Page 9 of Savage Claim

“If he wasn’t, he was very good at pretending,” Elio said.

“Santino?”

Damian swore out loud. “The coward ran. Hopefully he didn’t make it out.”

It wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but there was nothing that we could do about it right now. Without the Volkovs’ patronage, it would only be a matter of time before I got my hands on Santinoagain. The next time I would make sure that I had him in hand myself.

“Without Volkov, there’s going to be a vacuum, you know,” Samuel said. “Nearly all of his businesses and territory border the Cosa Nostra. The Russian Syndicate could fight for it, but so could any of the minor families.”

I hummed. “We’ll see who gets there first.”

The drive back to the estate was a quiet one. I kept my hand pressed against the wound on Isabella’s side, murmuring to her all the while that things would be okay. I couldn’t stop looking at her. Had she always been this beautiful? I heard Damian calling the men that he’d placed around Artem’s properties. They’d all made it safely back to where they’d come from, and then I passed him Dr. Coleman’s number. “Tell him to meet us at the house,” I said.

I listened to Damian’s urgent whisperings before he looked back at me. “He was not happy about being woken up, but I reminded him about the obscene amount of money you pay him to be on call.”

“Good man.”

Dr. Coleman’s car was idling in the driveway by the time we got there.

I carried Isabella into the house and up to the blue guestroom so that Dr. Coleman could examine her. The doctor followed behind me, and I could hear him stepping over the wreckage that I had caused in the second-floor hallway, but smartly, he chose not to comment.

I laid Isabella down on the bed, and I got out of Dr. Coleman’s way. “Isabella,” the doctor called. “Can you open your eyes for me?”

She groaned, but her eyes fluttered open. “S’bright,” she moaned softly.

Dr. Coleman felt around her skull, looking through her hair, before he glanced at me. “I don’t see a head wound, but her pupils are dilated like she has a concussion.”

“I believe she was drugged,” I said.

The news didn’t shake Dr. Coleman. When Isabella and I were planning to use IVF, I had chosen Dr. Coleman because I knew that he’d worked with a few women from the Cosa Nostra. Amalia’s mother spoke about him at dinner and praised his skills. The lack of a reaction now told me everything I needed to know about his connections to our world. He knew exactly who he was dealing with.

“Was she out for long?” he asked me.

“I don’t know. She’s been going in and out for the last hour or so.”

“A rag.” We both looked at Isabella. She raised her hand and put it over her mouth, showing us what they did. Her hand went limp, as if she had expended all of her strength.

I moved to sit by her side and took her hand. “Can chloroform hurt the baby?”

Dr. Coleman thought about it for a moment. “It definitely can,” he said, “with long-term exposure. If they didn’t hold it to her face for long, it would be impossible to really say until after the baby was born.”

“The baby?” Isabella asked, putting her free hand against her belly.

Dr. Coleman pulled out a fetal heart doppler. “Let’s just check, shall we?”

She nodded weakly, and Dr. Coleman and I gently pulled her shirt up. The doctor frowned when he saw the cut. It was still sluggishly bleeding. He dug out a first aid kit from the same bag that he’d pulled out the doppler. Quickly, he used liquid stitches to close the wound and applied a sterile bandage.

Once her wound was taken care of, he picked up the doppler again. It took a few moments, and then a softthud thud thudfilled the room. Dr. Coleman smiled. “That’s a fine heartbeat,” he said. “Right where it should be at this stage in her pregnancy.”

My shoulders relaxed. I hadn’t even realized that I had tensed while he had been searching for the baby’s heartbeat. Isabella, too, looked relieved. “Will she be all right?”

Dr. Coleman didn’t answer until after he checked her blood pressure. Once that came back normal, he nodded. “She might have a headache and feel sluggish for the next few days because of the chloroform,” he said. “It’s similar to a really nasty hangover, but you must watch her for signs of seizures. Outside of that, she seems physically fine.” He started to pack his bag once more. When everything was neatly stowed again, he said, “I want to see her in a week to check on the baby.”

“I’ll call the office in a few hours,” I said, and with a nod, Dr. Coleman took his leave.

“Everything’s okay,” Isabella said, more to herself than to me, hand on her belly.

“The baby is okay,” I reiterated, and the tension in the room was turned up a notch.

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