Page 110 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia King

I turn to watch the doorway. To fulfill my simple obligation and guard them from anything else that might still be lurking on the outside. Finally, I hear Harper’s muffled little voice,

“Mommy, I’msquished.”

It shakes Nadia out of her sobbing, making her laugh around those shaky sobs. She gathers herself, wiping her eyes.

“Look, baby. Look who came to get us.”

I glance over my shoulder. Harper turns those big eyes to me. I swallow hard, feeling the weight of our last encounter—the things I said to her when I thought they would be the last—but Harper’s breathy sobs kick up again and she reaches out for me.

“Daddy!”

The word goes straight through my heart like a bullet. Takes me down to my knees with them. I crush them both to me, holding them tight against me for as long as I dare—or at least until Harper complains again about being squished.

36

Nadia

The mob really is like a spiderweb. I shudder as I watch it efficiently spin its web around the carnage that took place today. Ren’s men file through the factory. Some have guns, some have badges. Salvatore Mori walks among them, helping orchestrate. Cold bodies are wrapped tight in sheets. Cocooned in barrels. The violence will be wrapped up, digested, dissolved—and vanish, as if it all never happened.

It’s an efficient, ugly creature, with too many limbs making the work seem light and effortless. Ren ushers Harper and me away from it as soon as possible.

I feel emotionally raw and am walking around in a daze. The aftermath feels like a dream, like maybe I did get thrown off that roof, and I am still falling, living out the life that could have been in those few seconds before I hit the ground.

Ren is alive. Here. Harper is safe. Sincere has reappeared as if by magic, along with a couple of old friends and a few strangers. I don’t really understand how it happened—how all these parts of my life snowballed together into what just transpired. Maybe that’s why it all feels like a fever dream, like reality is inventing its own rules as it goes along.

The stench of fear and blood keeps me grounded. Reminds me it’s really happening. I walk down the long, tiled hallways, Harper’s face tucked against my neck so she can’t see the aftermath.

We pass Elijah, and I find myself staring at him like he’s a ghost. He somehow made it down from the roof alive. He’s oblivious. A medical kit lies open at his feet, and Cali sits on a jacket spread across the floor. She holds her shirt up, where he tends a wound on her chest. His hands shake like leaves when he faces her with her tits out and open to him. Something about that in the chaos of everything else makes me laugh. The kind of bubbling, nonsensical laughter that feels like it might never stop.

Outside, sunlight feels sharper. The air crisper.

I step out into the alley where I would have fallen and died not an hour ago.

It’s all so strange.

Ren settles his coat around my shoulders, startling me out of the daze. It’s not cold, but he does it anyway, meeting my gaze. His hands are all bloody. I don’t know how I didn’t realize it until now. He’s covered. Even his teeth are bloody.

He makes a barrier of the coat, pulling me closer to him with it.

“I’ve got you,” he says, keeping me close like that. A lock of hair, dipped in crusted red, hangs in his gorgeous eyes. “We’re going to go home. Listen, Nadia,” he says, as if my attention had wandered. Maybe it had. I do feel strange, like the world is made of cotton, like my limbs move on strings pulled by some puppeteer. I gaze into his face, blinking him into focus until he stops being a dream again.

“I’m taking you home, and every part of this will be behind us. This is the past now, and I’m burying it. I’m done trying to repeat it. If—” his words catch for a moment, his eyes searching my face— “if that’s where you want to go, of course.”

My heart tugs in my chest, like he’s trying to coax it out of me.

“I’d like that,” I agree, something sharp stinging behind my eyes.

My hand slips into his, and I feel that slick, hot blood against my palm. Fresh.

“Ren…” I say, suddenly realizing how serious it is, how that blood—some of it, maybe all of it—ishis. Hisgoodhand.

“It’s fine,” he says, in a voice that I know too well. It’s the one I use for Harper when I’m telling her everything is alright and not meaning it. Because you have to say it. “I’ll have it looked at.”

I try to get a better look, but he has a cloth wrapped around it.

“Are we going back to the big house?” Harper asks, peeking out from behind a lock of my hair.

“That’s right, baby. We’re all going home,” Ren says.

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