Page 12 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia King

We’re alone in a sitting room with white, crystalline light. The house is empty and the space feels too bright, like an interrogation room.

“Sit,” Ren commands.

I take my place on a dark loveseat. He doesn’t join me. I watch him out of the corner of my eye as he moves around the room out of my line of sight. I hear him pour a drink.

“I’ve looked for you for a long time, Nadia,” he says, his voice measured.

“I know.”

“And you also know, I don’t like unfinished business.”

My heart clenches hard.

He paces back into my vision, coming to a stop in front of me. He takes a sip of something dark, his eyes raking over me. My nightgown is sheer and white and wet, and his eyes drop from my face down to my body. His knuckles pale around the glass. He takes another sip.

“We have a lot of catching up to do,” he says. My stomach flips sickly, tickling my gag reflex. “Tell me what happened with Dellucci and his men.”

“You saw what happened—”

“From the beginning.”

I know there’s no getting around the explanation. That doesn’t make it easier to say, to give the whole ugly story of my failures. I wish I hadn’t accepted his offer to sit. Being on my feet made it feel like I could still run away. A comforting illusion.

“I owe him money,” I finally say. “I’ve owed him for a few years now. I couldn’t…” I swallow my excuses and cut to the point. “I dodged him for a long time, same way I did you. I worked remotely. Calls. No video. I was really careful.”

Thinking it over, I wonder where I went wrong. If it was a bad move or just bad luck.

“I don’t know how he found me this time, but he sent one of his thugs to break my door down tonight. I…” I brace myself to say it, expecting to feel guilt, or horror, or whatever people are supposed to feel after they kill someone. All I see is that man pulling Harper away from me. I don’t feel a single thing that could be mistaken forguilt.

I hope he had a few seconds of awareness down there in the dumpster with all his bones mangled up inside him. I hope he felt it.

“I did what I had to do,” I finish. “I killed him.”

Ren’s mouth is a flat line, his eyebrows steady. No reaction. But he paces again. “And when the others came after you, you called me,” he surmises shortly.

I know how it looks, like a scared little rabbit running blind into the wolf’s den.

“I’m not here to try to save my skin, Ren,” I say. “I’m not that stupid. I know how you feel about me. I know what you have to do. I’m only here for my daughter. If something happens to me, she doesn’t have anybody. The state will take her, and God knows where she’ll end up. They might even try to give her to my uncle. I can’t let that happen to her. Please. She can’t live like this. She’s innocent in all of it, and…you’re her best chance. You know people, you can give her a life with a good family. She’s just a baby. I need to know she’ll be taken care of. That’s all I’m asking.”

He looks at me again.

God, those eyes are terrifying. I don’t know him. It’s like I’m begging a stranger. The truth is right there on my tongue—that she’shis—but his cold silent fury weighs down on me. I swallow the truth, afraid he’ll be more repulsed, that he won’t help her just because she’s halfme. When he doesn’t say anything, my desperation grows hot and angry,

“You want me to fucking beg?” I demand, dropping to my knees in front of him. “Is this what you need to see?”

“Get up,” he snarls, hauling me to my feet and throwing me back onto the loveseat. We glare at each other. He steps closer, wedges himself between my knees. A fist tightens in my hair, and he makes me look up at him. “Is this what you are now?” he asks. “Is this what I’ve been chasing this whole time? Some whore?”

“You’ve made me be a lot of things these past few years, Ren: a thief, a beggar. But I’veneverbeen a whore.” I knock his handoff me. “I calledyoufor help before I ever tried spreading my legs to get out of something.”

He scoffs and paces away again. “The kid suggests otherwise.”

My anger grows chilly, the silence settling between us.

“Maybe I’m the one who was wrong about you. I heard all this talk about how you make a show of sex offenders that move into your territory. How you crack down hard on CPS calls on your turf. Maybe everything they say about you is all bullshit, and you’re going to take your hatred for my family out on a literal child—”

“Nadia, enough—”

“You can finally finish it, Ren! You can be done with me. Put the vendetta behind you and bury me, but just do this for her. Do it despite me. Please—”

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