Page 71 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia Don

I didn’t realize how much I really cared for him, how much Nico mattered to me, until now. Until I thought I might have lost him to someone else.

Richie starts to move around behind the closed door, staggering footsteps that hobble closer to us. “Come on,” Nico says, as the sound of his suffering cools the air between us. “You shouldn’t have seen any of this.”

He puts his hand on my back and draws me up the stairwell, away from the man on the floor.

“What did he do?” I ask, glancing over my shoulder before Nico pulls me along, not letting me get distracted.

“Think of Richie like a problem child. What he hasn’t done is a shorter list, and my patience is done. I’m over it. Tonight, he tried to fuck Mae. Everybody in New York knows he’s the brokest motherfucker alive. He’s down here every week blowing whatever cash he can scam out of somebody, on whatever vice he picks for the night. If you can get addicted to something, he’s addicted to it. It doesn’t matter what. He tried to feel up Mae and got handsy when she said she wouldn’t go further before she had cash on the table. Don’t worry about him. He had it coming.”

“So you’re her pimp?”

“I’m her employer,” he says, with no emotion. “The same as the rest of the family.”

“Sounds like something a pimp would say,” I accuse him. He grins, his mouth dark with guilt.

“Salvatore has to keep me busy somehow, and if there’s one business that doesn’t sleep, it’s sex. The family has escorts. High-end, the best of the best. And we employ them the same way we employ anybody else in the business. If they work for us, it’s because they want to. If they could make better, safer money on their OnlyFans, they’d do that. They have incentive to work for us.”

We are almost back to the fighting ring when I stop, peeking out into the crowd. I glance up at the man I’ve missed for the past few days.

“When you said wife...”

He interrupts me before I can even ask.

“Don’t play stupid, Ava. You knowexactlywhat I meant.”

He puts his arm around my shoulders, making sure everyone in the room sees that we’re together, as we step back into the lively compound, where another savage fight is already underway, one of the competitors more blood than face.

Nico offers to buy me a drink, and when I tell him I don’t want any alcohol, he seems to have someone materialize a bottle of sparkling water for me from thin air. I feel the eyes on us as we walk together, the silent understanding that breaks across each group when they see me next to Nico.

As if suddenly, I am as untouchable as he is.

Nico shows me how to bet even though the betting is already over, and he gives me a quick and dirty rundown of who the fighters are and how to weigh the odds of each fight. Although the books should be closed—the bets always spread across all of the night’s fights in order to favor the house—he hands me some cash and tells me to bet it however I want on the last two fights. The bookie doesn’t blink at the oddity of it, not when it’s Nico giving the orders.

I try to use his advice, his insight, but the common theme is obvious—I always root for the underdog.

He takes me up to the VIP section. Mae poses on a seat, fixing her hair and making eyes at the men who only have their attention on the fight below. Behind the bulletproof glass, we have a good overhead view, and Nico puts me on his lap, just as I imagined he was going to do to her. I lean back into his arms.

“You know everything that happens down here makes it back to the family,” I point out softly as two men swap punches down below. Nico’s already been separated from the family once for his antics with me.

“Let it.”

I wish I could not care the way he does. His arm wraps around my middle, unknowingly cradling his own child as we watch the fight. I lean my head onto his shoulder, forgetting the family for just a little while, and let Nico tell me all the names of the fighters—their talents and their histories, and if he knew them before or not. Most men from his first days in the ring, he says, are either dead or retired.

The fighters from earlier lounge up here in the VIP balcony. They’ve changed clothes and now press fistfuls of ice to their wounds. Summers stares forward, his pale eyes on the match, hungry. His muscles twitch, as if he’s imagining himself right back in the ring again, living out someone else’s fight. I grin and lean into Nico’s ear, sliding my hand along his shoulders.

“I liked Summers,” I tell him teasingly. “He might be my favorite.”

“Oh yeah?” he asks, drawing my face to his, making me almost blush as I tease him.

“Mhm. He seems talented. He wins even when you don’t expect him to.”

And suddenly, Nico leans back, stretching one arm over the back of the couch.

“Summers,” he yells, drawing the man’s attention. “Me and you. Four weeks.”.

Summers looks surprised and a little doomed, but he grins a bloody smile and gives Nico an agreeable thumbs-up.

“We’ll see how much you like him after I get through with him,” Nico says, and draws me into a devastatingly blistering kiss. I spend the rest of the night in his arms. It feels like our first real date. The first time where I have spent time with him because I wanted to, and not because he forced it.

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