Page 46 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia Don

I roll over and tuck myself deeper against Nico’s chest, burying myself in him, where the rest of the world can’t reach me.

For the first time in days, I sleep with the certainty that tomorrow, something will be different. Maybe better, maybe worse. But at least it will bedifferent.

13

Ava

Nico’s idea of therapy is a two-hour drive upstate.

I’m not allowed to wallow in last night, given no time to overanalyze and strip it down. Nico forces me into the passenger seat oftoday, and he fills up the time telling me about how the city used to be before TikTok and boba shops. I poke fun at him for recounting his glory days like a boomer telling war stories. Nico’s not dissuaded, and even if I poke fun at him, I really am curious about who Nico was before prison. I knew him, but not in any way that really mattered. I knew him the way I knew fairytales and ghost stories, more myth than man even when we shared the same roof.

He tells me how he got involved in the fighting ring. Sal was the one who used to run it, and Nico only showed up for the fights, always against his dad’s wishes. Apparently, cage fighting isn’t asport befitting someone who would eventually be the head of the family. If Nico lost a fight, people might lose respect for him.

But Nico fought anyway. He learned not to lose, how to win at any cost, no matter the odds.

He couldn’t win them all, but he always redeemed himself. It didn’t matter how many fights it took or how many nights he had to drag himself home broken and bloody. Nico lived by one rule:

He never stopped until he came out on top, and eventually, everyone knew it.

I’m starting to get a sense of where his tenacity comes from, his obsessive, relentless push for the things he wants, when the car swerves onto the exit ramp and leaves the interstate behind.

The city is long gone out here. We’re surrounded by flat land and lines of trees gathered up on either side of the road. I was born and raised in the gridlock, and this feels about as close to the middle of nowhere as I’ve ever bothered going. I’m tempted to start hitting him with theare we there yet?whining when we pull off of the main road and onto a long stretch of winding gravel.

The road meanders through a thick tree line, where it clears out into flat farmland with fences lining each side of the road. Someone hammered no trespassing signs into the trees, weather-stripped omens warning us to turn back every few feet. Nico doesn’t turn back.

We park in the driveway of a sprawling ranch-style home. Dogs bark from inside the house, bounding around the screen door.

A man with thin hair and a sun-spotted face comes out onto the front porch with a shotgun in his hands.

“Nico,” I breathe, a low warning, but he tells me to stay put and gets out of the car. The mood changes once the man’s eyes land on Nico, his face animating. Instead of being held at double-barrel gunpoint, the two shake hands like old friends. I can’t make out the muffled words, but their catching up is brief and familiar. They laugh, and the tension is easily forgotten.

Nico jerks a thumb over his shoulder to gesture somewhere off in the fields behind us.

I take another glance at the farm, wondering if we just drove two hours so Nico can try to teach me some life lessons by shoveling horse shit.

The car door opens and Nico gets back in, starting up the engine.

“Who the hell was that?” I ask.

“Family friend,” Nico says as we continue deeper into the property. “Think of him like a business associate.”

I glance around, looking for any sign of the family’s business out here in these fields.

“Don’t tell me the family’s secret side hustle is pickled beetroots.”

Nico just grins.

The gravel under our tires turns to dirt. Nico parks us alongside the edge of a field, takes the handgun out of his glovebox, and tells me to get out of the car. My eyes roam from the pistol in hishands to our surroundings. Empty, flat land stretches out from us to the distant trees, with not another soul in sight.

“I know you’re upset I left you on read, but does that really warrant turning me into a cold case?” I ask, annoyed rather than afraid.

“If I was going to get rid of you, Ava, we’d have taken a different turn back there at the crossroad,” Nico says.

“How reassuring.”

I slam the door behind me. Nico pops open the hood of the car, where he has two boxes stored in the compartment—one, a narrow metal case, the other the cooler he took with us from the house.

“You said you wanted to do something that you shouldn’t. Putting a gun in the hand of somebody who should probably be committed to a psych ward sounds like a pretty bad idea to me.”

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