Page 2 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia Don

We aren’t the only women here, but our numbers are in the vast minority. Some girls serve drinks behind the bar or sell party favors. Escorts lounge with their tricks in the VIP balconies, high seats that keep the elite sequestered from the crowd and, fora price, offer a better view of the carnage taking place below. Women or not, in the middle of a fight like this, we aren’t the main attraction.

“That’s our guy,” she says, motioning toward a booth that has been built into the thick concrete walls. “The bookie.”

The man she gestures to has a bulldog’s frown as he sits behind a thick pane of spittle-stained bulletproof glass, with heavy chains on the steel door shielding him and his men from the rest of the compound. The man’s eyes are spaced so far apart, Frankie and I can walk side by side and still each be the focus of his miserable, heavy-jowl scowl.

Something has been off with the numbers the past couple of weeks, and Frankie has been given the duty of watching the collection and book balancing.

“He looks happy to see us,” I mutter.

“Nothing pisses off a man quite like being told he needs a babysitter. ’Specially when that babysitter is a woman. I don’t mind doing your basic heavy lifting, but being used for mental warfare? That shit’s myfavorite.”

She gives me a wink and claps me on the back. “Let me break the ice.” She grins and saunters up to the window, hips swaying.

With Frankie’s attention on her mark, I turn my eyes back to the rest of the compound. I’ve never been here before, and it feels like exactly what it is—somewhere I shouldn’t be.

I begged Frankie to bring me with her tonight. For ten minutes, she preached at me about how that was a stupid, terrible, world-ending idea. Then, she caved and let me come along anyway.

She really only had one question: why?Why did I want to come here of all places?

Looking around the room, I pretend not to know the answer. Not to seepossibilitywritten all over these grimy, crude walls.

Frankie is wrapped up in her conversation with the bookie when one of the fighters collapses for the final time. The reactions are mixed, but all of them are deafening. There are cries of financial devastation and whoops of barbaric, savage excitement.

“He’s down, he’s down, he’s out!” an announcer wails, the excitement in his voice nearly blowing out the static-filled speakers.

I’m pushed back as the crowd breaks backward, giving room for them to pull the half-conscious fighter out. Two men drag his sweat-soaked body under the arms. I see a flash of his busted face, his bloodied mouth, his crushed nose. I take in the sight like a camera, a Polaroid flash, where it lingers behind my eyes in all of its gory clarity.

My stomach stays solid, my knees firm.

Everything used to terrify me. Blood, violence, men who were just a little too much taller than me. A place like this would have had me weeping in the corner, clinging to Frankie like a lost toddler and begging to go home.

Not anymore. Not since Vinny.

Since losing him, my emotions have been like a bad tooth: first agonizing, and then utterly painless. Killed off by the sheer extent of the damage. I can dig into the places where I once felt happiness or fear or devastation, but I always come up shortchanged.

But down here in the underground wilds, where everything is pushed to the extreme, pushed right to the edge—that speaks to me. Even the simple fact that I am notsupposedto be here makes me all the more certain that I should be.

Maybe something bad will happen. Maybe I want it to.

I am convinced the universe can no longer hurt me, and I am playing chicken with it, daring one of us to flinch first.

I glance over my shoulder. Frankie stands on the other side of the glass now, hovering over the bookie’s shoulder as they review something, going through it line by line, like she’s teaching a kid how to read. His face is rage-red and greased in sweat.

A new eruption of cheers fills the compound.

The energy shifts. Electric and heavy. The men lingering in the shadowy corners of the room are lured in, drawing close and joining the crowd. All attention is pulled toward the center of the room.

The announcer’s voice scratches over the speakers again.

“Here it is gentlemen, our final fight of the night! The moment of truth you’ve all been waiting for! You’ve heard the rumors, the whispers...”

In the private booths overhead, spectators get off their couches and come right up to the windows. Something is happening. I sense it like a growing storm as the crowd around the ring thickens like worshippers gathering for mass, circling toward the spectacle.

“Nothin’s gonna be the same after this,” I overhear someone say, to which a thick Jersey accent answers,

“It’s about damn time.”

I’m still piecing together what the big deal is when the new fighters are brought out, the announcer’s voice rising to a frenzy, “And it is my pleasure to welcome back to the ring, the legend himself—”

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