Chapter 30
His haunted eyes hold mine, and he sits back in his chair.
Silence…
I wait for him to say something, he doesn’t. He just sits there, shocked… or perhaps he’s just counting
e ways to hurt me. He doesn’t need to count them, I already know it’s an infinite number.
“You…we…” My voice trails off.
He drops his eyes to a spot on the carpet, he can’t even look me in the eye.
“You didn’t wear protection, Gabriel.”
His eyes rise to meet mine, his hatred for me dripping from his every cell.
“I’d been on antibiotics that month, and…” I roll my lips as I try to compose myself, I can hardly see him through the tears. “You told me…”
His back to the carpet, his silence is beginning to scare the hell out of me.
eves
“What was I supposed to do?” I stammer. “You told me you didn’t want to see me ever again.”
Silence…
I watch him, waiting for the explosion, waiting for some type of reaction, even an overreaction is
better than this.
“Do they know?” he eventually asks. “No.”
“Who knows?”
“Nobody, I told everyone that they were conceived through IVF using donor sperm.”
His eyes drop back to the carpet.
Say something.
Chapter 30
Gabriel Ferrara doesn’t do silence.
“I don’t want anything from you, you don’t have to worry,” I stammer. “You can live your life as normal; we will never bother you.”
His dark eyes rise to meet mine, and this time they flicker with fury. He sits forward in his chair. “Do you honestly think that you can keep my children from me?” He sneers.
Fear runs through my system.
“I cannot believe…” His voice trails off as if stopping himself from elaborating.
Why is he not exploding? He’s acting weird and out of character, it’s very unsettling.
“What were you going to say?”
His eyes hold mine. “You are the most selfish person I have ever met.” What?
“You let your feelings for me betray your own children, preventing them from having access to their father.” He swallows the lump in his throat as if overcome with emotion.
“You have a fiancée. You will have more children, Gabriel,” I whisper.
“I will.” He tilts his chin to the sky in defiance as he sits forward, his anger returning loud and clear. “Did you really think I would never find out?” The hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“I thought the day you left me was your biggest betrayal,” he whispers.
You forced me away.
“Just because I didn’t want you never meant I didn’t want them.” He sneers.
oh…
A knife straight through my heart. I stare at him through tears.
There’s the Gabriel I know. Cold and heartless.
“Here is what is going to happen,” he says in a cold and calculating voice. “Today I am sending a medic around to your house, and they are having a paternity test and you-” he glares at me, “-are finally going to do the right thing by your children.”
Chapter 3
I open my mouth to say something.
“If you try to stop me from seeing them…even once. Prepare yourself for the consequences. Do you understand me?” he growls.
“Is that a threat?”
“Push me and find out.”
My
(y stupid eyes fill with tears of fear. “You haven’t changed, still the selfcentered bastard who only
thinks of himself.”
A trace of a smirk crosses his cold, hard gaze. “I think you know me well enough, Violet, to know why I’m angry.”
“You didn’t want anything to do with me.”
“This has nothing to do with you,” he spits. “I have missed six years of my children’s life. Six birthdays. Six Christmases, six fucking years, Violet.” My stomach twists, I’m on the edge of a full
emotional meltdown.
“Do the paternity test,” he warns.
“And if I don’t?”
“Prepare yourself.”
My eyes hold his. “For what?
“Armafuckinggeddon.” He stands, and without another word, walks out of my office. I stare at the back of the door he just left through.
Oh no…
Emotion takes over, and I put my head into my hands and cry.
I sit in my car around the corner from my house as I try to pull myself together.
I was so rattled that I had to leave work, I told them that I had just been told an old friend had died.
I’m just a dirty liar now.
Chapter 30
My eyes are red and swollen, and damn it, I feel so unstable.
Terrified.
His words come back to me: “If you try to stop me from seeing them… prepare yourself for the consequences. My god, how has it come to this?
Last week, my life was normal, my biggest drama was finding ballet slippers, this week
bad dream.
like a
A living nightmare.
The worst part is, I already know their paternity, there isn’t even a need to do the test. There’s not one seed of doubt in my mind. Gabriel Ferrara is their biological father and there is nothing I can do
about it.
Just because I didn’t want you never meant that I didn’t want them.”
“Oh.” I screw up my face in tears. His words still hurt. I went straight back to being that woman who
was madly in love with him, the pitiful woman with my heart on the bottom of his shoe, taking his
hits blow by blow.
“Stop it, pull yourself together. You have to go home.”
pulled over to
I pull down the sunshield to fix my face in the mirror and I catch sight of a black car pulled the side of the road and parked about two hundred meters behind me.
What?
I turn around and my heart sinks for the thousandth time today, he’s having me followed so that I can’t disappear. And if I were a better person, I would tell you that going on the run with his children
has never occurred to me.
But it has…especially today.
“You are the most selfish person I have ever met.” He’s right, I am…but it takes one to know one.
And he’s the fucking king.
I pick myself up and dust myself off. I wipe my eyes and put my sunglasses on. I know I have to play by the rules, but fuck him. We’re doing this on my terms.
15:29
