Alexis
stirred on the floor, rolling her head from side to side, then wishing
like hell that she hadn’t. Pain flashed through the front of
her skull and with it came a surge of nausea low in her belly. She
turned over and realized with a start that she was on the floor,
her nose buried in carpet.
Why was she…?
Oh God, Kristina…someone had come in and taken her!
She stretched her arm up over the side of the bed and tried to drag
herself upright, every last muscle in her body protesting, and the
nausea in her stomach threatening to eject every morsel of food.
She didn’t have the strength to make it off the floor and sank
back to the carpet with a weak moan of frustration. Tears seeped
from the corners of her eyes and she covered her face with her hands
in shame. She was supposed to protect her daughter. Why couldn’t
she have protected her daughter?
She pulled herself up on hands and knees wavering unsteadily. She
ended up sitting on her bottom, her back propped up against her
bed.
She needed help. Someone had to come help her.
It was then that she noticed a soft but insistent beeping. She scanned
the room to find the source. Her laptop on her desk across the room.
It was making an odd sound. As she watched, the screen went blank
and then lit up again. There was the sound of an aria, an orchestra
flaring with the swelling sounds of a popular soprano solo. Alexis
knew the opera and its solo well. Her mother had once recorded the
song.
As the thought rocketed through her mind, the clear unmistakable
voice that was Kristin Bergmann’s suddenly split the air, blaring
from within her computer. It chilled Alexis to the bone when she
heard it. Only one person alive would be sadistic enough to play
that aria on Alexis’ laptop. Helena.
As if somewhere the old crone was reading Alexis’ mind, the
computer screen flashed an image. Then another. And another. Photos
of her little Kristina’s angelic face. Words formed ominously
across the photos, letter by letter. Alexis had to swallow against
the rising bile in her throat as she read the posionous message
Helena had sent to her.
“Kristina Davis Corinthos…what a lovely girl. The bastard
child of a bastard child. Such similarities, Natasha, passed from
Kristin to you to this babe. I wonder what other similarities there
are. Does she have as delicate a neck as her grandmother, Kristin?
Perhaps I shall have to find out.”
A pain so severe stabbed through Alexis and completely stopped her
breath. She couldn’t, Alexis moaned in her soul. She
couldn’t be so evil that she’d kill a child just to hurt
me. But in her heart of hearts she knew that there was no limit
to what Helena would do.
Tears flooded her eyes splashing down on her hands like droplets
of blood. How fitting. Her child’s blood would be on her hands
if Helena had anything to do with it.
Alexis recognized that she was slipping into shock…she had
done so before when her sister had died. There was the sense that
she'd been plunged underwater where everything was cold, blue, silence.
Oh, the tears still came, but the slashing pain receded. She became
numb. Alexis’ mind shut down; she folded her arms around her
body, and rocked slowly back and forth.
And
her only coherent thought was that this would be the blow that would
kill her.
Johnny had been trained to operate the small speedboat and he was
doing his level best to guide it to Wyndemere’s dock in record
time. It was clear that Sonny was about to blow though the reason
was a mystery to Johnny. The Boss had simply said he needed to get
to Spoon Island in a hurry. His face was set in stone right now,
pale and drawn in the moonlight. Whatever this was, Johnny thought,
it was bad.
Sonny meanwhile was locked inside his head. He’d had a nasty
shock. No, a series of shocks. So devastating he had no words for
his bodyguard. Not until he got to Alexis. Not until he could get
the truth from her.
He shifted the videotape in his hands over and over. The contents
of his stomach protested as he remembered the scenes he’d watched
in stunned silence at the penthouse. Little Kristina, her face sweet
and gentle, laughing at her cousin Nikolas. It had been filmed in
the dining room of Wyndemere, obviously without any of their knowledge.
He had considered that part odd, but it was the words that rolled
up over the screen like movie credits that stopped him cold.
“What a little beauty… created by a mobster and a lawyer,”
the script read. “Kristina Davis Corinthos…How unfortunate
to find out about her on the day you lose her forever…”
The tape…and its maker…claimed he was the father of Alexis’
child. And that was shocking enough, but what if the threat were
also true? What if someone had done something awful to the child?
His child?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“’Lexis?”
The shout came from downstairs. A man’s voice that sounded
suspiciously like Sonny’s. She heard it. And she wanted to
answer, but could not.
“Alexis, where are you? Alexis?”
His footsteps were coming closer, his voice booming out a demand
for her to answer him. He was trying every unlocked door on this
floor. She heard him as he entered their daughter’s nursery
next door. She heard him pause there, walk in and around the room.
The next moment he burst into her room. The sight of her, trembling
and rocking, sitting on the floor in just her slip, stopped him
in the doorway. A million scenarios detailing what might have happened
to her flooded his mind; he had to force himself to move towards
her. Instantly, he dropped to his knees beside her shaking form.
“’Lexis," he said, keeping his voice as quiet and
gentle as possible. "What happened? Are you alright?”
She looked at him, her eyes haunted, no life in them.
“Lexis, talk to me. Say something. What happened?”
There are no words.
Her gaze swung mutely to the computer screen where her daughter’s
pictures were still popping up one by one. Her own mother’s
soaring aria rang out across the room with a joy that mocked this
tragic scene.
Sonny took her hands in his, and some part of her registered that
his were trembling. That his fingers were ice cold. He was afraid.
She saw it now as her eyes met his. And she tried to come back to
him because he seemed to need her.
“Honey, I-I got a videotape. It-it was like what’s on
your computer: the message, your daughter’s name with--with
my last name, too. Tell me what’s happened. Please. I’m
gonna go crazy here. Alexis, tell me what this means.”
She looked at him with wide bruised eyes, and when she spoke it
was with an emotionless tone. “It means you have a daughter,
Sonny,” she told him slowly, softly. “And it means Helena’s
going to kill her.”
