Page 38 of Mafia Baby

She has wormed her way into my life and I can’t imagine waking up without her snuggled up to me in bed. I’m not going to let her be hurt by the evil of her father and my father.

“Dom, I need to tell you something,” she says, her voice muffled because she is still pressed tightly in my hug.

“Can it wait until I figure out what we’re going to do about all of this?” I ask her.

She sniffs and nods, swiping her wet hair back off her cheeks.

“We’ll figure this out,” I reassure her, pressing a kiss to her forehead. “You can trust me.”

Chapter Fourteen

Gianna

This wasn’t exactly what I had imagined when Dom had said that he would find a safe place for me to stay while he figured some things out.

I press a hand into my aching lower back and lean against the wall for a moment to rest. Stocking shelves and cleaning at the apartments where his hired dancers live is easy enough, but it’s also really boring. And I have to wear an ugly uniform like some kind of cleaning woman, which is scratchy and itchy.

At least the girls who live here are really nice, and we’ve actually had a lot of fun watching movies late at night and gossiping about boys.

They know me as “Georgie”, which was one of my college nicknames. I figured I wouldn’t slip up and give away my real name if I used a nickname that I was used to hearing.

Most of the girls are around my age, and many of them have had pretty tough lives. Bad childhoods seem to go hand-in-hand with working as a dancer, but I was surprised to find that many of them really actually love dancing for a living.

They also all rave about how well Dom treats them, which makes me feel proud. I knew that he had a big heart despite what he did for a living.

Apparently being asked to turn tricks at the same time as dancing is very common in their line of work, and most of the girls told me that they won’t consider working anywhere else than Dom’s club because he doesn’t expect that of them.

Every time I talk with them about their jobs, I realize just how sheltered I have always been. I can’t think of a single woman in my mother’s circle of friends who works. I don’t know any women my own age who work.

It never occurred to me that so many women in the world are being asked to do jobs that they hate, for horrible pay.

I often feel pretty stupid and naïve when the girls include me in these discussions. They just assume that I understand. After all, I’m here working as a live-in cleaning lady and room mom.

They must think that I have a similar tough past that I just don’t like to talk about. I’ve tried to push the shock and worry to the back of my mind and learn from them.

There’s so much that I don’t know and I feel like I owe it to my child to become much wiser to the ways of the world. I need better street smarts, at least, if I’m going to be with Dom.

I haven’t been willing to consider the possibility that Dom will eventually stash me somewhere out of the way for my own safety and then come back to Chicago to work. It’s a very real possibility, but the idea of it breaks my heart.

I’ve had to admit to myself that I’m falling in love with him, and the baby that we share is making it even harder for me to face the idea that he might not feel the same way.

I trust him to think about my safety and to try to do the right thing by me, but love is a completely different animal.

I decide that I can worry about whether or not Dom loves me another day. I have other chores to take care of before the girls wake up for the day.

Most of them end their nights around three in the morning, so they often don’t get out of bed until ten or eleven at the earliest. I try to get a lot of the cleaning done before they are up for the day so that we aren’t bumping into one another while I work.

I’ve gotten especially close with a girl named Diva. She won’t tell me her real name, and I haven’t pressed her for that information. I know all too well that names have power and that keeping your name to yourself is often essential.

Diva is a sweet girl with dark skin, big, beautiful eyes, and slim, graceful hands. She said she did gymnastics when she was growing up, and her tumbling skills have made her one of the most successful dancers at Dom’s club.

She has been trying to teach me to do the splits and some of her other moves with limited success. I figure I can learn how to be even sexier for Dom while I’m in hiding, if nothing else.

I want so much to tell Diva that I’m pregnant.

The secret feels larger than my entire life at this point. It’s getting harder and harder not to tell Dom about the baby, but I just can’t distract him right now.

He’s been trying to find out what is going on with my parent’s business so that he can “take care of the problem”. I’m pretty sure that I know what that means, and I don’t dwell on it. At this point, I just want to be safe and be able to go back to living with Dom and working at the club.

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