Hitman's Baby (Mob City Book 2) by Holly Hart

replied. "I see better at night."
    "Better?" I asked skeptically.
    "I'm not used to having people over." It wasn't an answer, and it was, all at once.
    It irritated me. I'm not ashamed to admit it, either. "So what's the plan?"
    "Plan?" He repeated, looking stupefied. "What are you talking about?"
    The first tendrils of dawn began to creep into the room, and I realized I must've slept through the night. I'd slept off whatever drug had knocked me out to the hospital, I'd slept all night and I still felt dog tired. "This is it?" I asked, surprised. "Saving me and just bringing me here to do, what? Where even is here , anyway"
    "We're about three blocks from the old Ford factory," he said. "In an old warehouse. I've been turning it into an apartment, but it takes time, doing it alone."
    I was secretly impressed. The place was unfinished, that was clear, but where the work was complete, like the bedroom, it was finished to perfection. The marble was seated so precisely that if I had to guess I'd estimate that it was mounted at precisely ninety degrees to the wall, without even a smudge of sealant betraying where it was joined. The apartment bore the hallmarks of a craftsman, an artisan: someone who was positively obsessed with perfection. Or a control freak…
    "But you must've had a plan," I repeated. "Okay, not a plan, but an idea of what was going to happen after you brought me here? I can't to stay in your apartment for the rest of my life, can I?"
    He shook his head. "No."
    Is that it?

14
    R oman
    I shouldn't have done it. I'd taken it for her, not for me, and there were no excuses, anyway. The warning was right there on the top of the folder: Medical Professionals Only . But I couldn't resist it. I felt awful, the lowest of the low as I pulled the folder out of my rucksack. It was about an inch and a half thick, and stacked with densely printed pages of white legal paper, often annotated with almost illegible medical scribbles in the margins.
    Ellie's medical records.
    It was hard to believe that anyone could have suffered enough injury and pain in one life to fill the entire folder, but apparently Ellie was one of those sorry people. I didn't know what made me do it, but I started at the back. The first record was dated December 2010. Ellie had broken her collarbone skiing. May 2011, she'd fractured her eye socket falling in the driveway. November 2011…
    I blinked, looking away. I could barely bring myself to read the account of Ellie’s torture that lay so innocently in my hands. Because torture is what it was.
    I bristled with anger as I read the passionless, impartial medical text. It was so devoid of heart that it may as well have been another language. It was so clear to me what had happened to her, I couldn't understand why nobody else seemed to have picked up on what, to me, seemed like obvious signs of domestic abuse. I was no stranger to violence, I had meted it out every day of my life, but never to women, never to children, never to anyone who didn't deserve it.
    It was a strange moral code, that was for sure, but it was all I had.
    The man who had done this to her? He was another kettle of fish entirely. A bully, an abuser, a man , if you could even call him that, who got his kicks from hurting women. And not just any woman, but Ellie.
    Finally, after pages and pages and pages of heartless record-keeping, something made sense. The hastily scribbled note read: referral, adult protective services? I almost tossed the papers in the air for joy, but the relief was short-lived, for there was no record of anything actually progressing for the better from there. It was a good thing I didn't. The whole folder read like a horrific catalog of abuse, and a timeline of a woman sinking ever deeper into a spiral of depression.
    There was one question in my mind, though. This was a woman who had stood over me with a kitchen knife, ready to plunge it into my heart, and she'd only been around me for a matter of hours. How