Cruel Paradise (Beautifully Cruel Book 2)

We dress in silence. When we’re done, Killian looks at me with distant eyes, his whole demeanor cool and withdrawn. His voice is cool, too, when he says, “If you need me, you know how to find me.”

Then he walks out the door.

I sink into the nearest chair and press my hand over my pounding heart, too stunned to think straight.

I sit there like that for a long time, until finally my bubble of shock breaks.

I burst into tears.

I cry as I gather my things, cry as I call for a taxi, cry all the way home in the back of the cab. I don’t know exactly why I’m so upset, except that everything is wrong, wrong, wrong. The way he left, the way I feel, how badly my heart is aching.

I wanted this to be over.

Now it is.

Except maybe it isn’t. Because maybe baby.

Because maybe I am the stupidest person who has ever lived.

When I open the door to my apartment, it’s almost ten p.m. Fin and Max are sitting at the kitchen table in their underwear, drinking wine and playing poker.

Max shouts, “You’re fucking cheating!”

Fin laughs. “Just because you have no idea how to play this game doesn’t mean I’m cheating.”

I drop my handbag onto the floor in the foyer. They look over at me. Their eyes widen.

Max says, “Oh shit.”

Fin says, “Hun. What happened? Are you okay?”

I burst into tears again, because that’s just how my day is going.

“Okay, wait. Rewind. Luteal phase? What man on earth knows what the heck the luteal phase is? I didn’t even know, and I own a pair of ovaries!”

Max holds up her phone. She’s just queried Siri, who affirmed the definition for us all.

Fin says, “Maybe the study of women’s reproductive cycles is one of his hobbies.”

Max shoots me a loaded glance. “Or he’s been in this situation before.”

I groan. “Oh god. He could already have kids for all I know. Hell, he could have a wife! I don’t really know anything about him!”

Fin shakes her head. “He doesn’t have a wife.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Married men are neutered. You can see it in the way they walk. That ‘I’ve-surrendered-my-free-will’ slouchy, shuffling walk. They’ve lost the desire to live. Your Mr. Black walks like a peacock. Like a lion. Very unneutered. Very unmarried. His balls are very much intact.”

Max crinkles her nose. “Since when are you such an expert on married men and their balls? Or men at all, for that matter?”

“I’m not in the straight fishbowl. You people can’t see each other clearly, but I’m looking in from the outside, an impartial observer. There’s a married man walk, an unmarried man walk, and a cheating married man walk. That one is super distinctive. Cocky but also furtive, like a fox slinking away from a henhouse with a dead bird between its teeth.”

It’s nearly two o’clock in the morning. We’ve been sitting at the kitchen table for hours, going over everything that’s happened since I left. The two of them are drinking wine, but I’m drinking water, trying to pretend that’s a completely normal thing for me to do on a Saturday night.

We’ve already asked Siri how soon a pregnancy test can confirm if a woman is, in fact, pregnant. To my great dismay, it seems that even the most sensitive tests need about eight days from conception to let you know for certain if Hot Gangster, Jr. will be arriving in nine months.

Max looks at me. When she takes my hands across the table and gently squeezes them, I know it’s going to be bad.

She says carefully, “Okay. We’ve never talked about this before, so I don’t know how you feel about it, but I’m just going to float the possibility that you do have other options besides keeping the baby. You could have an—”

“No.”

Fin and Max are surprised by the vehemence of my answer. I look down at my hands, spread flat on the table, and blow out a breath.

“My mother had this thing about becoming a grandmother. Somebody asked her when she was a little girl what she wanted to be when she grew up, and she said she wanted to be a grandmother. That it seemed like the most wonderful thing to be in the world.”

I have to take another breath before I go on. “She always talked about the day I’d have my own baby. How happy she’d be. How she hoped it was a girl. If I ever do have a girl, I’ll name her after my mother.”

After a moment, Fin says gently, “This is about what you want, though. What’s good for you.”

My laugh is dry. “If it turns out that I’m pregnant, it’s not about me anymore at all.”

Max squeezes my hand and sits back in her chair, smiling at me. “Damn. I never thought I’d be a godmother so young.”

Fin scoffs. “Excuse me, but I’m going to be the baby’s godmother. You can barely tie your own shoes.”

I say loudly, “You’ll be co-godmothers of the maybe-not-even-actual baby. Now can you please give me a break?”

Max is quiet for a moment, then gasps. “Oh, jeez.”

“What?”

She looks at me with big eyes. “Who’ll be the godfather?”

