Page 56 of Forbidden Surrogate

I try to scream and drop my weight protectively, but the man is way too strong for that defense to work and he effortlessly picks me up into his arms and squeezes me against his chest, taking me to his waiting car. I fight the entire way down as he shoves me in the back until he threatens to cut the baby out of my womb.

The threat is enough to shut me up, I won’t lie. That’s my baby he’s talking about. Our baby. The man ties me up and blindfolds me, making it impossible for me to do anything but tilt my face towards the roof of the car.

When he returns to the front - the car is similar to a Tahoe, a vehicle I got familiar with during my first kidnapping - I hear my kidnapper speaking in a quiet, melodic language that my ear eventually recognizes as Italian.

Chapter Thirty

Luigi

Halfway up the driveway, I see the door wide open and I know some shit went down at the lake house. What the fuck? I had people watching the house tonight. I call Sal, yelling at him to get hisshit together immediately.

He got a command from dad to leave the property tonight, so he had to. It’s a reasonable explanation, but I chew him out for not at leasttelling methat he was going to leave.

I call Danny next, since he should have more sense than Sal, who is dumb enough to defer to my father on the basis of family loyalty over anything else. He’s slightly more apologetic, but he doesn’t have any answers about what the hell could have happened to the girl in the house.

Nothing is missing from the house except Delphine, giving me absolute certainty that this was a targeted attack – and I’m the target. Could my father have done this? Or Angela? Is this part of some twisted plot to get me back together with Delphine?

I return to my car in an effort to think straight, and because I don’t know if I’ll need to get out of here on short notice. This might be related to the Pittsburgh situation, so I have to be careful about who I call. What questions I ask.

Angela doesn’t pick up when I call, which isn’t like her. I know Delphine said she was acting strangely, but Angela is a dancer who no longer has her art as an outlet for her fucked up psyche. She acts out once in a while. We fight all the time, but I’m closer to that crazy fucking woman than almost anyone in my family.

If she really wanted to run, if she really needed to get away from the family, would she really leave me with nothing, not even goodbye?

Was that why she played her little trick with Delphine? In her twisted fucking way, she didn’t want to leave me alone… It’s hopelessly foolish and romantic in exactly the way I would expect from my sister, but I don’t want to believe it’s true. I call her three more times before I accept the fact that Angela won’t be picking up. Reasons currently unknown.

I’m staring at my phone when a call from an unknown number pops up.Delphine?At the same time, a call from my father flashes across the screen. My device gives me the option to choose between the two calls. It’s hardly a real choice.

“Dad. Tied up at the moment. Everything okay?”

“Are you panicking?”

He exhales slowly, like a gila monster beneath a heat lamp. He doesn’t have to say much more or do much more for me to understand the implications.

“Dad, do you have Delphine or know her whereabouts?”

“How long did you think you could hide a colored woman from me, Luigi?”

“Wanting privacy is not the same thing as hiding.”

I resent his implication. He makes it so much harder for me to deny Angela’s claims about our family and their beliefs. Surely, even if something were more generally true, there would be exceptions. And how much of that shit do I really believe? Is there really somethingembarrassingabout being out with a gorgeous woman, who I genuinely love from the bottom of my heart?

If he has her, he doesn’t know what I’ll do to get her back.

“You were hiding her for a reason,” my father continues forcefully. “You know there’s something shameful in what you were doing.”

Does he really think he canlecture meout of loving Delphine? He’s wrong. What I feel for her has absolutely nothing to do with common sense. Would it make sense for me to genuinely fall for a woman Angela selected for me and drugged? My emotional connection to Delphine seems even more like fate because of the unusual circumstances surrounding her arrival in my bed.

She’s a gift that fell out of the sky and I don’t care what anybody thinks about her or our relationship.I’m getting her back.Considering my father’s power and his temper, I should tread carefully, but I barely have control over my words. Rage courses through me in unpleasant waves and I have to face the terrifying conscious realization that if he were in the same room as I was, I would beat the fuck out of my own goddamn father over Delphine.

“You have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“Do you really think I’ll let some half-breed baby get involved in our family affairs, Luigi?”

“I think if you don’t accept your own grandson, you wouldn’t be a real Italian. I don’t give a fuck what you think about Delphine’s skin color.”

He pauses, almost like he’s considering my words, but of course, nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t dare read too deeply into anything he does or says right now unless he makes a direct threat against my life.

“Where is she?” I press him, before he gives me any feedback.

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