Page 73 of Mafia King's Surprise Baby

She smiles. “It’s short for Lorenzo, actually.” She sighs. “I wanted him to have your name, but I couldn’t do that, as it would’ve given us away then. Our cover name was Picard, and as Lorenzo Picard, at least he had the same initials as you.”

My throat clogs for a moment. So she has been thinking about me all this time, too. And she’s always had a reminder of our relationship with her. Not just memories, like I had, but a living, breathing, beautiful mix of both of us.

“You’re not angry at me, are you?” she asks, voice small as she stares at me with big eyes.

“Never,” I growl, my voice barely making it out past the lump in my throat. I reach up to clasp her face between my palms, and I drop a light kiss on her forehead, then on her lips, before peering down into her eyes. “This, you coming back and with him, it’s the best gift I could’ve received.”

A close second would be to have my father alive again, but that, I can’t make happen. I held his lifeless body in my arms, I buried him in the family crypt. He’s not coming back.

My father would’ve been a grandfather today. And me? I’m a father now.

“I know the other Dons are putting pressure on you,” Biancasays, tearing me from my melancholy thoughts.

A harsh chuckle flows out. “You don’t know the half of it.”

She also laughs without humor. “Oh, trust me, I know how it feels. I was their sacrificial lamb, remember?”

My jaw clenches when I think of this. They’re putting so much pressure on me, and I’m a grown man who can hold his own. She was a vulnerable twenty-three-year-old girl. How, ever, could she have fought back? They all but sold her to those fucking Albanians with the empty promise of peace. During the war, we all saw how greedy those bloodsuckers really are. The marriage into one of their clans would’ve held a tenuous peace, at best, if they didn’t outright start gunning for us since they were already ‘in’ having married into one of our families.

“They’re not taking you from me,” I grit out.

“It’s Enzo I’m worried about,” she tells me.

“No one’s coming close to him, either.”

“Thank you,” she exhales. “For keeping him safe.”

My chest clenches. Doesn’t she know I’ll scorch the earth for her, that I’ll bring the moon and stars down if necessary, that I’ll dance with the devil and take on God Himself if it means she’s safe, with me, and this also applies to our son, our family?

I wrap my arms around her and pull her to me. When she comes willingly, I sigh against her hair and press a soft kiss onto her head.

“There’s something I have that might help you,” she says.

“You’ve already given me enough,” I reply.

She gave me an heir. I was joking with my grandmother just yesterday telling her I need to pull a child from a magician’s hat to get those old goats to ease up on me, and look where we are now, a child seemingly pulled out of a magic hat landing in my life as if by a snap of fingers.

Enzo, he’s a game changer.

“Thank you for protecting our boy, Bianca.”

“He’s everything.”

“You both are.”

We stay like this for a long moment. The contentment in these minutes washes over me like a balm. I always knew Bianca was the center of my world, my anchor. It all kicked in when I saw the grown woman she’d become, but this germinated from a seed of fondness planted inside me from a long time ago, possibly from that night I met with her on that pier. She was underage then, so nothing happened, but something inside me was simply waiting for her, for the moment she’d step back into my life again. Then, boom! I was fully and unequivocally a goner.

Losing her all these years ago, it made me spiral in a downward descent. I’d lost my cornerstone, and then my father left us the way he did. Not his death, but the dementia diagnosis, that’s what took him from us. I lost my rock with him, and since then, I’d been drowning, slowly suffocating, unable to come up for air long enough to do more than just survive.

Having her here now, it’s like the hand that was keeping my head underwater has lost all its force. I can surge up, break thesurface, gulp in enough oxygen to fill my lungs and clear my head.

“Leo?”

“Hmm?”

“I’m sorry about your dad. He was a good man.”

I sigh. “The best.”

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