Page 18 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia King

But this—this is even stranger.

How many times have I looked into a mirror just like this, dolled up and darkening my eyelashes, getting readyfor him?

Only now I feel a yawning hurt instead of a fluttery excitement. There is no one to get ready for. Not really. I ignore the wet glisten in my eyes and smooth down my shirt. Harper tires easily, and after a morning of running up and down the apartment stairs, she’s tuckered herself out. She lies on the bed, using Applesauce as a pillow and playing with my phone. I join her, curling up alongside her as I wait to be collected.

It doesn’t take long.

Elijah knocks on my door. I barely recognize him. He was fifteen the last time I saw him, and in my head, he’d stayed that age. Until now. I have to crane my neck to look up at him, just like his brother. He’s grown into himself. He has new frown lines and a neatly trimmed beard.

He smiles at me kindly, and it makes my heart shred a little. Despite everything that’s happened between our families, at least Elijah is still himself.

“It’s been too long, Nadia,” he says, even though we were never that close and he has just as much reason to hate me as Ren. “I’ll take you to Ren, if you’re ready.”

Elijah offers me his arm and leads me up the staircase.

“…How has he been?” I dare to ask. “Ren, I mean.”

“You spoke to him last night, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know if spoke is the right word,” I admit. “Maybe yelled.”

Elijah smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

“Not exactly a warm reunion,” he surmises as we climb the staircase. “That’s understandable. You’re…in a weird situation, Nadia.” He glances over at me, something more painful flickering across his expression as we pass the second landing, climbing higher. “A dangerous situation. I don’t know how my brother has been. Not really. I see him every day, but I don’t know. We don’t talk like that. How he is, that’s anybody’s guess.Whathe is, well…it’s nothing good.”

Elijah’s footsteps slow at the top of the stairs. He looks down at me.

“Be careful, Nadia,” he warns me emphatically. “Be careful with him.”

It feels like I’m choking. A chunk of anxiety lodges in my throat.

We reach the top of the stairs.

Ren sits in a bright office, the wall behind his back a full window. My hushed conversation stops abruptly at the scene. The view from his office window is the same view as it had been in our hotel years ago. The angle is different, much lower, but it doesn’t matter when there are no buildings between us and the river. It’s still the view I see sometimes in my dreams, the water dark and glossy. Daylight makes it ugly, washed out and gray, mirroring the city on the other side.

It’s a painful coincidence and brings back memories that make that knot in my throat harder to breathe around.

Ren glances up as I enter, his empty eyes flickering for a moment like a double-take, a spark ofsomethingthere.

“Sit,” he orders.

Elijah pulls up a chair for me and sees himself out, closing the door behind him.

I take a seat across from Ren and try to find something brave to say. “Have you decided what to do with me?” I settle on.

“I’ve chased you for years, Nadia. I’ve always known what I was going to do with you,” Ren says, his serious gaze boring into mine, burning dark and cold. I meet his gaze right back, refusing to back down and play meek.

He pushes a picture toward me. My stomach sinks. It’s an image of a dead man—the man I pushed over the balcony railing. He still looks like himself enough for me to recognize him, but his skull is deformed, the landscape of his face now broad and bumpy, broken from the inside out. A sour emotion curdles on the back of my tongue. I wrinkle my nose and shove the image back at Ren, not wanting to look at it.

“What the hell are you showing me that for?”

“The man you killed. Did you know him?”

“No, of course not. Why would I?”

“He was Dellucci’s son.”

My heart flips around in my chest for a moment, trying to find some place to land.

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