Page 65 of Forbidden Pregnancy
“Do you really want to go there?”
“I’m not weird,” CC says. “I’m traumatized. And after tonight–
“SHHH!” Michael hisses, definitely forgetting himselfthattime. “Never speak about what we’re going to do tonight.Never.If somebody has a gun to your head, I expect you to stay quiet. Do you understand?”
There’s a beat of silence and I wonder if they moved far enough away from my bedroom door that I just can’t hear the rest of their conversation. Just when I’m ready to give up on hearing CC’s response, I hear her say, “I won’t. I promise.”
“Good.”
“I’m ready.”
“Let’s go.”
It might be stupid to sneak out after them, but fifteen minutes after they leave, I can’t change my mind to a more reasonable position. I have to know where they’ve gone. Thankfully, I set myself up so it would be easy to keep track of them tonight.
I leave my bed, confident that Michael is nowhere nearby. It’s still scary, even if I know that Michael isn’t in the house. I check my phone to see where his little pin shows up. I gave him a little animated football as an icon, so I watch the little football speeding down the state highway that takes you around the outskirts of the city.
No idea where he’s going and no idea how I’m going to follow them either. Michael has more than one vehicle at all his houses, so I’m just hoping that he didn’t leave behind the motorcycle. I’m willing to risk a lot while pregnant, but getting on the back of a motorcycle when I don’t even know how to ride one seems just a little too crazy, even for me.
I don’t have to search the kitchen long to find Michael’s truck keys. Good. He didn’t take the truck. I can handle driving the truck and it’s the safest one. The tinted windows don’t hurt thesituation either. My hands are shaking, but I’m so determined to follow Michael that I slip the keys into the pocket of my maternity pants and search the kitchen for a weapon.
I’m not comfortable with guns at all, but I know Michael has lots of them and I have no idea where he’s going tonight, just the dark sense that he might need someone else in the room with a weapon who has his back. I haven’t ever done a full blown search of the house for weapons before, so it surprises me that it doesn’t take long to find an unloaded pistol.
I can’t find any ammunition, but I’m hoping that a gun without ammo is plenty to strike the fear of God into anyone I might meet tonight. I glance at my phone to watch Michael’s football symbol trailing around the map. It seems like he’s heading out of town, maybe towards the casino?
It’s the most popular spot in that direction outside of Buffalo where locals spend the weekend, especially locals with lots of money to spend. That must be where he’s going. I step outside where Michael has the truck pulled under the roof where the “carriage” of the old days would have gone. I’m so fixated on my goal of getting out of there and following Michael, that I don’t notice anything wrong until I hear footsteps.
I gasp and try to play innocent, wrongfully thinking it’s Michael. But it’s not… There’s a black woman exiting a black sedan that I didn’t even notice parked behind Michael’s truck. I calm down because it’s a black woman, but I have no idea who she is and why she pulled up at my house parking the truck into the carriage house.
My instincts tell me not to reach for the gun, but I don’t know what to make of this black woman walking towards me confidently. Detecting my confusion, she raises her hands to indicate surrender.
“I’m not going to hurt you, Myra. I’m Delphine Taviani, one of Michael’s in-laws.”
I glance down at her ring finger and the piece of jewelry is so shiny that it almost blinds me with its reflection off the outdoor motion lights. Shiny jewelry backs up her story of being a mob wife, but that can’t be my only evidence. I don’t say anything to her until she gets close enough that we can truly see each other. She has no weapon and I don’t reach for mine even if I don’t go as far as showing total surrender.
“Who sent you here?”
It hits me as the words fall out of my mouth. Michael never cared if I was asleep or not. He had a plan for tonight.
“My husband has a job tonight. I came here to watch you. They promised me you would be asleep the entire night.”
“Michael’s hiding something from me and–”
“You’re pregnant with his child,” Delphine says, her gaze dropping intentionally towards my stomach. I nod and look at her again, trying to figure out what she means by “in-laws” and also absorbing every detail I can about this black woman who married into their family. I don’t know how she made it this far. She looks like she’s living the soft life, not the life on the run I would expect for any black woman involved with this dangerous family.
There’s no point in denying that I’m carrying Michael’s baby, so hopefully I can trust Delphine. She seems like she has a trustworthy face. She has healthy round features, large square-framed glasses with a tortoiseshell rim, and a pretty normal outfit – not a clown costume or anything like that.
“Don’t leave tonight,” Delphine says. “I can’t make you stay, but Luigi sent me here to tell you the truth. If you leave, they can’t protect you. If you stay, you never have to worry about your safety again.”
I feel a shiver of fear and uncertainty again. I know he’s up to something morally wrong, and Delphine doesn’t seem to be hiding that from me. I don’t know if I even want the details.
“Do I have accountability for what he’s doing tonight?”
“Don’t think about it,” Delphine says. “My husband is Luigi Taviani. Let’s go inside, I’ll make you a cup of tea and we can get to know each other. It sounds like we’ll be in each other’s lives for a very long time.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Michael
