Page 43 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia Don

Finally, Nico tilts my head to look at him. He swims in front of my vision, all dark shadow and ghostly highlights. His breathing is elevated, his expression shaken.

“Ava. I’m not Marcel. I’m not Sal. I’m not any of your little girlfriends that are gonna come bring you cookies and tissues and cry with you. If you need that, you need to tell me to leave. Right now. I’m not gonna sit here and let you justcry. I won’t let you bleed out without doing something about it. I’ll cauterize a wound if I have to.”

“That’s not what I need,” I finally admit.

That brand of kindness has never helped me before. I’ve been offered plenty of it, more than I knew what to do with. It was always wasted on me.

“Then talk to me,” he whispers, his hands on me so tight they hurt. “Tell me what’s hurting you. Let me fucking kill it for you.”

“I feel like I betrayed him,” I confess, the hardest six words I’ve ever uttered. My lungs hurt with how violently I try to hold back my sobbing and pitchy breathing, desperate to get some kind of control.

Nico’s hand curls around the back of my head.

“I told you to blame me,” he reminds me firmly. “I made you feel those things. It wasn’t your fault, but you had to feel them. You had to know before you signed your life off to someone who wasn’t gonna give a damn about whatyoufeel.”

I shake my head. Nico didn’t force me to do anything I didn’t want to.

“You didn’t betray shit, Ava. You liked being fucked, that’s all. You’resupposedto like it.”

My eyes adjust to the pitch dark, and I see the fresh cuts and bruises on Nico’s face. I sniffle.

“Were you fighting again?”

I reach up to touch them, but he catches me by the wrist.

“When I brought you back home that day, you were fine. What happened?”

I glance around in the dark. I can’t see much, but I know every inch of this room. I can close my eyes and know exactly what it looks like. I turn on the bedside lamp so we can finally see, and I can wipe my eyes on something that isn’t the front of Nico’s shirt.

“It’s just this place,” I say through shaking breaths. “When I came back, I just…I couldn’t do it.” The truth swims in my eyes, obscuring the room again as I blink back more tears, refusing to let them start again. “It finally felt like I did something I shouldn’t have. I didn’t think it would…”

“You didn’t think it would change anything.”

I force a tiny smile, nodding. “You warned me. You said you’d fix me or you’d break me. I guess now we know which one it was.”

Nico’s throat works, the meaning sinking in.

“Come on,” he says, taking me by the arm. My feet instinctively drag against the floor.

“Nico, I’mtired,” I beg, having done nothing all day except be miserable, which takes a lot out of a person when it’s your only full-time gig.

“You think I’m not?” he counters me. “I’m tired of wanting you every goddamn day, while you’re locked up where I can’t have you. I’m tired of constantly wondering what you’re doing, what you’re wearing, what you’re thinking about. You know what it’s like, living in the same house as you? Like I’m a recovering alcoholic working at the goddamn liquor store, the thing I want most always just a few steps away. Wanting you isexhausting, Ava.”

The air leaves my lungs, my belly fluttering irresistibly.

I’m forced out of my room, through the broken doorway.

“You’re not sleeping in there,” he says, no room for argument in that iron tone. “I spent years of my life locked away from the rest of the world. I’ll be damned if I sit by and watch youchooseto do that to yourself.Youaren’t going to live that.”

The fight snaps out of me as it suddenly makes sense why Nico is so upset, why he’s taken my vanishing act so personally.

“Tomorrow, I’m taking you out.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere,” he says, pulling me along.

Nico has taken a bedroom for himself on the second floor, but there’s nothing personal about it yet, nothing to make it look lived in. I feel nothing about it until Nico pulls down the covers and orders me into bed like a child. The sheets smell faintly of him, like a bonfire in the late fall and crisp, turning weather.

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