Page 66 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia Don

I don’t have a chance to confess the truth, even if I wanted to.

The house returns to normal. No cars smoking on the front lawn or spontaneous road trips, no creeping footsteps approaching my doorway in the late hours of the night. For the first time in weeks, I remember what peace feels like.

It’s boring.

I spend my days tending to Emma and tailing Tessa around the house. Tessa loves it. She doesn’t need me to help her coddle her daughter, who really doesn’t need it and is drowning in affection through all her waking hours. Tessa’s just happy that things feel like they did before. How they weresupposed tofeel before Vinny died.

I am the only one who knows the truth: I am not inching my way out of the dark of my own volition, I am being dragged there, kicking and arguing and kissing all the way. I am being good for Nico even when he isn’t here. He’s always blowing up my phone, telling me what to do. Even from a distance, Nico is in charge. From having breakfast in the morning to exactly how I should touch myself at night, his instructions are endless.

And without complaint, I do my best to obey.

Nico thinks it’s because I’m anxious for him to come home at night and reward me with his cock. I let him think that. In truth, I’m trying to get a taste for routineagain. I’m finally fighting back against the waves of dark water, dragging myself back to the shore, because it is not only my life that I have to fight for.

With a baby, I won’t be able to fall apart on a whim. I can’t slink back into my room for a few weeks or go out late to do something stupid and reckless. Nico has already proven he might not be there to drag me up again and again, and Thaddeus—he wouldleave me to drown as long as I left a pretty corpse. I have to be ready, somehow, to do this on my own. A baby will anchor me to safety, to home, to all the things that have tormented me, everything that I have been trying so hard to escape for months.

So, I better get used to it.

Day after day, I am so, so good—but all good things come to an end.

By Friday, I am missing Nico in earnest, and all day, I think about seeing him. While having lunch with Tessa out in the gardens, I flirt with the idea of texting that little phrase to him:I miss you. I wrinkle my nose at myself before I can make that mistake.

His ego might explode and take out a few city blocks with it.

By the evening, my pointless daydreaming instead becomes a plan:

It’smyturn to do the stalking.

The fighting ring is open every Friday night, but Nico only fights, at most, twice a month. Anything more, he says, would be too disastrous on the body—as if it isn’t already. But every Friday since his release, Nico goes to the ring whether he’s scheduled or not. Maybe he just has a passion for the sport, or maybe he’s scouting out the competition. Or maybe it’s the people, all the old, familiar faces from before, that make him feel at home. I know he can’t possibly feel that way here.

The only thing I know for sure is that it’s Friday night, and I can find Nico there in the underground.

With ruby red lips, black heels, and fluffed hair, I descend deep beneath the crumbling skeleton of the vacant church, down and down into the winding underground stairway to hell, searching for my Hades.

This time, I am alone. There’s no Frankie to lead the way through the dark.

I haven’t been back to the fighting pit since that first night. I tell myself it’s not because I learned some important lesson or even because Marcel guilt-tripped me into behaving. I’ve just been too busy with getting stalked, deflowered, and knocked up. Anything else, and it’s going to sound a lot like healing. I don’t know how to deal with that. I don’t know if grief is something you should heal from.

The security at the door recognizes me. He frowns, but he waves me in anyway, with a grumpy: “Don’t make me regret it.”

“No promises.”

The crowd is thinner than it was when I was last here. Nico’s fight must have drawn an audience, and without that headliner effect, the room is more manageable. The cage rattles as two men playfully box it out. The event has the atmosphere of an intermission, no one paying much attention to what’s happening in the center of the ring as people talk and shout familiarly with each other across the room. A few people look my way, recognizing me from that night.

I meet their gaze and hold it, refusing to back down as I march through the room, heels snapping against the concrete.

Through the shadowy edges of the compound, I scan walls and tables, looking for a familiar face among the groups gathered. Suits and leather jackets mingle together, two very different branches of society merging down here in the dark.

I don’t see Nico.

The bookie isn’t the same as before. I wonder what happened to the old one, but I doubt it’s anything good. I make my way to the bar to wait for him, and I’m greeted by the bartender with California blonde hair and more tattoos than skin.

“Do you have anything non-alcoholic?” I ask.

She gives me a dumbfounded stare, as if she’s never heard those words in that order before.

“...You want tap?” she asks.

“No. Forget it,” I sigh, leaving the bar and my hopes of getting a drink behind. I make my way toward the cage instead.

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