Thomas tilted my chin to make me look up at him and kissed me again softly but then nipped at my lip. “I’ll talk to Stefano. That’s all I will say for now.”
Chapter Thirteen
Stefano
“Hailey’s losing her mind,” Thomas began as we had just finished having a business meeting with our men about moving from the manor soon. They had their new orders, and I was pretty confident that all would run smooth.
“We’ll move her soon,” I said. “I’m sure the walls are closing in on her.”
“It’s more than that.”
I studied Thomas’s face and could see that he was troubled. “Don’t ask me how, but I think she’s falling in love with us.”
I smirked and rolled my eyes. “I think you are losing your mind. Maybe the walls are closing in on you.”
“Stefano…” Thomas ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. “You’re welcome to watch the video of our talk, but it wasn’t pretty.”
“Just tell me and save me the time.”
“She doesn’t want to leave us. She said so. She wants a life with the three of us and the baby.”
My heart skipped. “Baby? Is she pregnant?”
“No guarantees but a high chance.”
Baby. A baby…
Jesus, was this all really happening? The plan all seemed good at the beginning, but now that reality was kicking in, a surge of panic hit me hard.
“But this isn’t about the baby, bro. I really think she’s in love with us.”
Pushing back the thoughts of fatherhood to focus, I stood up and began pacing the room, which often helped me process all my emotions.
“It’s probably just hormones,” I said.
“No. It’s more. You didn’t talk to her. I did. She wants to stay with us. She doesn’t want to leave the manor without us.”
“That’s insane. She should hate our guts.”
Thomas nodded in agreement. “She should. She should want to fucking kill us.” He looked me square on. “But she doesn’t. Far from it.”
Hailey in love? How could this be? We kidnapped her. Made her fear for her life. Forced her into submission. Yes, it was clear she enjoyed much of the punishment, and her body came alive under our touch, but that was physical. How in the fuck could she be falling in love with the both of us? How?
“It’s that Stockholm syndrome shit or something,” I said, nodding as if I had just explained it all away. “I’m sure as soon as she’s out of the manor, she’ll want us dead and hate our very presence.”
Thomas nodded slowly, clearly taking in my answer. “Possibly.”
“And it doesn’t matter really,” I said as I sat down and studied the woman in the monitor.
God, she was beautiful as she slept. So angelic. So perfect. So…
“We continue as planned. If she’s pregnant, we move her to a safer location. I’ve been looking into a villa in Florence that looks like we could compound the hell out of it. It would be a good setting for her to stay during her pregnancy and should make her happy. I think keeping her there for nine months will be an okay amount of time, but we’ll want to move her and the baby soon after. I don’t like the idea of her staying in one place for a year.”
“What about you? Are you ready to leave the manor?” Thomas asked as he too watched Hailey sleep.
“Yeah, I am. We work too hard to be roughing it like this. I miss some of the luxuries of life I’d gotten used to. Plus, we need to get back to the daily oversight of our operation. I think there are some cracks forming we need to get sealed up.”
“What about Hailey? Are you ready to leave her?”
My stomach twisted and an unexplainable lump formed in the back of my throat. “The past few months have been fun. I’m not going to deny that. The kinky sadist in me has been able to run free. I’ll miss that.”
“Me too,” Thomas said. “When we came up with this plan to punish Hailey rather than just killing her, I had no idea… well… I just had no idea it would turn out this way. I expected her to react differently. But Hailey surprised me. I’ve surprised myself.”
“But it’s not like she’ll ever be out of our lives. She’ll be carrying our baby. She’s in our life one way or the other.”
“How often do we plan on seeing her in Florence?” Thomas asked, but it was a question he already knew the answer to.
Not often enough.
“We need to get back to real life. Full time. You know this,” I said.
Who was I trying to convince? Thomas or myself?
Thomas nodded slowly. “Correct. But she wants to be with us as we do it.”
“Which is crazy.”
“Mama stayed with Pops the entire time he was boss,” Thomas said.
“That was a different time. There was a code back then to leave women and children alone. No one would mess with Mama regardless of how much they wanted Pops dead. That mafia code doesn’t exist anymore. The same rules don’t apply, and you know it.”