Page 48 of Mafia King's Surprise Baby

I think back to their wedding day, to how Bianca was rankled by their non-existent PDA on such a momentous occasion. She’d been on to something—it was essentially an arranged match. No wonder Mattia waited for his wedding night to bed Hana.

Bianca. She’d been on the money about this. What else did she get right? She found out about Abrashi before any of us, knew what he was capable of right away.

My stomach churns. A dark alleyway leading to a crossroad of back ways in The Bronx, which is Albanian territory. Blood in a splatter on the wall, the drops stopping at the end of the alley. No further traces of her, and that dark sedan with the tinted windows could’ve been anyone’s car.

I recall a son of a bitch telling us he’s good at what he does because he always covers his tracks.

I refuse to look it in the face, but I have to.

Ardian Abrashi lured Bianca to The Bronx, attacked her, abducted her…and most probably killed her and got rid of her body, covered his tracks so we have no way of finding her ever again. Until his family found a new bride to marry him off to, his girlfriend would’ve given birth to their child. His family would’ve had to accept the fait accompli and marry them off for the child’s sake, to legitimize its birth. Ardian would be off the hook, happy with his wife and baby, all while the nuisance of his fiancée would’ve been dealt with and forgotten about.

He planned it all out, and worse, he pulled it off, too. The fact Ikilled him doesn’t change a thing for Bianca in this deal. She lost, either way.

As we drop Hana off at the terminal, I also drop the weight I’ve been carrying—the one of trying to find Bianca Bonucci when all clues point to her being gone…

I don’t want to admit it, but Mattia is right. His family needs closure.

And for this, I need to let the very idea of Bianca Bonucci being alive go.

Chapter 14

Leo

Three years later

I’ve been summoned by my father. It’s not uncommon lately, and I dread what’s awaiting me when I’ll get to the family home. Whose death will he announce today?

Our family and its soldiers have been relatively spared in this conflict that’s erupted in the past eighteen months. After Bianca’s disappearance, the memorial held for her solidified the fact she’s gone. She isn’t legally dead yet, but in all aspects, it’s the case—Bianca Bonucci died in that seedy alleyway in The Bronx.

When she went, she took my heart. The void she’s left behind, it’s one that created an abyss in my soul, a bottomless darkness that threatens to take over me if I don’t keep it under control. This darkness is what made me kill a man with such ease, as if he were a mere cockroach.

Ardian Abrashi’s lifeless body was discovered at the foot of a fire escape staircase at the back of a questionable strip club near the Port Authority in Hell’s Kitchen. My father’scapofound him with a broken neck at the bottom of the stairs to the cellar of my restaurant; I let him believe it was an accident. Abrashi fell, end of the story.

He couldn’t be found on my property, though, hence how he wasmoved to the location where his body was discovered. No one, not even his own people, blinked an eye at the location—after all, he wasThe Butcher’s brother. That family was cast in a bad light afterwards, their influence all but extinct a year later.

Despite this, the Albanians pushed for another alliance for a long time. They still are, at least some of them, on the organizational level. Brokering a truce through marriage, it’s like they still have some hope this will work. Or it’s all an eyewash. Because on the ground, their men have been advancing, staking claims on our operations.

They’re going for the ports, where most of the Italian-American Mafia operations happen on the import-export trade routes. Some of these fuckers are also advancing on European ports like Turin and Palermo and other territories notoriously controlled by the Cosa Nostra and the ’Ndrangheta. They have no qualms, much less any respect for age-old institutions.

My family owns clubs and security companies, so we’ve been spared their attacks. Until recently, when they tried to make a move on one of our operations near the container park of Port Newark. They killed two of our men on the team overseeing that area.

My father, Don Pellegrino, didn’t want to get involved in this war. But we were drawn into it, and now, we’re facing the consequences as there’s at least one attack on our crews every other week.

This has forced me and my brothers to step up, to grow up and become men when still in our twenties, a time when we’d have a free pass to be wild and carefree until we’d have to settle down as soldiers and also family men at thirty.

I’m thirty-one now, turning thirty-two in May, and this isn’t the life I had envisaged for me at this age. On most days, I feel weary and worn out. To think I have the rest of my life to go, to function in the same vein, to follow in the illustrious footsteps carved out by past generations of Pellegrini men.

Bit by bit, I’m becoming my father’s second in command. Sergio and Emilio are both computer whizzes—must be all those video games they played in their teens; it’s almost like girls didn’t exist for them—and as such, they’re the perfect team for running the security firms. Tristan is still in college, and we’re keeping the baby of the family as far away from this clusterfuck as possible. How long we’ll be able to, I have no idea, but at least for now, he’s protected, literally and figuratively, from the darkness and violence of our world.

I step into the house and head to my father’s study. A whiff of flowery perfume tickles my nostrils, and I frown. Only one person leaves a sillage ofAnaïs, Anaïsin her wake everywhere she goes. I knock, open the door, and step in, not surprised to find my grandmother sitting on the leather couch with a snifter of Cognac in her hand.

I close the door then make a beeline for her, dropping a soft kiss on the paper-thin skin of her cheek. “NonnaValeria. It’s good to see you.”

“Buongiorno, fligliolo,” she greets me with her free hand patting my shoulder.

I can’t help but feel her hand is lingering a bit today, pressing into the fabric of my suit jacket. It’s strange because her touch is light as air usually.

Something’s wrong. I can feel it in my gut first, then in the airlike a cloak of doom closing in on me.

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