Page 30 of Relentless Oath

Who was I kidding? What I really hoped was that it would get me brownie points with her.

I walked past the study and ventured upstairs to a room hidden behind another. It was a room even the staff didn’t know existed.

When I entered, it was dark aside from the light of the monitors that extended across the entire back wall. The room had been a panic room of sorts before I had it converted to a surveillance room where I could monitor the entire mansion in real time.

I wondered what Mya would do if she knew that I watched her constantly.

I had thought her presence would be enough for me, but I found myself experiencing a rush seeing her behind closed doors on video.

It was these unguarded moments that fueled my obsession with her. As I did every day, I sat at the monitors and watched her. She would hate me if she knew, but I had no plans of her ever figuring it out.

She entered the bedroom. When she undressed, I usually looked away from the cameras, but today, I noticed that as she removed her jeans, she turned away from the camera. And then she did it again, removing her top, just outside the scope of the camera.

From the corner camera nestled in the crown molding of the bedroom, I watched her trace her hand across the mirror and lift it. The camera disconnected.

I sat up straight. “How did she know?” I whispered to myself.

Shit, she had found my cameras.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Mya

He was standing facinga window looking out when I opened the door and stepped into the bedroom.

I was exhausted. I just wanted to get some sleep, but I couldn’t sleep when he was there.

Silently, I closed the door and walked back to the study where I spent most of my time.

I tried my best to stay away from him, not only because I didn’t trust him, but because I didn’t want him to somehow notice the little subtle changes that pregnancy was having on my body.

When the staff had come back after being gone for a week, I’d been elated to have someone else around so that I wouldn’t have to be alone with him.

His presence still unnerved me. He slept next to me at night, but never touched me. He never tried to get near me.

I would have given him the benefit of the doubt if it weren’t for the fact that I knew about the cameras.

I deliberately avoided the ones I was aware of. It sucked being watched or feeling that I was being watched at every moment. It made me feel violated and on edge.

My life felt suffocating. I didn’t know what to do about Dario. I didn’t know what to do about the baby. My stomach and head hurt just thinking about my lack of choices. How had things gotten so insane and out of control?

What should have been a beautiful moment in my life, starting a family, was a moment I dreaded. Jason and I had never discussed having kids. I’d been on birth control since my teens so I just kept it up after we were married.

Jason and I had been more than enough for each other.

Up until the moment I realized I was pregnant, I’d never thought about being a mother. As far as I was concerned, I was still reeling from losing my own. It was a fresh wound…like Jason’s death had been.

My mother was the best. Strict, yet fair. We hadn’t been best friends.

She always made it clear that she was my mother and not my friend, but as I got older, she’d become gentler and had started to let me in. It had been devastating to walk into that house every day after school and watch her wither away.

She hadn’t bothered with any of the treatment options. She’d said she’d wanted to spend her last days feeling like herself. She’d been strong but I could see the disappointment and pain on her face every day, disappointment that she wouldn’t be able to see me grow up.

She would never get to see her grandchild. It tore me up inside more than anything else.

Mom would do anything for me, and I already felt the same way about my little nugget, which is what I called him or her in my mind. I just needed to figure out a way to escape Dario.

I’d done some digging before our wedding and realized that Dario’s family had ties to criminal dealings back in the eighties before technically going legit. I’d found nothing about Dario, butI did find interesting information about Nico and Matteo, his brothers.

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