Page 125 of The Damaged Billionaire's Obsession
He takes in the test sticks on the sink and the two pink lines on each of them.
“Bloody hell, Bonnie. I’m so sorry, love.”
“No, Twigs, thank you.” My eyes are heavy, and my heart feels like it’s been raked over coals, then run over by a Mack truck. Repeatedly.
I love Ethan Hawthorne, so much that I know I’m liable to do whatever he tells me to do, whether it is in mine or the baby’s best interest or not.
Oh, fuck.
I’m such a fool. And here I was, thinking his blondes were the guinea pigs, not knowing I was the ultimate experiment. I’m so far from the women he’s been attracted to in the past, it’s laughable to think he’s suddenly changed. I was the idiot who begged and pushed him until he took what I so willingly offered.
“There’s something I need to do.” I disentangle myself and calmly head back into the bedroom.
I find the Xi-Gen email and accept the offer.
“I’m going to Vancouver. Tomorrow,” I inform Twiggy.
“Wait, what?” he blurts out.
“I just accepted a job offer. I’ll start ASAP. I’m not going back to New York.”
“What about yer things? Are ye goin’ there with the clothes on yer back then?”
“My friends in New York will send me anything I need, and I’ll buy the rest.”
“And what about yer mam, Bonnie? Ye just told her yer taking her to New York!”
“Well, I don’t see that she has that much of a choice in where we go. Now I’m taking her to Vancouver. She can either come with me or stay in Dublin with you.”
When Twiggy sees there’s no getting through to me, he throws his arms up in resignation. Then, he starts to make plans with me and finds us flights. My mother takes the news of the change of plans surprisingly well. I suppose it doesn’t matter one way or another to her. She’s still getting on a plane and going somewhere unknown.
I spend the next day in bed, heartsick, nauseous and retching, in spite of the anti-nausea tablets. By the afternoon, my mothercomes right out to ask if I’m pregnant and I don’t bother denying it.
Just before we board the Vancouver-bound flight later that evening, I send Ethan what I know will be the last text he’ll ever get from me.
Chapter 36
Ethan
Gino stares back atme from my laptop, his pale blue eyes twinkling in humor, hair up in his signature bun. “Ethan! Where the flipping hell have you been, asshole! We’ve been shitting ourselves here trying to get a pin on you; is our ass flapping in the wind or what?”
For a mafia kingpin, Gino is actually very likable, with the most infectious smile, and boisterous laughter. I was saddened to discover that under all of that beats…nothing. An almost eerie absence of human sentiment.
This near-psychopathy makes him able to hold the underbellies of New York in a ruthlessly powerful, iron fist.
When I confronted him, he confessed it’s not that he can’t empathize or feel. He just can’t afford to. He suffers remorse but can never show it to his people. Which is why he says he likes to keep friends like me around him. Friends that he doesn’t have to be the Capo around.
“I’ve been in hell, Gino. But I’m back. I told you this last week when I checked in.”
The past three weeks have been the worst in my life.
My meeting in Berlin went well enough. It was in Munich that everything crashed, and things went further south from there.
Halfway through the stem cell transplant, with my eyeballs numbed and eyelids spread wide open, the surgeon offered me a choice of converting to a general anesthetic or potentially losing my sight.
The panic attack that followed took the choice out of my hands. They decided to put me under. What should have lasted three hours ended up taking six.
My dad, as my next of kin, had to be informed while I was under full anesthesia, and by the time I came to, Elsa had driven from Prague to get me. Beyond that, I wasn’t aware of my surroundings, thanks to being exceptionally high from the cocktail of drugs floating in my bloodstream.