Page 10 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia Don

“You gonna deal with that or what?” Nico asks.

“I only have the patience for one overbearing man at a time,” I tell him.

“Well, then someone’s just gonna have to wait,” Nico says, spontaneously snatching the phone out of my hand.

“Hey!”

Before I can stop him, Nico chucks my phone out the open window. It shatters into a hundred pieces on the road behind us. By the time I whip around, it’s already long gone in the darkness.

“Are youcrazy?” I scream at him.

“What’s crazy is you not seeing the irony in that question,” Nico says.

I punch him in the shoulder, to absolutely zero effect.

“Why would you even do that?! You absoluteidiot!”

The car jolts violently, sending me lurching back against the door away from him and bumping my head off the glass. Nico is unfazed, his steady eyes on the road as he effortlessly slings us around just to keep me off him.

“If you only have time for me or Marcel, then it’s going to be me. I don’t share.”

I gawk at him, too astonished to answer.

“I wasn’t even answering him!”

“And now you don’t have to worry about it at all. You’re all mine.” He glances at me out of the corner of his eye, smirking devilishly. “You can glare all you like, pretty girl. As long as it’s at me.”

“…I don’t understand you.”

“You will,” he says, like it’s a promise.

My stomach twists into a knot.

That dangerous, tilted smirk never really seems to leave his face. Like the world is one big joke and he’s the only one in on the punchline. I have nothing to do but sink down into the seat and cross my arms, glaring out at the distant taillights ahead of us.

When my angry silence stretches too long, Nico’s voice finally fills up the cabin of the car.

“You want to know why I got out of prison, Ava?”

He claws my attention back to him even when I try to hold it away. I’m desperate to know, and I can’t help myself but play into his game.

“…Why?”

“When you bring civilization to a place, the first thing people do is take out all the predators. They kill them off or drive them out, because they know what a carnivore is capable of. But they leave the prey behind. Deer, rabbits. Real fucking nuisances, overbreeding, nothing to wipe them out. It takes time for people to realize how devastating they can be, running rampant,chewing through everything. Eventually, you gotta bring back the predator. You gotta set the balance again. That’s all it is. I’m just out because this city is a wilderness, and I’m good for the ecosystem.”

I gaze into the passing night, silently trying to figure it out.

Nico has given me something else to chew over, something that isn’t how pissed off I am at him.

Who benefits from setting Nico free? What needs to be set in balance? I look at the man in the driver’s seat, wondering who’s in his crosshairs and who’s giving him the gun. I don’t have any easy answers.

Nico and I coast through the late-night streets of New York City for too long. We should have been home by now, but I’ve been too busy stewing over the loss of my phone and Nico’s miraculous reappearance. I didn’t notice the strange, leisurely routes he’s been taking through the city. I ask where we’re going, and when he doesn’t answer, I tell him it better be to get me a new phone.

It isn’t.

We stop instead at a late-night diner. I insist that I’m too pissed off at him to eat, but he says I’m too skinny and pays for mine, parting with a hundred-dollar bill and not bothering with change.

We take the boxes to-go.

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