I groan and collapse facedown onto the table.

Fin pats my back reassuringly. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. You’re probably going to be fine. In all likelihood, this is just a false alarm.”

Max says brightly, “At least we know where to get diapers if we end up needing them.”

I groan again, more pathetically.

They put me to bed and tuck me in, cooing and clucking over me like a couple of mother hens. Like I’m a sick child. Like I’m some kind of basket case, a totally lost cause.

Which I suppose I am.

When I wake up in the morning, there’s a brief, lovely moment where I don’t remember where I am or where I’ve been or what’s happening.

Then I spot the stuffed unicorn pony staring accusingly at me from my dresser across the room, and it all comes flooding back.

I pull the covers over my head and stay in bed for the rest of the day.

Like a funeral, Monday arrives.

I go to work. Hank takes one look at my face and laughs. “You look exactly like my sister at about five o’clock every afternoon.”

“Your sister with the half-dozen evil Viking banshee children who’s forty-two but looks one hundred and two?”

“She’s the one.”

“Thank you for that.”

He leans his forearms over the top of my cubicle and sends me a sympathetic look. “Guess the vacation didn’t take, huh?”

I chuckle darkly. “Oh, it took all right. It planted itself right in and took root.”

Now Hank looks perturbed. “Not sure how to respond to that, kiddo.”

I wave him off. “Forget about it. I’ve traumatized you enough with my personal life. Anything exciting happen while I was gone?”

He shrugs. “George broke the copy machine again. Sandy and Donna got into a screaming match about The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. At the weekly staff meeting, Rudy launched into an epic rant about Tom Brady leaving the Patriots and joining that obscure Florida team. Whatever their name is.”

“The Buccaneers.”

“That’s the one. Orange jerseys that make ’em look like Creamsicles. Rudy’s beside himself. Thinks the whole thing was set up by some anarchist shadow group to sow discontent among the masses and overthrow the government. Oh, and there’s a new FedEx delivery guy all the girls are salivating over. If I hear the term ‘sex on a stick’ one more time, I’m quitting in protest.”

“So it was business as usual.”

“Yup.” He studies me for a moment. “You need to talk?”

“I need a time machine so I can go back to before I was a dumbass.”

He gazes at me, laughter shining in his eyes. “So many jokes.”

“I know. You’re showing amazing restraint. Now please go away so I can try to work.”

“‘Try’ being the operative word.” He raps his knuckles on the top of the cubicle. “I’m here if you need me.”

I swallow around the lump forming in my throat. “Thanks, Hank.”

“Anytime, kiddo.”

He turns and walks into his office, leaving me with a searing mental image of Killian’s face when I thanked him for saving my life. He said the same thing Hank just did. “Anytime.”

I know it’s first thing Monday morning, but I could really use a drink.

It hits me that if I actually am pregnant, I’m not going to be able to have a drink for nine months. I almost burst into tears again, but manage to control myself.

Barely.

A week goes by. I don’t hear from Killian. I don’t call him, either. The big black SUVs are still parked in front of the apartment, changing every few hours in shifts, but he isn’t one of the men who arrives to sit and watch over us.

I buy six pregnancy tests and take three, knowing it’s too early but unable to stop myself.

They’re all negative. That does nothing for my peace of mind.

I go to the bank, take out the safety deposit box, and stare at the diamond necklace. I run my fingers over the coldly glittering stones, wondering if they used to belong to someone my maybe-baby daddy killed.

I develop a nasty case of insomnia.

Then, the following Tuesday, something crosses my desk that stops me cold.

It’s an article in the digital edition of the newspaper. A small article, three pages deep, about an elderly man living in obscurity in a small town in Arizona who went to the grocery store one morning and wound up in jail a few days later, charged with multiple crimes committed many years ago.

According to the prosecutor, the man was a former mafia member who’d vanished without a trace thirty years prior. His family and associates thought him dead, the victim of a contract killing. But he’d been living out West all these years under an assumed name, quietly going about his business.

It wasn’t so much the man himself that got my attention, but the way he was caught.

An informant identified him.

Another former mafia member, now on the police payroll and working undercover, happened to be in that particular grocery store on that particular morning, buying cigarettes. He was on a driving trip from New York to California to visit his only grandchild, his crippling fear of flying keeping him off a plane.

Former mafioso number two saw former mafioso number one at the checkout, and the rest, as they say, was history.

I stare at the article with my heart racing like mad in my chest, reading it over and over. One word keeps jumping out at me.

Informant.

