All Chapters of Dominated By Him: Chapter 131 - Chapter 140

Sophia POVI made it two more blocks before I turned around and walked straight to the urgent care clinic on Maple Street instead of Dr. Graham's office. Different building, different staff, no one who knew my face. I sat in the waiting room for forty minutes with my hand pressed against my stomach, running through every obstetric scenario I'd studied and telling myself none of the bad ones applied here.The doctor on duty was young, maybe a year out of residency. He didn't ask many questions. He did the exam, ordered an ultrasound, and came back fifteen minutes later with the results."Everything looks normal," he said. "Cervix is closed. Baby's measuring on track." He turned the screen toward me. "Heartbeat's strong."I stared at the screen.The same fast, steady sound. Still there. Still exactly the same.I pressed my lips together and nodded and did not cry in the urgent care clinic, which I considered a significant personal achievement."Round ligament pain is very common in the

Vito POVI put the phone down and sat with it for a moment.Fifteen percent. That was what they'd asked for. Fifteen percent of Romano Holdings, transferred clean within forty-eight hours, in exchange for a woman they'd described as my wife.I already knew this wasn't my father's operation.Luciano Romano had been patient for twenty years. He had spent that time building leverage, positioning Clark, chipping away at the board piece by piece. He didn't make moves like this. Snatching Isabella off a bus route in Connecticut and calling me with a ransom demand — that was reckless. That was the work of someone who thought proximity to the plan entitled them to run their own version of it.Someone had gone off-script."Tony."He came in from the side door. He'd been standing outside the study since the call ended."The voice on the phone," I said. "Run it.""Already started." He set his phone on the edge of the desk. "We'll have something within the hour. The accent had a regional trace —

Sophia POVI ran until my lungs gave out.The tree line was dense, and I went in fast, not thinking about direction, just away from the warehouse, away from the voices that had gone up behind me when the basement door scraped open. Branches caught my face and arms. I put my hands up to protect my eyes and kept going.A cramp hit me low and hard. I grabbed a tree trunk and doubled over, gasping. The pain was a tight pull across my lower abdomen, deep and insistent. I pressed my free hand against my stomach and stood very still, breathing through it.Not now, I thought. Please. Not now.It eased after maybe thirty seconds. I didn't know if that was long or short. It felt long.I straightened up, wiped my face with my sleeve, and kept moving. Slower this time, watching the ground. The light was coming in gray through the tree cover. I oriented toward it.The road appeared about twenty minutes later. A single-lane blacktop running through scrubland, no shoulder, no markings. I had no idea

Vito POVThree days.Tony had put the count on the board in the operations room the morning after the warehouse, and I'd told him to take it down. He'd taken it down. But I still knew the number. I knew it the way you know the time when you haven't slept—not from looking, just from the weight of it.Seventy-two hours since she'd walked out of that basement and disappeared into the dark.I sat at the desk in the study with the lights low and her file in front of me. Not her legal file—the Romano family paperwork, the contracts, the documents my lawyers had drafted. The other one. The one Tony had built over months without being asked: photographs, notes, patterns. The route she took when she went to visit Alfonso. The coffee she ordered when she was tired versus when she wasn't. The way she held a pen.I pressed two fingers against the edge of a photograph and didn't look up when the door opened."Nothing new," Tony said. He'd stopped prefacing these reports with sir after the second d

Sophia POVI switched hotels three times in four days.The first one was too close to the highway. Too many cars coming and going at odd hours, too many people who looked at a woman checking in alone and decided that was interesting. The second was better, but the desk clerk had a habit of asking questions that didn't match the price of the room. Where are you headed? Visiting family? I smiled through all of it and paid cash and left before sunrise.The third place wasn't a hotel at all.It was a cabin at the edge of a fishing village called Crayne's Point — thirty-two residents, one general store, one small clinic, and more lobster traps than people. The woman who rented it to me was eighty-something and moved like she had somewhere to be, which I respected."You're pregnant," she said when she saw me. Not a question."Yes."She looked at me for a moment. "You running from something, or toward something?"I thought about it. "I'm not sure yet."She nodded, like that was a reasonable