Page 99 of The Wrong Mafia Bride
Step one: Remove cap.
Step two: Hold test stick under urine stream for five seconds.
Step three: Replace cap and lay flat.
Step four: Wait two minutes for results.
Simple. Straightforward. Easy.
Except my hands will not stop shaking and my breathing is coming too fast and I cannot make myself move.
What if it is positive?
What if I am pregnant with Dante's baby or Gabriel's baby or Luca's baby, and I have a bomb that Patrick wants me to use to kill the father?
What if it is negative?
What if this is just stress and grief and fear manifesting as physical symptoms, and I am spiraling over nothing?
I don’t know which answer terrifies me more.
Move, I tell myself. Just move. One step at a time.
I force my body to function, to do what needs to be done, and two minutes later I am standing at the sink with the capped test sitting on the edge, watching the second hand on my watch crawl around the dial.
One hundred and twenty seconds to know for sure.
One hundred and twenty seconds that feel like a lifetime.
I stare at myself in the scratched mirror while I wait. I look terrible—pale skin, dark circles under my eyes so pronouncedthey look like bruises, hair escaping from the messy bun I threw it in before leaving the house. Luca's hoodie drowns my frame, making me look smaller and younger than I am.
I look like someone who has not slept in days.
I look like someone carrying impossible choices.
I look like someone who might be about to become a mother.
The thought makes my stomach flip, and for a moment I think I might throw up again, but I force the nausea down through sheer willpower.
Twenty-eight hours, a voice in my head reminds me. Twenty-eight hours until Patrick kills Erin if those men are not dead.
But what if one of those men is the father of the baby potentially growing inside me right now?
What kind of person kills their child's father to save their sister?
What kind of person lets their sister die to save their lover?
What kind of person am I?
I have spent my entire life being Erin's protector. Being the shield between her and danger. I took bullets meant for her—metaphorical ones, mostly, but I would have taken real ones if it came to that. I gave up my freedom, my future, my identity to marry Dante in her place so she could run away with Dolan.
Can I stop now? Can I choose my own happiness over hers?
Do I even know how to be anything other than Erin's bodyguard?
My watch shows two minutes have passed.
Time to look.