I grab a yellow legal pad from the top drawer of my desk and hastily scribble a list.

• Secrets
• Mafia
• Different name
• Access to FBI database
• Access to air force satellite
• Scary good background checks
• No personal artifacts in residence
• Geo-location device in business cards
• Arrested on multiple felony charges but quickly let go
• “He’s doing important work.”
• “There are too many lives at stake to take that risk.”

I add Shakespeare buff and annoyingly arrogant, but cross them out because they don’t matter.

Then I sit back in my chair, stunned.

It blows over me like nuclear fallout. An atomic mushroom cloud, raining toxic ash.

Killian Black is working with the federal government.

He made a deal with the FBI to keep himself out of prison. He’s an informant on the mafia.

My maybe-baby daddy is a snitch.

“Holy shit,” I say aloud, causing a girl walking past my cubicle to look at me strangely.

I don’t care. I’m in the middle of something too big to give a damn what anyone thinks about me right now.

And I have to admit, my idea makes total sense.

He was arrested on multiple felony charges but let go the same day. He says cryptic things about how he’s helping people, and that there are too many lives at stake to trust me first. He has access to all kinds of technology that regular people don’t—I mean, who puts a biometric fingerprint scanner on their friggin’ computer?

Someone who’s working for the government, that’s who.

All the puzzle pieces finally come together, so I see the whole picture at last.

I’m so stunned, I’m numb. I can’t feel a thing. I don’t know if I’m happy, sad, or crushingly disappointed. I’ve got an abandoned Western town of tumble weeds and rutted mud roads inside me, with empty buildings and no signs of life except for the vultures picking over bleached bones.

My desk phone rings. I answer with something that could be, “Huh?” but I’m not sure because my brain isn’t working.

“Hullo, lass.”

His voice is low, but it’s enough to make every cell in my body wake up from their comas.

I hunch over my desk, clutching the phone to my ear, my heart pounding like mad. “You.”

There’s a pause, then Killian says, “Aye. Me. Who were you expecting?”

Though he can’t see me, I wave my hand frantically in the air to dismiss the small talk. Speaking in a combination of a whisper and a hiss, I say, “I figured it out!”

His voice sharpens. “Figured what out?”

I open my mouth to answer, but realize with a cold snap of fear that it might not be in my best interests to let him know what I know. In fact, this call might even be being recorded. The FBI could be listening in on all his communications.

Then something else—something far worse—occurs to me.

What if this hot pursuit of his hasn’t been about me at all?

What if the romantic gestures and Shakespeare quotes and aching vulnerability have all been part of an act, part of a much bigger web designed to catch a much bigger spider than me?

A spider, for instance, like my father.

“I’ll handle your father. I’ll ask him permission to marry you, and we’ll work it all out.”

Those were his exact words. His exact insane, ridiculous words.

All his insistence that I trust him, that we tell each other nothing but the truth, that I give in to our intense chemistry and “let it be,” that I tell him I belong to him…all of it could be with the ultimate goal of getting closer to me so he could get closer to Antonio Moretti.

Because how better to bring down the head of the New York mafia than by using his own daughter to get to him?

I see it all in horrifying, crystal clear Technicolor, like a movie playing on a screen inside my head.

He gets me to fall in love with him. He gets me pregnant. He insists on arranging a reunion with my father, insists that we should patch things up…then he slithers in like a snake into the heart of my family and hands us all to the government on a platter.

Bugs. Surveillance. Tracking devices. He’d deploy all his specialties to catch my father and his associates in his trap.

And I’m just collateral. A means to an end.

A tool to be used and discarded like a dirty Kleenex.

A strangled noise rises from my throat. I think I’m going to be sick all over my desk.

Killian says, “Juliet?”

I slam down the receiver, disconnecting the call, and sit there staring at it, shaking.

The baby. Oh my god. What if I’m pregnant?

What have I done?

I think back to the first time I saw him in the bar at La Fiesta the night we stole the truckload of diapers from him. I remember the look on his face.

That smug, self-satisfied look.

How he and his FBI buddies must have laughed at my stupidity. After all, it was me who started the ball rolling. I broke into his warehouse. What a gift that was to them! What a fantastic turn of events! They’d probably been trying to find a way to bring down my father for years, and there I came, waltzing in like an oblivious idiot, the perfect solution to their problem.

I remember every time Killian looked deep into my eyes as he made love to me, and an animal sound of anguish breaks from my chest.

I barely make it down the hall and into a stall in the restroom before I throw up.