Untamed (A Bad Boy Secret Baby Romance) (83 page)

Three fucking months… that’s how long she’s been gone.

Three long fucking months… it feels like three years, like a night that’s never ended. I keep walking toward the horizon, hoping that the moon will disappear behind me, and that the sun will rise up in front of me.

Only it hasn’t. Not
yet
.

She’s got my baby, she’s passed her first trimester, and she’s all alone.

That fucking thought kills me.
She’s all alone!

I know she’s strong, and I know she can do this, but she doesn’t
have
to. I know what it’s like to feel alone, and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody, least of all her.

One way or another, I’m getting Dee back, making her mine again. One way or another. But in this time that I don’t have her, in this time that I can’t reach over and touch her, kiss her… it leaves me embittered.

Every single fucking day I wake up and reach over instinctively, expect to feel her warm body, expect to hear her steady breathing, expect to be able to roll over, kiss her neck and smell her hair, sometimes watch her for a while. Treasure her, wonder at the chain of events in our lives that brought us together, like some kind of cosmic magnetism… destiny?

Every single fucking day my hand hits cold sheets, and I get out of bed with a soured mood to start the day.

A day of searching for the mother of my child.

It’s been futile. All my leads are gone. There are no more breadcrumbs. Now… now I want to say that it’s only a matter of God damned time. I never doubt that I’m going to find her, but what I do worry about is how long it’ll take me to.

I’m faced with the idea of being unable to do something I want to do. It’s not an unfamiliar feeling, but I haven’t felt it in a while.

I
am
going to find her. I
am
going to get my family back.

But I can’t trust in anything other than my own agency. I can’t believe that our lives are drawn together the way our eyes are. If we really were like magnets, then what if, momentarily, we might have flipped over? How do I know that with each day I don’t get pushed farther apart from her?

How do I know I’m even looking in the right fucking place?

How do I know that if I ever find her, that should the stars align and I find a person who is trying to hide in a city I don’t know, trying to go unnoticed, that she’ll then even welcome me back into her life?

Fuck, I don’t even want to think about that. It’s a well of frustration inside me, never-ending, like it digs down right through the Earth and pops out the other side, spilling my soul into the dark emptiness of space.

It’s a black hole, sucking inward, right in my chest. I
feel
it in my chest. Usually all I feel in my chest is a good hit from my opponent, and the swell of happiness and anticipation whenever I saw or thought about Dee.

Nothing like this.

“Fuck,” I whisper, rubbing my forehead, pinching my brows together between my forefinger and thumb. I clench my fists, force myself to calm, actually have to use the fucking breathing techniques I use during fights to keep my head screwed on straight.

Dee
needs
me. I tell myself that every single day because it drives me, keeps me going. I need her, too, but the thought that she’s alone is what keeps shoveling coal into my furnace.

Everything else can fucking wait. Life is on pause. Nothing else matters.

Her old man is after her. Her old man wants our baby. She ran away because she was scared.

Why the fuck didn’t she tell me?

I thump the steering wheel of my rental, gaze out of the window at the traffic slowly creeping by. The afternoon sun warms my arm, and I leave it hanging out of the car. My dark tattoos soak up all that heat.

“Dee,” I whisper to myself. “Where the hell are you?”

I followed the breadcrumbs she unknowingly left. I went to Hong Kong, tracked down that slimy fucker who sold her a new passport. I made him tell me where she was going. His cries of pain still sometimes echo in my head.

He sicced the triads onto me. I only just got out in time. When I passed through passport control on my way out, I could see, out of the entrance of the departures zone, a group of mean looking men with dyed-red hair held up in ponytails, tattoos creeping up their necks, scanning the crowd.

It was a close call. They would have chopped me up, put me in garbage bags, and tossed me out to sea.

But after that it was a dead end. All I know is that she came to Australia, so all I can do is look where I think she may have gone.

It took three months for her face to surface on a camera in an identifiable location. Melbourne. The shiny RMIT college city campus behind her was like the city’s fingerprint.

The email was sent to me anonymously from one of my fans. A lone security image at an ATM. How this fan hacked into that, I have no idea. Some people are just wizards.

But I’m glad, now more than ever, that I put out a call for help to my fans. That guy who interviewed me the night Dee left was right… if I didn’t then, anyway, I owe my fans now.

All it took was one post to fan sites, and I had thousands of people offering me their skills. I was surprised to learn how many people regularly did illegal shit on the internet, and just how easy it was to gain access to places you shouldn’t.

And how many people were willing to do it on
my
behalf, just some underground fighter.

