Page 4 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia Don

The crowd roars unhappily at my interference, a deafening boo that crashes at my back. I barely hear it. My expectations are reeling, reality shattering as I meet that gaze.

I feel as though I have missed a step in the dark. My heart flies into my throat. I was right. It wasn’t just some fantasy or paranoia gnawing at my gut. My instincts hit hard and true.

Iknowhim.

I know those masculine angles, that body thickened by natural muscle. His once wild, dark hair has been buzzed short now, blending down into a tight, clean beard. Deep-set eyes bore into me, and it’s those eyes that I remember most. Eyes that have more cruelty than color, a washed-out gray. Age has sharpened his looks into a fine, dangerous point, as if he was carved out by loving hand that had only a switchblade to work with.

Nico Mori, the former don of the Mori family.

It should be logical that Nico might fight in the underground ring managed by his own family. It’s simple, basic arithmeticthat all makes perfect sense—except for one tiny, troublesome variable:

Nico has been serving time in federal prison for the last seven years on a murder charge, and he was not supposed to be released anytime soon. Maybeever. But here he is, in a much different kind of cell, killing another man.

But Nico is something far worse than a murderer set loose and walking the streets—he is my embarrassing childhood crush.

Universe one, Ava zero.

It feels as if he’s been manifested from those humiliating memories that used to creep into my thoughts right before I would fall asleep, and he recognizes me in the same moment, to the same furious backdrop of men booing and screaming interference.

For the first time, maybe in my entire life, I hold his gaze.

I am no longer the timid little girl barely out of puberty who couldn’t be in the same room as him without blushing, who was sosurethat Nico was one of the most handsome men to ever walk the earth. Unfortunately, that part hasn’t changed.

As a teenager growing up in the Mori house, I lived in perpetual fear that Nico was going to notice me. I was awkward and timid, with no curves or charisma, and he always had some comment about how spineless I was. His cruel little remarks buried under my skin like splinters, but they never made him less attractive, less magnetic.

I really hated him, and I really liked him.

Here we both are, seven years later, and my body, my subconscious, theystillrecognize him. How humiliating, that a man can have that kind of effect on someone. A long-term, chronic condition. Incurable.

The aching heat in my belly still feels that magnetic pull toward him, the first thing I have reallyfeltin months. It’s so powerful and unexpected that it rips the air out of my lungs.

I am so stunned, I do not notice the security man behind me until he tears me down from the cage and then throws me back, straight into the clutches of the furious crowd.

2

Nico

All the time you spend in prison, you mostly use it thinking about what you’re going to do when you get out. What greasy fast food you’re going to eat first. What old score you’ll settle. Which bitch you’re going to fuck. Even for those of us with no light at the end of the tunnel, westillthought about that shit.

But then, when some guys did get out, they’d come crawling back. Like prison was that one drug they just couldn’t quit. It was always that same pathetic tale: they froze up on the outside, too paralyzed by choices to do a goddamn thing. The freedom they fantasized about day and night behind bars, it scared them shitless once they got their hands on it. Just dogs chasing cars.

The world had changed, and they hadn’t. It was easier to go back to prison and be a number than it was to go back to being a person.

For years and years, I heard that shit. Saw it happen time and time again as ex-cons flunked out of life and fell back into the system.

And now I know, with blood on my knuckles and a man half-conscious at my feet—I’m not like those dumb pricks.

I’m not paralyzed. My speedometer is in the red. I’m swinging back into the world like a sledgehammer and I will break anything that gets in my way. If I have to claw my way back, carve my place out in it with blood and bone, then I will.No oneis taking this from me again.

I’m flying high on fresh freedom and second chances and the bloodlust of arealfight. Not that prissy, hair-grabbing, hidden-shank shit they pull in the pen. Spit goes flying from the kid’s mouth. They tell me he’s the golden boy of the era, the big alpha dog who has been dominating the ring for months. His hands scramble against the cage, feet floundering, unable to find grip. He’s too dazed for the most basic instincts, arms outstretched on either side of him, not even defending his face.

I crack him again, beating the message home: he is inmyterritory, I am not in his.

Seven years and the cage hasn’t changed. Some of the faces are new, some of the fighters fresh and young, full of promise just waiting to be broken, but the cage is just the same. And the crowd wants what it has always wanted—

Savagery.

God, I still know how to make them sing.

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