Stalking His Assassin

one

GRACE—FOUR YEARS LATER

The bed shifts as Christos gets up and wakes me. My stomach immediately lurches. I barely make it to the toilet before I vomit last night’s dinner. I’ve been sick the last several mornings, and even though I haven’t taken a test, I’m guessing that the latest round of fertility treatments worked.

Part of me is excited and wants to test right this second and confirm that I’m pregnant, but fear makes me hesitate. Before marrying Christos, I had never seen myself as a mother. Bringing another life into such a fucked-up world was the last thing I wanted. Being with Christos changed me in many ways.

We talked long and hard about starting a family in the first year of our marriage. Neither of us anticipated children being part of our future, but both realized how bad we wanted the family we never had growing up. Of course, that meant changing several things about our lives. We were both content being assassins and enacting our own version of justice, but the risk is too significant to drag a child into that lifestyle. We both retired.

Well, Hades retired, and as far as anyone knows, he moved to a private island and is living his best life. Eris had to die. It was bittersweet to end that part of my life, but after it was done, I only felt free. Tomas was an integral part of our retirement. Christos’s alter ego, Mark/Hades, spent several days in New York boasting about his retirement in all the right places, including Tomas’s bar. So that was easy enough.

For Eris, it was a little more complicated. Being the Ghost was great while I was active, but it also made it hard to cleanly extract myself from that life. Everyone would speculate on whether a job was done by Ghost or if it was someone else. Tomas whispered in the right ears about the identity of Ghost so that the word spread. Then rumors started about Ghost letting a target escape and failing to complete a job. People assumed that Ghost was losing his touch, so when a job went sideways, and Ghost was killed, it wasn’t questioned too closely.

Tomas did a great job with procuring a body and setting the scene. He even arranged through his Syndicate connections to have another assassin retrieve the “asset” Ghost from the dungeon of a mobster that needed killing. The mobster had no clue there was a dead body in his dungeon. Tomas made sure that the body was so damaged from “torture” that he was unidentifiable.

It worked, and the Ghost was dead. Eris’s name wasn’t known by many after I took out my uncle all those years ago, so that wasn’t a huge concern. Hades is retired and off being a rich asshole leaving us free to live as Grace and Christos Caputo. I still own Shield Security and enjoy creating new innovative security programs, but the day-to-day stuff is handled by Lance and the team we built together.

Christos has taken a different direction with his life… he became an author. He’s written three USA Today and New York Times best sellers and has made quite the name for himself. He writes dark romantic thrillers about a pair of assassins. No idea where he got the inspiration for them… Ha!

Anyway, life is good. We decided to start a family and were ready to begin our next chapter… only after a year of trying, we still hadn’t gotten pregnant. We went to a fertility specialist who determined my chances of getting pregnant without assistance were next to zero. After spending several days bawling my eyes out over a baby I never knew how badly I wanted, we decided to do IVF like the doctor suggested.

Every IVF cycle since has been met with disappointment. Four cycles of nothing. Four times where I’ve felt like a failure because of my body’s betrayal. We decided this would be the last time. If it didn’t happen after five rounds of IVF, it wouldn’t happen. The hormones and rollercoaster of emotions are just too much. It wears on both of us for different reasons. To say I’m scared to take a test even though I'm having morning sickness.

I’m just finishing up brushing my teeth when Christos walks into the bathroom. He kisses my cheek and strokes a hand over my hair. He sets an unopened box of pregnancy tests on the counter in front of me. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. When I open them, I find Christos staring at my reflection with so much love and understanding that I could burst into tears. He turns me so he can hug me. The strong beat of his heart under my ear relaxes me and gives me the strength I need to face anything.

“Whatever happens, we will be okay,” he murmurs, kissing my forehead.

“I know. I just?—”

“I know, love. Me too, but there are other options.”

Surrogacy and adoption.

I immediately vetoed surrogacy. I hate the idea of someone else getting the chance to carry my baby. Christos’s baby. Adoption is something I’m willing to do. Hope House has children who need forever homes come through their doors all too often. I feel selfish for wanting a baby of my own when I know there are babies out there that need a good home, but I can’t help how badly I want it.

I take a deep breath and open one of the tests. Christos steps out of the bathroom to give me privacy while I pee on the stick. When he hears the toilet flush and the sink turn on, he’s at my side again. His eyes are glued to the test, where the dotted line slowly fills the bottom of the digital display.

An entire lifetime seems to pass by before the display changes and shows the results…

Pregnant

Hot tears roll down my cheeks as I clutch the positive test to my chest. I’m pregnant.

“It worked,” I choke out. “We’re having a baby.”

Christos pulls me into a fierce hug. “Yes, we are.”

“Please tell me this isn’t a dream…”

“It’s not a dream, little wolf.”