Glass fucking Marino may have resources, he may have people in high places, he may have an army of enforcers on the payroll, but I realized that I have a militia of people who can hide behind IP addresses, who are able to track anybody by the digital footprints that they leave on the internet.

And
everything
is on the fucking internet these days.

A post on a message board looking for a job – young pregnant woman seeking teaching position at a kindergarten – a background check done on a
Caroline Sax,
a new bank account opened to the same name. A photograph of Ms. Sax at an ATM, withdrawing money.

Separate events linked through the network, time-stamped, recorded to exist forever. Traceable.

That’s how I came to Melbourne.

Glass is old-fashioned. He’d never think to scour the online world.

That gives me a head start. Not a large one, but one nonetheless.

The sight of Dee’s face, grainy, black and white and from a low angle, sent my heart surging. It made me feel a great longing for her, an ache that could not be dulled. The embers inside me burned brighter upon seeing her face, as if someone had just blasted oxygen at them. She looked well, had put on a bit of weight, no doubt because of the pregnancy.

And… she was so
beautiful
. Even in that blurry footage she took my breath away. Even just the fuzzy outline of her lips, her eyes… it kicked me into sixth-gear, because every single fucking day I long to see her, long to be with her.

I stared at that image for hours. I still do, every night. I boot up my laptop, open the image file, and I just sit there, a drink in my hand, and look at her. Nothing in my life has ensnared me so completely like she has.

When we were together, I never imagined not having her in my life. I had a vague plan, built on the resources I would have.

Just a little longer
.

I only needed a little longer, another couple of wins, another few big payouts, and we would have been golden. We’d have had a way out, and could have bought ourselves secrecy, could have paid to drop off the grid. Nobody, not even the best private investigators could have found us.

We could have lived without Glass’ shadow over us. We could have been happy somewhere together. I don’t know if it was naïve to assume she’d say yes, go somewhere with me, disappear with me. All I know is that she ended up disappearing alone.

It was always going to happen…
always
. Glass would never let go of his greasy grip on her. The
only
way she could have freedom was to run, leave, vanish.

I just thought that it would be with me.

But when she did leave, I was a little surprised by how much it affected me. Maybe I’m not in touch with my emotions, maybe I don’t understand exactly what I felt for her, how much I cared for her… how much being with her felt like plugging in the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle.

I would remember the times I would catch her staring off into the distance, lost in her intelligent mind, cogs whirring as she considered… well, I never knew what she was considering, but it was as if she was taking care of the universe itself.

But nobody is meant to be alone. Some like it, but they are self-destructive. Dee needs me. And God damn it I’m going to find her. She’s not going to be a struggling single mother without a man. Our child is not going to grow up without a father.

She will
not
be alone.

I thump the steering wheel again, grip it so hard my hands hurt. Why haven’t I found her yet? It’s only a matter of time before Glass catches up. He may not be on the scent now like I am, but he’ll get here sooner or later.

He wants that baby. He wants to take my fucking baby.

She stole what’s mine!
Glass’ words echo in my head.

I didn’t understand at first. Why would Glass call his daughter’s baby his own? But it all pieced together, like a distant shape in the fog slowly growing sharper as it approached me.

I won’t let him hurt her like that. I won’t let him take what’s not his.

That’s him in a nutshell; he takes what he wants, thinks nothing of the consequences. Hurting his own daughter doesn’t seem to matter to him.

How does a man get like that?

What kind of life does a man have to live to get like that?

I grew up with nothing, nothing but older boys trying to beat on my ass and steal my shit. I grew up with nothing but well-meaning social workers who went home at five. Us boys in the home, and the girls in the system, too, we ceased to exist after office hours.

It was a fucking free-for-all, and still I don’t know how a man ends up like Johnny fucking Marino.

The snaking traffic finally starts to speed up, and I drive toward St. Kilda, into the parking lot of the complex where I’m renting a modest studio apartment.

I couldn’t take much cash with me unless I wanted immigration to look at me funny, and I don’t dare withdraw money from my account back home. No doubt Glass has eyes on that and he’ll trace it. That ruled out setting up other accounts under my name, too.

But it’s not like I need to live luxuriously. I prefer not to, anyway.

I climb the steps two at a time, open my door, and go straight to the corkboard I have mounted on the wall.

There’s a map of Melbourne and surrounding suburbs, towns, and cities. I take a thumbtack and push into the map. Another school scouted, and another time there were no signs of Dee.

She would be a teaching assistant perhaps, or work in a less official capacity, but the timing of that message board post asking about openings in kindergartens, paired with the flight records for a Caroline Sax… it was always her dream to teach and work with kids. This is the only thing I have to go on.