Page 86 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia Don

“Marcel is a symptom of the disease I promised to cure. It’s already in motion, and I can’t stop it now. It’s not that easy, Ava. None of it’s easy. And telling Salvatore I conspired with a bunch of the family behind his back? Fuck, he’ll put my head on a stick in the front yard just to warn everybody else. A cautionary tale he’ll tell his daughter about in one of her bedtime stories—”

“Okay, okay,” I interrupt. I don’t want to hear any more ofthat.

“But I won’t let them hurt you, alright?” Nico says. His drunk thoughts are unpredictable, and they slide one to the next. “Trust me that much, Ava. They won’t hurt you. You’re never in danger as long as I’m here.”

In danger?

The thought of being in danger hasn’t even crossed my mind, not until Nico says it. I don’t know if it’s drunk ramblings or if he really thinks I might be threatened, but I don’tfeelin danger. Maybe having a six foot five cage fighter in your bed comes with its own false sense of security, but all of my problems are more complicated than just men with low morals and shady agendas. Even if someone was coming after me, I don’t have any worry left to give them. My problems are booked out for the whole year. They’re just going to have to make an appointment.

“If I could choose you, Ava, I would. But it’s not my choice to make,” he says.

And the stupid, heartbroken little romantic in me wants to believe him.

I slide my hand through his hair. It’s getting longer now, and I wonder if he’ll let it grow out. I kind of like the close-shaven look he wore fresh out of prison, but I wouldn’t mind if it got to one of those awkward growing-out lengths that I could tease him for. I swallow the thought along with my smile.

Why do my thoughts slip so easily into something soft and domestic with this man? All he’s done is teach me to fuck. He’s threatened to own me, to control me, to fix me at my own peril—and my feelings for him are warm and gooey and sweet, like a bite of hot cookies right out of the oven.

I could swear, gazing into his eyes, that sometimes he feels them, too. In his own way, I’d imagine. It’s like I’m looking at two totally different sides of the same man. I wish I could see who he is when he sits across from Salvatore. When he drives late across the city with an address on a napkin and a gun in his jacket.

I wish I could see all of him at once and know the truth, but I can’t.

We spend the night in each other’s arms, crushed to each other’s bodies, fighting fruitlessly against the tide of tomorrow that will drift us apart again.

I’m not running any of this back to Salvatore, no matter what he wants. Disobeying the head of the family, even in the smallest way, puts a dark shiver in me. Marcel drilled one truth into my head from the time I was just a child: the don is obeyed in all things, at all costs. But not this time.

Nico’s fingers ghost against my skin, and when they slow, I think he’s almost asleep, when his voice reaches out and he says,

“Don’t choose Thaddeus. I don’t have a choice. But if you do, if you get to choose, Ava—don’t choose him. You’re better than him.”

“If it’s any consolation, Nico, I think I came closer to stabbing him tonight than sleeping with him.”

Nico buries his smile in my neck and mumbles, “That’s my girl.”

In the midst of falling asleep, he quietly adds, “I’m not like him. Better or worse, I’m not like him.” This is not his commanding, furious voice. This is different. The softest note of hurt colors his tone, something that might only slip through because of the shots and the late hour.

“Will you tell me about your other girl?” I ask softly. “About the one you went to prison over?”

His throat bobs. Maybe it’s a dangerous topic, especially while drunk.

“You don’t have to worry about that, Ava. It’s in the past.”

“I’m not worried about it,” I promise him. It’s not like I don’t have my own man in the past, even if my past and Nico’s have two very different meanings. “I just want to know.”

He sighs, his fingers dragging strands of my hair through the air as he toys with them.

“You’ll get jealous,” he says grumpily.

“No, I won’t,” I whine, elbowing him gently.

“Suit yourself.” He drags me against his chest. “I met this girl a little after high school, when I was still running wild,” he says, as if he’s stopped running wild. I don’t interrupt him. “And my dad, he had all these ‘opportunities’ lined up for me. That’s what he called them, anyway. Felt more like a bunch of leashes and I just got to pick the color, but whatever. Rich, pretty women with good teeth and good families. Plastic surgery right at eighteen, if they needed it. All that bullshit that matters when you have more money than common sense, you know? But anyway, I met this girl. Her dad worked at a deli or something. Just worked there, didn’t even own it. I was crazy about her, and I thought she was crazy about me. I hadn’t been in love before. I didn’t know it was going to eat me up like that. Nothing else mattered. I didn’t care how pissed off my old man got or how everyone else was gonna look at us at some stuffy, old money party I didn’t want to be at anyway. Dad said she was just some nobody. But she wasn’t going to be some nobody when she was standing next to me. If I had the world, I wanted to cut out a slice of it for her.”

My heart squeezes a little, because that sounds oh-so much like the Nico I know.

“Then Dad died. Nobody saw it happening that soon, least of all me, and I got shoved to the top of the food chain. Dad was barely cold before I popped the question. Maybe I just didn’t want to face it alone. I don’t know. But I asked her to marry me, and she said yes. Of course she did. Except now she was going to be a mob man’s wife, and that comes with mob man surveillance. I guess nobody warned her about that. She staged her bachelorette party so that she could fuck her ex one last time, before she signed off to live with me forever.”

His voice grows a little hollow.

“It turned out, she’d been fucking him for a few months behind my back. But I guess when I popped the question, the money was too good to turn down. Her life would be set. And all she had to do was act like she was as crazy about me as I was about her. When I found out…” He pauses, searching for the right words. “I don’t really remember it, to be honest. I used to think about it all the time, but it always felt like what Iwoulddo. Not what I did do. Hell, I sat in a courtroom and I watched myself shoot him right there on screen. But…” He shakes his head. “I don’t remember doing it. I don’t have some high and mighty justification. Somegood reason. I just knew I did, and that I would have done it again. Because that’s what I am.”

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