Not Your Toy Anymore Chapter 04
My hand hung in the air for one frozen second. Then I lunged for where I’d last heard his voice, grabbing for the phone.
“Give it back! You don’t get to make this call for me!”
Something in him snapped. He hurled the phone out the window and shoved me back with his free hand in the same motion.
I stumbled sideways, and my stomach slammed into the edge of the medical cart. The pain was immediate — deep, wrong, radiating.
I doubled over, arms wrapped around my belly. Something warm was moving down my thighs. The fear that hit me was primal.
Every wall I’d built came down. I dropped to the floor and grabbed the fabric of his pants, clinging to it.
“I’m pregnant, Rafael. Something’s wrong — please, please help me.”
My voice cracked on every word. I would have said anything. So I did.
“If you help me right now, I’ll drop everything. Zoe, the complaint, all of it. I’ll disappear. You’ll never see me again.”
Rafael went still. His gaze dropped to my stomach, and a crease dug deep between his brows.
Zoe let out a laugh that belonged nowhere near this room. “Wow. You’ve really upgraded your playbook, haven’t you? Back then it was just clinging. Now it’s a fake pregnancy.”
“You think throwing out the word ‘pregnant’ is going to make him care about you again?”
Rafael jerked his leg free. The force of it sent me tipping backward, and the back of my skull cracked against the metal bed rail. My vision — what was left of it — went completely white.
“First you’re a surgeon. Now you’re pregnant. What’s the next story going to be?”
His eyes narrowed, carrying that same cold certainty they’d always held — the one that only ever pointed at me.
“I’m telling you to stop. Don’t start another problem before Zoe’s promotion goes through.”
“And don’t bother with the police. Nobody in this city will touch this case.” A beat. “Test me if you want.”
I stayed on the floor. There was nothing left to hold me up. Pain throbbed through my belly and the back of my skull in waves, each one stealing more of my breath.
After a long silence, something like a smile pulled at my lips.
“Do you even know who I came to L.A. to operate on, Rafael?”
His lip curled. He didn’t even let me finish.
“You’ve told this lie so many times you actually believe it now, don’t you?”
He paused, then threw it out like a dare. “Fine. If any of what you’re saying is true, I’ll take every consequence for Zoe. Happy?”
“This is over. Stop hiding behind accusations about Zoe.”
I didn’t say another word. I just let my head drop and smiled — the kind of smile that comes when there’s nothing left to lose.
Rafael’s phone went off. He answered, and the voice on the other end was frantic.
“It’s the Don — acute heart failure, he’s crashing. Heart rate and BP are tanking.”
“The surgeon who was supposed to handle the bypass — she’s gone. Nobody can reach her.”
Boom.
Every muscle in Rafael’s body locked. The mask he’d been wearing cracked wide open. He started barking orders before the call even ended.
“Get every doctor in this hospital on the Don right now. I want that surgeon found — thirty minutes, I don’t care how you do it.”
He was out the door before the sentence finished.
Zoe went after him without a backward glance.
The door slammed. Silence swallowed the room.
I dragged myself upright, one hand on the wall, and felt my way out of the room. I found a nurse in the hallway, handed her a phone I couldn’t even see, and begged her to dial a number I knew by heart.
Minutes later, an SUV pulled up to the entrance. I climbed in, and the hospital shrank behind us into the dark.
…
Rafael stood outside the ICU, watching his grandfather through the glass. His face held an expression no one in the family had ever seen — raw, cornered dread.
He didn’t know how long he stood there before the team he’d sent out came back.
“We found her paper trail.” The guard stood stiff, hands clasped behind his back. “Entry logs show the surgeon arrived on Draven territory yesterday. No public itinerary. She came in quiet — deliberately.”
“We traced her phone signal. It’s pinging from this hospital.”
Rafael’s jaw unclenched. For the first time in hours, something other than dread crossed his face.
Before he could respond, the guard held out a phone. The screen was shattered.
“Found it on the lawn below the ward windows. It’s been confirmed as her personal device.”
Rafael took the phone. It was cool against his palm. And the second his fingers closed around it, recognition hit him like a freight train.
His hand stopped moving. Something hollow opened up inside his chest, and a thought he didn’t want seized him by the throat.
This phone. He knew this phone.
Impossible.
The denial lasted less than a heartbeat before the panic shredded it.
His fingers were shaking. He pressed the power button.
The shattered screen flickered on. Seraphina smiled back at him, her arms around a man and a little boy. A family photo. Her family.