Page 37 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia King

“Where’s the baby? It was a girl, and you named her Cali, right?” Cali teases me.

“No one names a baby after a troublemaker,” Sincere says. “Should have thought of that before you were always bad girl, making bad impression all the time.”

Cali flips her split-dyed hair.

“The men don’t complain.”

“It’s good she didn’t bring her! It’s a bad place for a little girl,” Luna says.

“It’s a bad place for us, too. We should get out of here just in case,” I say, feeling uneasy just being back in this alley, which still smells like vomit and trash, just like it used to. The girls promised me Marlow wouldn’t be awake or at the club for hours.I believe them, but standing so close to this building still puts me on edge. “Besides, we’ve got better places to be.”

I flash them Ren’s credit card. It’s met with approving and awed stares. If anyone knows a hefty black card when they see it, it’s New York dancers like these. We pile into the car, where I am wedged between Sincere and Cali. Luna takes the front seat and apologizes to our driver before we have even pulled out onto the street.

I’m put right back in the thick of strip club gossip: who got pregnant, who got bailed out by getting hitched, who got arrested, and who just…vanished for better or worse.

That’s the fate of most, and everyone knows it.

Luna tells me she’s in charge of the dancers now. It’s no surprise. Marlow liked his drinking and his opioid habit too much, even back then, to actually manage his girls. He’d take the one with the best English and make her represent the rest. Luna says her English is better than it’s ever been thanks to having to yell at “the idiots” all day.

Sincere demands photos of Harper, so I show her off and how big she’s gotten.

“See?” Cali cries, swiping at my phone screen with extra-long, glittery acrylics. “She looks like a Cali!”

“Bitch, it’s not even your real name,” Luna yells, our squabbling filling up the car.

I’m going to have to tip the driver double.

We hit the first store like a hurricane, and whatever the girls want, I buy. There’s a surprising lack of miniskirts and halter tops and knee-high boots. They probably have all those things, at least on rotation for theme nights. Luna and Sincere want blouses and classy shoes and new pairs of jeans, things that clients and their handlers weren’t as willing to buy them when it doesn’t turn a profit for the club.

Sincere slides up next to me as I pay, and she snatches the credit card from my hands when it’s passed back to me. I fumble against her cat-like reflexes, caught off guard as she swipes it and looks at the name. Her eyes do a double-take between me and the name on the card, her mouth opening and closing. She hands it back, but her eyes say it all—

What the fuck am I doing with Ren Caruso’s credit card?

She swallows her concern and acts as though she saw nothing until we’re out of the store. “I thought that was the name I saw when you held it up earlier,” she mutters, under the rustling of bags. “I thought I was crazy.”

“I couldn’t have pulled this off on my own.”

As we walk to a coffee shop a couple of streets over, Sincere and I fall behind. We keep our voices low.

“What are you doing with him, Nadia?” she asks. “He’s dangerous, yeah?”

“…He can be.”

“Your family. He was after them. You were with usbecauseof him,” she says, as if desperately trying to make sense of it. “Did he find you?”

“…It’s complicated.”

Her eyebrows agree with me. She shakes her head and mutters something in a language I don’t understand. I’m only a couple of years younger than Sincere, and somehow, I still feel like a scolded child.

“His brother comes to the club.”

“Elijah? What is he doing at Marlow’s place?”

“Whatever he wants,” she snorts. “VIP.”

I don’t understand why Elijah would want to set foot in a place like that. It’s hard to picture him in a strip club at all, much less one run by my own uncle. And he has privileges there?

“All that bad blood, I thought him and Marlow would kill each other—”

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