The Cruel Mafia Boss Drank at the Bar, And He Called Her Hired Help and Threw His Whiskey at Her Feet
Part 2: “I don’t know you!” she cried. “Let me go!”
The sound of her fear should have stopped him. Instead, grief twisted into rage because rage was the only language he had spoken for half a year.
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not lying! My name is Hannah Wells. I woke up in a clinic in Gary with no purse, no memory, and this baby inside me. I don’t know who you are.”
Roman stared at her, breathing hard.
No memory.
His grip loosened.
Rosa came forward, trembling but stubborn. “She’s telling the truth. Mercy House sent her to me. She has papers from the clinic. Temporary name. No family listed. She doesn’t remember anything before January.”
January.
The bombing had been in late December.
Vince stepped closer. “Roman, listen to how insane this sounds. You saw the report. We buried Evelyn. The Morettis are playing with your head.”
Roman slowly turned.
Vince’s expression was perfect: concern, caution, loyalty. Too perfect.
For six months, Vince had been the one at Roman’s shoulder, pushing him to strike harder, faster, bloodier. Vince had handled the medical examiner. Vince had brought the dental confirmation. Vince had advised against opening the casket because “you don’t need to remember her that way.” Vince had managed the war while Roman drowned in grief.
Roman looked back at the woman. She was shaking so badly the mop handle rattled against the floor. Her breathing became shallow. Her hand flew to her stomach.
“I feel dizzy,” she whispered.
Roman caught her as her knees gave out.
For one impossible second, her head rested against his chest exactly where it used to fit. Her scent rose around him, and the beast he had become stood helpless with his dead wife alive in his arms.
“Lock the doors,” Roman said.
Two guards moved instantly.
Vince’s eyes sharpened. “That’s a mistake.”
Roman lifted Hannah—Evelyn, his Evelyn, his stranger—and held her as if the whole city might try to steal her again.
“The mistake,” Roman said, looking at Vince over her unconscious face, “was letting me believe she was dead.”
Vince’s jaw tightened. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“For the first time in six months,” Roman said, “I know exactly what I’m doing.”
He carried her out through the back entrance into the sleet, and the men of The Blue Lantern watched their king leave with a pregnant janitor in his arms and murder waking slowly behind his eyes.
The Archer estate sat in Lake Forest behind iron gates, black pines, and cameras hidden where even birds seemed watched. Roman had bought it for Evelyn because she once said she wanted a house with enough trees to make Chicago feel far away. She had hated the coldness of the glass walls and polished stone, but she loved the west garden, the old library, and the breakfast nook where morning light came through the windows like forgiveness.
Since her death, Roman had not entered her rooms.
Now he carried her past the grand staircase, past the portrait she had made him take down because “no living man should look that pleased with himself,” and into the suite they had once shared. He laid her on the bed as gently as if her bones were made of rain.
“Get Dr. Ellis,” he told his security chief, Caleb Wynn. “Not Keller. Not anyone Vince knows. Ellis.”
Caleb’s brows lifted. “She retired.”
“Then unretire her.”
Within an hour, Dr. Margaret Ellis arrived in a camel coat, snow in her gray hair, and irritation in every line of her face. She had delivered half of Chicago’s political families, treated gunshot wounds she never reported, and told Roman Archer to shut up twice in one evening the year he broke three ribs. Unlike most doctors in his orbit, she had never taken his money unless she had earned it honestly.
She examined Hannah while Roman stood outside the bedroom door, one hand pressed flat against the wall.
When Ellis emerged, she closed the door behind her and looked at him as if he were still the reckless nineteen-year-old she had stitched together in a basement.
“She’s stable,” Ellis said. “Dehydrated, underfed, exhausted, but stable. The baby’s heartbeat is strong.”
Roman closed his eyes.
“How far?”
“About twenty-seven weeks.”
The number entered him like a blade and a blessing. Evelyn had been pregnant when the bomb went off. She had not told him. Or perhaps she had planned to that night. They had argued that morning because Roman missed a meeting with a real estate attorney she had begged him to see. She wanted him out of the business. He had said leaving wasn’t as simple as signing papers. She had said, “Then make it simple before there’s more than me to lose.”
More than me.
Roman opened his eyes. “Her memory?”
May you like
“Traumatic amnesia is complicated. Head injury, shock, emotional trauma. She may recover fragments. She may not. But I’ll tell you what she doesn’t need.”
“What?”
