Page 56 of Mafia King's Surprise Baby

“No.” She sighs. “Like your father, you’re driven by your heart. Though he did learn how to switch that wiring later on.”

After my mother left him. And I’m supposing the eyeful she got in this very room involved her own son and another woman. I cringe inside.

I take another sip of Scotch and come to sit beside her. Something she said gives me pause. Will I one day also be able to bypass my heart to get to my dick? I only have to think of Bianca Bonucci to feel this isn’t gonna be possible.

“How did the meeting go?” she asks.

A sigh escapes me, and I down the rest of the whiskey in a single gulp.

“As you can imagine,” I tell her.

I’ve been meeting with the other Dons who are all members of the syndicate. As a Don myself now, I have a seat at their table. However, instead of being seen as their ally, they see me as theone they need to gang up on.

It’s a sort of tradition against Pellegrini men—my father, when he sat with them, didn’t kowtow to anyone and walked to the beat of his own drum. It’s expected I’ll be the same…unless they can browbeat the rebellious streak in my bloodline. I’m young and not set in my ways, according to them. Or so they think. No man is ever going to walk all over me. My father taught me well, especially in the past few months since he told me I’d be stepping into his shoes soon.

Recalling his illness and the death sentence it laid on him makes me want to rage at the world. It’s not fair he’s been taken from us so early.

I ease my grip on the glass, recalling a similar one breaking and slashing my palm over four years ago in Mattia’s kitchen. All because I was seeing Bianca in a tiny bikini…

I blink out of those thoughts before they can consume me. And also before I have to hide my hard-on from my grandmother.

“What did they ask for this time?” she continues.

Thankful for the distraction, I focus on the meeting I just left in a dark back room of an upscale gentleman’s club on the Upper East Side.

“Same as always. That I need to beget an heir—”

“Yes, you do. I would like a great-grandson, you know.”

I don’t let her interruption affect me. “—but they don’t seem to be ready to wait for a child to even happen. It’s like I should’ve pulled one out in front of them already. Like I’m a magician with a hat and instead of a rabbit, I pull a baby boy from it.”

“It would spare a lot of couples a lot of trouble if that were possible. IVF and all that,” she says. “Though it’s also fun to make a baby.”

I raise my eyebrows, though I’ve stopped being surprised at how bawdy my grandmother and her friends can be when they’ve set their minds on babies. I haven’t been spared a sex and baby talk any time I’ve met her and her cronies since I turned thirty.

“Don Salvatore’s offering his daughter for marriage,” I say.

Nonnamumbles something too vulgar for me to really want to dwell on.

“That girl.” She all but spits saying ‘girl.’ “Half the men in Ibiza have been inside her hoochie.”

“Nonna!”

She huffs. “Have you seen her Instagram? I wouldn’t be surprised she has an OnlyFans profile up, too.”

I’m spared having to pursue this topic when my phone beeps with a message. It’s from my father’s enforcer, Bruno. Technically, he’s my enforcer now, but I haven’t dwelled on this too much. I had — still have — more important matters to deal with, like the syndicate, than the fact Bruno and the othercaposhaven’t yet sworn theirOmertà— their vow of silence and service —to me.

Bruno wants me to meet him at his house.

I don’t know why, but I feel something fishy in this request. I’m tempted to brush it off, but paranoia has kept me in good stead lately—my gut is on high alert, and this is how I haven’t yet been roped into becoming the syndicate’s bitch.

Right now, it’s telling me to be wary of Bruno.

As a precaution, I message Mattia and ask him to meet me there.

Things were strained between me and Mattia for a long time after Bianca’s memorial. We didn’t see each other for the two weeks Hana was in Japan with her brother. When she came back, it’s like she brought peace back with her. She arranged dinner, had me over, and after eating, she excused herself and let us deal with our falling out as grown men over espressos and not glasses of liquor.

It was a tenuous truce, at first, then as we reconciled ourselves with Bianca’s loss, it brought us closer, in a newer bond that had lost the carefree tint of childhood friendship and had instead united us in the dark weight of grief.

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