Page 100 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia King

They’re not what I want either. Not at all. I want the man who wrote this letter. The one who apologized. The one who couldn’t kill my mother because I have her eyes. The man I have been hunting, looking for, ever since Ren and I reunited.

He’s right here on this page.

I stare at the words.

In a week’s time, maybe sooner—you willinherit.

I know what that means. I know what he means to do. I crush the paper and I pick up my phone, calling him. Again and again. The calls bounce.

33

Ren

I wake up drowning. I cough the water out of my lungs, and it comes up red. I blink the lights of the room into focus again. Stretch my wrists against the knot tying me to the chair.

Conscious again, I think blearily. That’s annoying.

“One more time, Ren. From the top. Where is Nadia?” Atlas asks.

His accomplice had to drag himself out of the situation and go get stitches, holding a flap of skin against his leaky jugular. Still remember that. Still taste that.

I spit again, not quite sure what’s my blood anymore. Atlas rounds me, looking for information I don’t have.

“We both know you didn’t give her up, Ren. You didn’t just let her go where you couldn’t follow. A man doesn’t chase a womanfor years and then watch her walk off with his kid in tow.” My eyes flash up before I can think better of it, and Atlas smirks. “So, she is yours? Kind of figured, but you never really know. Women these days.”

Nadia’s not like that, I say. Or I think it. The world swims in and out of focus again.

Atlas shoves up my sleeve, takes in the scar there. He clicks his tongue against his teeth.

“That’s a doozy, that,” he says. “I always wondered what it looked like under there. Morbid curiosity, you know?”

He slides the knife over the skin, cutting into the topmost layer like cutting a thin, translucent sliver of onion.

“You don’t feel that, huh?” he asks.

And I don’t.

My brain has decided we have enough real pain; we don’t need to add any more.

“What about this one?” he asks, walking over to my other arm. I brace, hands clenched into two white fists as the knife drags, skinning a piece of my flesh off like cleaning a thing already dead.

My scream goes down into my stomach. I swallow it again and again, force myself to growl through it and tense against the pain. I tell myself it’s not any worse than road rash, but it’s a hell of a lot worse.

“Where’s she at, Ren? Before I start freshening up on my high school anatomy class with your circulatory system.”

I stare at the lights overhead until Atlas’s face blocks it out. His hair is longer than when we first met, a little greasy, too, like he’s been on the road.

“I don’t know,” I say. It comes out in a pant.

He’s not going to believe me, but pain really can rip the truth right out of you.

Atlas flips the knife around, then slams it clean through my good hand. I don’t swallow that scream. Pain makes the world wobble in my vision. Tilt in and out.

I grit down and bear it again, drawing a deep, steely breath. I know how to deal with pain. I’ve dealt with it for a long time.

Atlas clicks his teeth again. The sound just as grating as any of the wounds he’s given me. The pain fades as quickly as it comes.

“Oh, don’t do that now,” Atlas says, the words sawing out between his teeth as he cleans off the knife. “Going into shock, that’s just going to piss me off a little more. Draw this whole thing out longer than it needs to be.”

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