Page 109 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia King

I spend long, daring seconds drowning in Nadia’s mouth, not caring whether I come up for air, not caring if the whole building caves in around us. It feels like a long time. The wrong time. But she kisses me and kisses me, and sobs, and breaks apart from my mouth only to beg me—find Harper.

“She’s here?”

“They took her,” she says.

It jars me out of the haze. It’s a frantic rush, a blur as I get her out of the restraints tied around her wrists. I’m nipping on her heels as she goes running, trying to take the lead. I have to pull her back, stop her from storming blind into what could be a hail of gunfire on the other side of that doorway.

“Nadia—”

“I don’t know where she is, Ren. I don’t know where they took her.”

“Stay here,” I try, but Nadia’s hands lock onto me and they won’t let go. She clings to me, but at least she follows, her hand a death grip on my arm as I take point and rush us through a strange commercial building with no direction and a million places a child could be hiding.

We step over Dellucci’s body at the foot of the stairs with no reaction.

“Elijah’s upstairs—” she says. “I don’t know if he…”

“He can handle himself.”

He’ll have to, just for now, just until I can find Harper. The fighting is mostly over, but I keep Nadia tucked behind me, leading with the gun, even though I can barely feel my index finger curled around the trigger.

It feels like a maze, like we’ve covered the entire bottom floor like a grid, finding nothing but empty rooms and broken glass.

“Where is she, Ren—?” Nadia says behind me. “Olivia brought her in, but she came into the room with Jon and me. Harper wasn’t with her. She had to have left her with someone. Or—or shut her in somewhere—”

“We’ll find her,” I say.

All the time I spent desperately searching for Nadia, letting it eat away at me—it never felt like this.

I put a just-to-be-sure bullet in a man on the floor before Nadia and I step over him. Hallways stretch as if in a dream, growing longer and longer the farther down them we walk. The dancer who must have left the man there crouches against the wall, holding her side, her shirt ripped open down over her bra. She staggers to her feet when she sees me, says something in a language I don’t understand.

“Have you seen a child? A little girl?”

She stares back at me, not comprehending.

I hold my hand at about my thigh, trying to get through to her, but she has no idea what I’m talking about. To my surprise, Nadia steps around me. She strings together a few foreign words. The words sound stilted and unsteady, but they register some reaction.

We follow the dancer through the labyrinth, back toward the eerily silent entrance. Everyone has either scattered or left the dead behind. A once powerful chaos has settled into soft sobs or curses. Every motion I see out of the corner of my eye feels like a threat—but it seems the plan worked.

We had the advantage, the jump that made that difference.

The dancer gets turned around herself. Every second is torture as we roam the skeletal factory, every shadow a possible enemy, every sound the half-hearted hope for Harper and the bone-deep dread of more trouble.

This, I decide, is the worst six minutes anybody could ever feel.

A woman with platinum-blonde hair perches on the boxy edge of an old rusted-out machine, drinking Bollinger straight from the bottle. One eye is shiny and black, and she has flecks of blood on her cheek. The dancers exchange rapid-fire words, then point us to a utility closet in the corner of one of the offices.

Nadia and I both run for it. I throw open the door, ready to shoot anyone who had laid a hand on Harper—instead of one of Dellucci’s men, I come face to face with the point of a knife, a woman jerking toward me and then back, just as fast. I barely avoid squeezing the trigger, the realization striking us both in the same moment as we lower our weapons. Relief spreads across her thin face as she looks over my shoulder—it spreads across mine when I look down, and see Harper cowering on the floor behind her legs.

“Nadie, thank God—you okay, yeah?” the dancer asks. “And I was right. Shedoesn’tlook like a Cali!”

“Oh, my God, Harper—” Nadia croaks.

Nadia and Harper collapse into each other’s arms. Harper immediately bursts into tears, absorbing all her mother’s emotions like taking a big spoonful of medicine. They hold each other on the floor. My throat hurts. My eyes. That’s how I should have held Nadia when I got her back. My hand—still bleeding—curls tight, as I remember how I put my hands around her throat instead. How I held her to me, held her down, held her like I needed to keep her in place.

I never held her like I wasgratefulto hold her.

It makes my throat tight, a love like that. I don’t dare interrupt it. Like letting a bubble hang suspended in the air, certain that ifyou try to touch something that delicate and beautiful, you will destroy it.

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