Claimed Mafia Bride by Mae Doyle
Trevor
“Pick up your fucking phone, asshole,” I mutter as I wait for Marcelo to answer my call. I’m out of the train station, leaning against my car in the parking lot, but I’m not relaxed. I have to keep looking around me, keeping making sure that I wasn’t followed and that someone didn’t hear my gun.
Finally, right when I’m about to hang up, Marcelo answers. His voice is clipped and harsh like I caught him in the middle of something. “What?”
“The Dark Devils are back,” I tell him, getting straight to the chase. I’ll have someone clean up the body later, or maybe not. Maybe it’s the deterrent that shitheads need to stay out of the train station. Might as well put his head up on a stake and set it out in the parking lot.
“What?” His voice changes, but only a little bit. I can still hear the surprise in it. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I just got into it with a scumbag in the station.” Talking quickly, I fill him in on the details. It’s a lot to take in, especially since we just found out about the Wicked Bastards moving back in and trying to take over. They want to punish us and called in some reinforcements, drawing on the memory that the two clubs were going to be tied together through marriage.”
“Fuck.” Marcelo groans as he speaks and I can just picture him running his hand through his hair. “Listen, I have shit news too, Trevor, and you’re not going to like it.”
He pauses and I suddenly feel nervous. “What the fuck is it, Marcelo? Spit it out.”
There’s the sound of the phone being passed off and Salvatore is suddenly on the line. “We’re moving our families out of town, Trevor. Getting them to a safe house. Marcelo called in some guys to watch Jane for you but by the time they got there, it was too late.”
“Too late?” I echo his words, feeling a terrible twisting feeling in my stomach as I do. “What the fuck do you mean by too late?”
“They hit the house. Our men are there, looking through the wreckage and trying to figure out what the fuck happened.”
I’m sure that there’s more he wants to say to me, but I hang up and practically throw myself into my car. In my chest my heart’s beating so hard that it feels like someone’s punching me over and over and I suck in a breath, trying to calm myself down.
No dice.
Something happened to Jane because she was being as stubborn as fuck and now I need to get there as quickly as possible. In the passenger seat next to me, my phone starts to ring again, but I ignore it, squealing my tires and throwing gravel as I tear out of the train station parking lot and head back through town.
This time I don’t wait at stop signs. Instead, I blow through them, ignoring the honking from other drivers. They can all go to hell for all I care right now. I just need to get to Jane and make sure that she’s okay.
I reach her side of town in record time and stop right in front of her house. The street is packed with cars, most of them ones that I recognize from our guys and I slam my door shut, running right up to the house.
“Trevor,” a man says, reaching out to stop me. I recognize him but it takes me a moment to come up with his name.
“Mikey, move your ass,” I tell him, ready to punch him in the face to move him. “I mean it. I’ll kill you if you try to stop me from getting in there right now.”
“She’s gone, Trevor.” Even though I know that he’s aware that I’ll hurt him to get into that house if I have to, he doesn’t move. “They took her and shot her mom.”
“Fuck.” Turning, I run my hand across my face and groan. “Where did they take her? Is her mom alright?”
“We called in the family doctor,” Mikey tells me. “The mom will be fine. We’ll get her moved out of here to a safe house so that we can keep an eye on her, but there’s one more thing that you need to know.”
“What the fuck is it?” I ask, spinning back around to look at him. “What could be so important that you can’t just spit it out, Mikey?”
The look he gives me tells me that he thinks I’m a fucking idiot for not figuring it out already and I groan, shoving him out of the way so that I can get into the house. Off to my right I hear someone crying and I’m sure that it’s the mom getting patched up.
According to Mikey, she’ll be fine, so what’s the problem?
“Oh, fuck,” I say, turning back to him. “The kid. Where’s the fucking kid?” Panic courses through my body when I realize that I didn’t see the kid anywhere. I don’t know anything about it, except it’s a girl, and pretty young.
Maybe she hid when she heard the door explode in. From the looks of what’s left of it and the bits of wood scattered all over the floor, they blew it up with enough force to take down a house.
Fucking lucky the entire thing didn’t fall down on them.
“Back room,” Mikey says, and my eyes snap up to his. “She’s in the back room with Bert, playing with some toys. She’s okay, just scared, but I don’t think she realizes that they took her mom.”
The back room. I don’t answer him as I whip around and stalk down the hall. It’s a small house, with a layout that I’m familiar with even though I’ve never been in it. My house growing up was huge compared to this, but the layout here makes sense. The bedrooms are in the back, down a skinny hall that’s hung with family pictures.
I’m tempted to stop and look at them but I know that I won’t be able to rest until I lay eyes on the little girl and know for sure that she’s safe. She’s not mine, and I know that, but she is Jane’s, and Jane belongs to me.
Until we can get her mother back, I have to make sure that her daughter is safe. It wouldn’t be fair to Jane if I didn’t.
There are two rooms at the end of the hall. One is dark and I walk past that one, but the other has light coming through the door and I hear voices. Pausing, I take a deep breath and swallow hard.
I’m going to walk into that room and see a child that looks just like Jane, I know it. It’ll suck seeing her and knowing that her mother is missing, but we’ll find her. I’m just not prepared for the dead ringer of her mother that I’m going to see.
Because don’t daughters always look just like their mothers?
Turning the corner, I stop in the doorway, looking at the scene in front of me. Bert’s facing me, holding a stuffed animal in one hand and a doll in the other. The little girl has her back to me but turns around when Bert glances up at me.
“Hi,” I begin, but then my voice fails me.
It’s not that there’s a problem with the two of them playing. It’s not that I’m not fucking thrilled to finally get to see the person that Jane brought into the world.
The problem is that she looks just like me.
“Trevor,” Bert says, standing up. The doll and stuffed animal hang at his side and he gives me a little shrug as he looks between me and the girl. He sees it too, then. I wonder if everyone in the house has seen the girl and put two and two together.
And she’s not as young as Jane told me.
“How old are you?” I ask the girl, unable to form any other question.
She looks at me curiously then stands up, turning to face me with her face tilted up to mine. “I’m three, and my name is Annie,” she tells me. “Who are you?”
Three. Not two, like Jane told me, but three, which means that the timing is right. She looks just like me, I can’t deny that. We have the same hair and eyes and as she waits for me to respond, she gives me a little smirk and I feel my heart skip a beat. I know that smirk. I’ve seen that smirk in the mirror every day for my entire life.
“I’m Trevor,” I tell her, “and I’m going to take care of you. Your mom and grandma had to pop out for a little bit to take care f some things but they wanted me to look after you.”
She stares at me and shake her head. “I don’t know you.”
“It’s okay,” I tell her, reaching for her hand. “Why don’t you come with me and we’ll get some ice cream? I bet that by the time we finish eating, we’ll know all about each other.”
She hesitates and I’m sure for a moment that she’s going to dig in her heels and fight me, but then she nods. “I like ice cream. And you seem nice.”
Nice. My daughter just called me nice. I know that she’s my daughter like I know any other truth in the world. Never did I think that she was mine, never did I think that I’d have the opportunity to be a father quite yet.
“Well, Annie, so do you. Looks like we have a lot in common already. Let’s go, darling.”
Holding my daughter’s hand and leading her from the house feels right. When we walk by the living room where her grandmother is being seen by the doctor, I scoop her up into my arms and she presses her little face against my neck. Carrying her out of the house, I nod once to Mikey, but I don’t look back.
