Page 119 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia Don

When Ava’s labor turns long and hard, everyone is all maddening smiles and, “It’s perfectly normal for the first time,” while Ava cries out, low and soft against my shoulder, with each contraction. They say she’s getting close, it’s almost time, almost time, but they’ve been saying that, and it never has been—until it is.

She only wants one position—the whole reason she insisted on having our baby here, and not trapped on her back in a hospital—so that she can lean into me. And Jesus Christ, it takes so long,and eventually Ava’s mask slips and the tears come, and the baby is well on its way now because the contractions are coming fast and they’re not stopping, and all she has to help is my low encouragement against her ear, urging her on.

And when Ava’s crowning, in the heat of all that pain, she screams, and some well-meaning nurse, who wouldn’t know the value of silence if you stamped Ben Franklin’s face on it, chirps up with a, “It’s a big one. They definitely take after their daddy, that’s for sure.”

And goddamn, why does she gotta putmein the crosshairs like that?

But Ava can barely hear it, holding onto me for dear life.

In every big push and blinding scream, I see the woman that shot Vincent Mori’s killer. The woman who stabbed Thaddeus Mori to death and drowned him in a fountain. The savage little thing I saw in her that first night, when she tried to fight off a crowd of men twice her size. She screams and sobs and shakes head to toe, but she fights harder than I ever have or ever will.

Ava gives birth to a son. Eight pounds, eight ounces, and he comes out kicking and squirming and crying like mad, and I know the nurse is wrong. That little boy is a fighter, and he takes after both of us.

37

Ava

Nico told me it would be okay if I wanted to name him Vinny. He said he’d understand and wouldn’t feel any type of way about it, but I didn’t want that. Not really. I don’t think it’s fair to have the weight of another person’s life or death put on you from the first minute you’re born. Nico wouldn’t let me name him something that he would have bullied some other kid for when he was in school, and I wouldn’t let Nico name him anything that sounds too close to a type of gun or the model of a car.

We settle on Cade, and he’s perfect.

It’s disorienting, coming home with a new baby. You have over half a year to anticipate it, to get everything just right, and all those months of nesting and worrying and needing everything to be so, so perfect—and then it happens, and this thing you prepared so much for just doesn’t seem real. Nico and I drove to the birthing center, just the two of us and the pain in my belly,and we drove home with a whole new tiny person sleeping in my arms. The doctor just stitches you up and sends you off, and all you sign is a birth certificate saying yes, this is a person now, and that’s that. I’d have a harder time getting a cat out of a shelter.

It takes me a while to trust that it’s all real. Maybe it’s just the hormones being purged from my system, and for the first couple of days I catch myself randomly crying over how much I love him, and sometimes I have to get up in the middle of the night even when he’s not crying for me, just to double-check that he’s really there, with all his little fingers and toes, and he’s sleeping away.

And I’m not alone, in all that mad love.

Early one morning I find Nico stretched out in the chair by the crib, all effortlessly gorgeous in a sleeveless shirt and a gold chain, with our little baby tucked in one strong arm. The image boils the primal chemicals in my brain and belly, and for a split second, not even a month out, I forget all the pain and discomfort and sleeplessness of pregnancy, and think,Oh,I could do that again.

That reaction happens almost every time Nico holds him.

I’m convinced that’s how they get you. The only way we made it as a species.

The man, unaware of the primal, thousand-year-old instincts he’s setting off inside me, silently beckons me over to him. I curl up against him, sitting on the edge of the chair, until Nico has each part of his family wrapped in each arm. I kiss his temple.

“It still doesn’t feel real, does it?” I murmur, stroking the soft down of dark hair on Cade’s head.

“I’m still coming to terms with you marrying me, much less this,” Nico answers.

“Oh, please. Like you would have given me any choice,” I tease him.

“I couldn’t afford to give you choices, you know.”

I look at him, not understanding.

“I realized it that day we signed the paperwork for your birth plan. My mother, she probably chose Sal. I guess most women would, but that doesn’t make it any easier, thinking she might’ve had a choice in it. That she decided not to come home, so that he could.”

My heart sinks. Nico can’t possibly know that’s how it went down, but before I interrupt, he goes on, “And Cecilia. Maybe she thinks I don’t know, but I do. She conspired with all the rest of the family to keep me locked up for those seven years. She voted for it. The woman who raised me. She thought Sal was best for the family, so she chose him. And then Rosalyn—”

The word sounds strange on his lips, and we glance at each other as he clarifies for the first time, “My ex.” And I realize he’s never said her name before. I thought it was because she was so important to him, but hearing him now, I realize…it’s just because she doesn’t matter at all. “She chose one more night with her ex-boyfriend. So I couldn’t give you a choice, Ava. I had to have you. I had to, and I knew if you had a choice, it wouldn’t be—”

“Don’t,” I interrupt, not letting him say it. I tilt his face toward me, cutting off those ugly thoughts with a kiss. “Don’t, Nico,” I beg him. I meet the intensity of that gaze, seeing in him the relentless man who would follow me to the ends of the earth. “After you and I met, I only ever chose between two people. And it was you and him,” I say softly, glancing to Cade in his arms. “It was never because I wanted anyone else. You know that. Maybe it took all those awful things to make you the man that kept holding onto me even when the world tried to rip us apart. But that was the man I needed. No one else would have done it. No one else could have. You chose me, too, you know?”

Nico laughs, and it turns into a soft shushing as Cade stirs in his arms.

“I didn’t choose,” he confesses in a low whisper. “Men fall in love for stupid reasons, Ava. It’s always something dumb. Some little thing a girl does that nobody else would think twice about, but it gets us all fucked up in the head, and it sticks in there and eats up all the gray matter, until it’s the only thing left.”

“What did I do?”

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