Page 1 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia Don

Prologue

Ava

The bad decision starts at 2 A.M. with a pair of scissors and a bathroom mirror.

Through the condensation on the glass, I stare back into a reflection that doesn’t feel like my own. I drag my fingers over my skin, pulling at and squeezing the dimensions of my heart-shaped face. I don’t recognize that blurry girl looking back at me.

A year’s worth of grief has left me gutted. My cheeks have hollowed out, leaving cheekbones where I once had soft baby fat. My nervous smile is now no smile at all. The soft, loose curls I used to love are tangled and overgrown like the neglected front yard of an empty house. My expression, a warning sign:

Haunted: Do Not Enter.

The ghost who haunts me is Vincent Mori, and I saw him die.

You expect tragedy in a mafia family, but you never really see it coming. At least, I didn’t. Vinny was a wannabe chef, only twenty-two. He was sweet and silly. He was my lover.

And he died right in front of me on an ordinary Sunday afternoon, his head cracked open by a bullet meant for a more deserving man.

For a split second, my blurry reflection takes on the phantom shape of a misshapen skull, and my stomach heaves. I retch over the sink with nothing in me to vomit up.

What nobody tells you about grief is that it’s like an ocean, and you start right at the bottom. The weight of all that dark water crushes you down into the pitch black. It takes time, so much time, to claw to the surface and reach that first breath of air, and just when you finally get your head above water, exhausted and barely alive, there will always be another wave just behind you ready to wrench you back down into the dark.

The wave can be anything. A familiar song on the radio, the smell of food cooking on a stovetop, a certain make and model of car on the highway. There’s no avoiding it. The waves just keep coming.

I swipe my hand against the wet glass, smearing my impressionist reflection into a more angular blur. My fist tightens around the scissors again. I close my eyes, feeling along by my blind fingertips. I start cutting. Thick clumps of hair gather around my feet like tumbleweed, scissors clumsily sawing through matted knots of neglect.

In the early days of grief, everyone tries to rescue you.

Advice, therapists, pills, wellness checks.

By now, the rescue efforts have stopped and the urgency has cooled. Now, it’s less like saving a life and more like recovering a body.

I cut away the damage, the pain, the numb feelings. The parts of me that died with him fall away, strand by strand.

I don’t know who will be left in the mirror when I’m done, who will face me in the glass, but whoever she is—I know she’s still alive.

1

Ava

A man’s molar skitters across the concrete floor as frantic cheering erupts. In the sweltering underground, the screams meld into a deafening roar. The fighter drags himself back to his feet, spits blood, and is rewarded with another bare-knuckled punch to the face for his tenacity. His opponent falls on him and takes them both to the ground, sweeping them out of my sight.

By the sound of the crowd, whatever happens down there isn’t pretty.

At only five foot four, I have a distinct disadvantage against standing crowds, particularly crowds of bloodthirsty men baying for violence.

The underground fighting ring is a crude steel cage under smoky orange lighting, encircled by dozens of men with money and pride on the line. A dangerous combination. Inside, it’s afight for survival. There are no referees to ensure a fair fight, no camera crews to broadcast what happens down here in the city’s underbelly. In a ring like this, everything goes, and for the sinfully rich and morally bankrupt, there is no money better than blood money.

“Hey,” Frankie says suddenly, her sharp words tearing my attention from the cage. “Don’t get distracted, and stay close. Can’t have anything happening to you.”

I nod and follow closer in the shadow of my chaperone. The girl I am with blends into a place like this better than I do. Frankie has a man’s name, a pixie cut, and piercings in her face and ears. More importantly, she’s been blooded into the mob family that runs this very ring, the family she and I both work for in exceptionally different ways.

This is how Frankie spends her days. Upholding shady deals, running drugs, keeping her aim sharp. She fought tooth and nail to have her position, to earn respect in a man’s world. She is a distinguished mob woman, a soldier right alongside the men.

While I…am the family nanny.

My most harrowing act of the day is patting a freshly fed baby on the back.

Compared to Frankie, I’m nothing. A foolish girl making a foolish mistake, out looking for trouble in the dead of night.

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