked in holding his side with a dish towel, and blood ran down his pant leg into his shoe.

Two men came in behind him with their jackets open so I'd see the guns.

"Fix him fast," one of them said.

"Get out of my bay," I said, "or I'll call security and let them fix you."

Gianluca laughed, and then he winced, and then he laughed again.

"You heard her," he said. "Go wait in the hall."

I put fourteen stitches under his ribs.

He didn't make a sound.

The next day there were white roses at the nurses' station with my name on the card.

They came every day for a month, until the charge nurse begged me to go out with him so she could have her counter back.

He took me to dinner on Hanover Street.

He stood behind me at my mother's funeral the next spring with one hand on my back, and he didn't move it once.

On the night he proposed, he told me I'd never be alone again.

I believed it, because I think he did too.

Then Donatella Rossetti came home from Milan.

She was the girl his family had promised him to when he was nineteen.

Her father had moved the whole family to Italy that same year.

Eight months ago her father died, and she came back to Boston in black with sunglasses on, and Gianluca decided she belonged to him to look after.

"She's got nobody, Shona," he'd said. "She's family."

I had nobody either.

He just never counted me.

After that it was phone calls he took in the hall with the door pulled shut.

It was dinners I cooked and ate by myself while his plate went cold across from me.

It was his men looking at the floor when I walked into a room.

And tonight, at the gala I'd spent six weeks planning, he'd danced with her twice and with me not at all.

At two in the morning my phone buzzed.

My heart jumped so hard it hurt.

GIANLUCA: Don't do anything stupid. Don't give him a reason. Tella's in shock and can't be alone, so I'm staying at hers. We'll talk in a couple days.

A couple days.

I read it four times.

I laid the phone face down on the comforter.

Then I pressed both hands over my mouth so the sound I made wouldn't go through the wall.

Someone knocked.

"Mrs. Bellucci." Lazarev's voice. "Can I open the door?"

I wiped my face with the sweater cuff.

"You own the walls. You don't have to ask."

"Not these ones. Not for thirty days."

He opened it, and he didn't step through.

He'd lost the jacket, and his shirt was open at the throat, and he was holding a mug.

"Ginger tea," he said. "The doctor says it helps the sickness."

"I'm not sick."

"You've been in the bathroom three times since midnight. The walls here are not so thick."

My face went hot.

He leaned in and set the mug on the dresser closest to the door, and then he stepped back out into the hall.

He gave me the whole room.

"Why are you being nice to me?" I said. "I'm what he owes you."

"You're a guest under the old law. Nobody in this house raises a hand to you. Nobody raises a voice. If one of my men looks at you wrong, you tell me his name."

"And after thirty days?"

"That's up to your husband."

We both heard what that meant.

Gianluca had the money in his safe at home, in cash.

He could have paid it before his car reached the highway.

He hadn't even asked what it was.

Lazarev watched me work it out, and he didn't say one cruel word.

He didn't say anything.

That was worse.

"Can I ask you a question?" I said.

"One."

"At the warehouse. He said if you touched her, he'd burn Brighton down. And you said, which her."

"I did."

"Why?"

He put one shoulder against the doorframe.

"I've watched men give up guns for money," he said. "Territory. Their own brothers, once or twice."

A muscle in his jaw moved.

"I never watched a man step over his wife like she was a bag on the floor."

I couldn't breathe for a second.

"Drink it while it's hot, Shona," he said.

It was the first time he'd used my name.

"There's a lock. Use it, if you sleep better."

"Why bother? You'd have a key."

"No. There was only ever one, and it's in the door. Your side of it."

He pulled the door closed.

I looked at the lock.

A small brass key was sitting in it, on my side.

For three years I'd lived in a house in Medford where not one door locked from the inside.

Gianluca liked to be able to walk in.

The man my husband traded me to had handed me the only key in the first hour.

I didn't sleep.

I lay on my side with one hand under the sweater on my stomach and listened to the harbor until the windows went grey.

At six my phone lit up on the nightstand.

It wasn't Gianluca.

It was a number I didn't know, and a photo.

My kitchen in Medford, the one I'd drawn on graph paper and fought the contractor over for a year.

Gianluca at the counter in his undershirt, pouring coffee into the blue mug I'd given him our first Christmas.

And Donatella beside him, barefoot on my tile, in nothing but his white dress shirt.

There was one line under the picture.

"He's had the real thing back for one night and he's already forgotten your name."

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