Page 7 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia Don

“Put that on.”

She doesn’t say anything, but I hear the rustle of fabric.

“So, why’d you climb up onto the cage?” I ask as we dress, back-to-back.

“Because you were going to kill him.”

“I wasn’t gonnakillhim.”

Well,maybeI would have killed him. Hindsight and the moment are two different beasts, and one of them is harder to tame. “That your problem, if he dies?”

“It’s the family’s problem.”

“Thefamily,” I say, rolling the word on my tongue. Those traitorous fucks. I fasten my belt and turn around. Ava has my shirt tied into a crop top, showing off her midriff and somehow making an oversized tee look sexy. My gaze lingers. I roll the thought of what she might taste like over my tongue. Can’t shake it.

When I got out, I figured I’d pay off the first whore I saw. Take her right in the back of some alley. You’re not picky about pussy when you haven’t had any in half a decade. Really fucks with your standards. But now, standing here with Ava, wrapped up in her fucked-up web…I don’t think some random whore is going to do it for me at all.

“Thanks, Nico,” she finally says, even if she can’t look at me while saying it.

“You think I’m done with you?” I ask, sensing the finality in her statement. Like I’m just gonna let her walk away from me. “I’ll take you back home.”

“You can’t,” she says. “I still live at the house.”

“So what?”

“So…isn’t that why you’re not there? Why you haven’t visited? Aren’t you hiding out from Salvatore?”

I grin at that bold, bewildered assumption. The girl’s got it all wrong. I inch in closer, put my hands on those hips and pull her right up against me.

“Do I look like I’m hiding?” I ask lowly.

She stares up at me, speechless and finally flustered as we are body to body. Even she can’t hide that. She tests my grip, trying to step back. I meet her step for step, get her pinned right up against the locker.

“You and me, pretty girl. We’re going home.”

3

Ava

I went looking for danger, but I didn’t know danger would follow me home like a stray dog. I didn’t think it would shadow my steps, keeping its eyes and hands always on me. Nico presses in too close, towering over me. This whole time we have been revolving around each other like two satellites caught in each other’s orbits, circling and circling, doomed to crash.

The distance whittles down between us again, one breath at a time.

Nico has a way of crowding in on me, on taking up all the air and space between us until there’s nothing left. I veer away from his pull again, launching off of that collision course a second time.

“I already have a ride home—”

Nico’s arm comes up fast as he slams his hand into the locker door right next to my head. The metal rattles loudly as he leans in, pinning me there under him and cutting off my escape route.

It stirs the heat in my belly, and Ihatehim for it.

“Look at those nerves of steel,” he mutters lowly, staring back into my death glare. “Didn’t even jump.”

In those eyes, I see seven years of hunger, all keen and sinister. Pitiful. Seven years hasnothingon me. Heat pours through my belly, pools between my legs as he holds us hip to hip, but unlike him, I can pretend it doesn’t. Unlike him, I know how to do without.

I shove past him a second time, off to find Frankie, when his hand curls around my wrist and slings me back into his arms. He holds me like a kitten, his fist clutched into the hair at the base of my skull.

“What’s the matter, Ava? You too good for me now? I can’t even drive you home? Or maybe there is something you’re still afraid of—”

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