Page 27 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia King

I’m the one who looks after Harper. Who puts her to bed. Who reasons with her, through her outbursts and wipes away her tears. Is that what he’s going to take from me, too?

I shut down the thought.

When Ren returns up the stairs a minute or so later, I want to pick up where we left off. We were so close to—tosomething. Maybe another fight. But maybe something else.

I listen to each of his sharp footsteps in the hall approaching. He veers into his office. The door shuts. I wait, holding my breath—but it doesn’t open again. With a furious sigh, I throw myselfback onto his bed, put a pillow over my face, and fight the urge to scream.

10

Ren

“HYAAAAAH!!”

Harper shrieks and takes a frog-legged leap off the couch in my office and sends her stuffed animal into a dramatic, slow-motion somersault. She plops the giraffe on my desk. The computer monitor shakes in front of me.

She wiggles his long, floppy legs, making ninja noises in my general direction.

I don’t know where Nadia is. I try to make a point of not knowing. We may have shared a bed last night, but we didn’t speak. I didn’t join her until late, when she was already asleep—or pretending to sleep—and I left long before she woke up.

But I did sleep for those few hours, with her body next to mine, stretched out in the dark. Deep and blissful sleep. Finally,finally.

Maybe that’s why I weather being socked in the head by a stuffed giraffe better than expected.

The girl has followed me all morning. She spends most of her time asking what I’m doing, and then asking why I’m doing it, and then asking how I’m doing it, and then asking why I’m doing it the way I’m doing it.

She might have a promising future in mid-level management.

“Applesauce knows karate,” Harper informs me, as the words on the screen slip in and out of focus.

“I thought he was a doctor,” I mutter, half-listening.

“Doctors can know karate. Applesauce can doa lotof things! What do you do?” she asks, standing on her tiptoes to look over my desk, like she might find the answer there.

“…That’s complicated.”

“Mommy calls people on the phone,” she tells me, very proudly.

“Not anymore she doesn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s beneath her. And she doesn’t need to.”

Harper doesn’t seem to understand, but she lets it go and says instead, “When I get big, I’m going to be a nurse.”

“Not a doctor?”

“No, because doctors—doctors—” she scrunches up her face, trying to figure out a reason, “Doctors are good, but nurses are all really nice, and they can wear cartoon characters on their clothes,” she informs me, then keeps chattering on and on about how much she likes nurses. I get a small idea of what her life has been like up to this point, the experiences that have shaped her tiny little worldview.

She climbs back up onto the couch for another round of interrogation.

“What are you again?” she asks. I study her, wondering what she’s looking for. What she could even understand about the things I do. How do you condense something like that for a child? I study the email on the screen, the dot-gov extension filling up the recipient line.

“I’m a bad guy,” I tell her.

She giggles. “No, you’re not,” she says, like I’m just messing with her.

“I am.”

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