Page 90 of Wife Number One

“Hawk!” I shouted.

He yanked open the passenger side and put the little girl down in the seat before shutting the door.

He owed me nothing, but I had to fucking know. “Hawk! Does she even know I’m alive?”

He turned and glared at me. “She’s married. And that kid ain’t your daughter, even if she was named for you. You’re too late, Chaos.” His voice dropped to something sadder. “We were all too fucking late.”

He didn’t even give me a chance to question what that meant before he got into the van and the engine roared to life.

I watched him drive away but refused to heed his warnings.

I wasn’t too late. Everything I had ever wanted was falling into place.

All I needed to have everything was that little girl.

And her mother.

27

KARA

An ambulance siren whirred in my head. The sky around us black, but red-and-blue lights reflecting off the dark, wet road outside.

Pain throbbed through my body. Every inch of me tender and sore from birthing my sweet girl just days before.

But in the front of the ambulance, her father sat behind the wheel. His face twisted into pure malice. A gun aimed at the man in the passenger seat.

Boom.

The crack of the gunshot splintered my ears, and the tiny baby in my arms screamed until her tiny face was scarlet.

It matched the blood spreading across the man’s chest.

“No!” I screamed, lunging forward but unable to get to him.

He looked back at me. He wasn’t supposed to be a good man. He’d done bad things. Things that would send him straight to Hell.

And yet he’d been kind. Sweet. He’d held my hand when I’d wanted to give up and convinced me to try again.

He was the only reason I was alive. The only reason my daughter was breathing and in my arms.

I was the reason he was dead.

I woke up with a start, drenched in sweat. “Hayden,” I mumbled around the lump in my throat.

Queenie glanced over at me, a chunky romance hardback in her hands. “What was that, sugar?”

I shook my head, blinking a few times and trying to orient myself. My heart pounded with adrenaline from the dream I’d had so many times in the past five years. That day playing out in my nightmares in horrifying detail, so I could never forget it.

“Nothing.” I scrubbed a hand over my face, the exhaustion I’d felt in the dream seemingly following me into the real world as well. The room was so busy I wondered how I’d managed to sleep through it. Besides Queenie and her book, Ice and the other prospects sat around a round table playing cards. Aloha and a man they called Crow sat at the bar, nursing beers while they chatted. Kiki and Amber had a phone out and were dancing in front of it to tinny music from the speakers, laughing when one of them got a step wrong, and then starting over.

Hayley Jade was nowhere to be seen.

I’d fallen asleep and had no idea where my child was.

Panic flooded my system. “Where’s—”

Queenie reached over and put a hand on my knee. “She’s fine. She’s with Hawk.”

---