Page 7 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia King

For six years, I’ve bounced between bed bug-infested apartments and working two or three jobs to scrape together the month’s rent. My past sounds like a fairy tale, even to me, the girl who once lived it; just a bedtime story someone read to me once. But it was true, back then. I was the daughter of a crime boss in the New York underground, the fifth generation of the Petrone family legacy.

But they’re all gone now.

Harper cries and cries, begging me to fix it. And I don’t know how to fix it. Not this time. I’ve started over so many times. New jobs, new friends. I have to move whenever the crosshairs get too close. That’s the mob. The web.

But it was never like this. They’d never gotten this close. They’d never come into my home. They’d never put their hands onher—

There’s no one left to run to. Everyone I once had was killed by the only man in the world who might be able to help us. Help Harper. Ren might want me dead, might want to wipe me out like I am the last stain of my family’s lineage, but maybe Ren Caruso will save his daughter.

My grip tightens around my phone again.

Nadia’s fun, but she’s not wife material.

I wasn’t meant to hear that when Ren said it.

That is an atom bomb to a seventeen-year-old girl, who has already mapped out her future on the arm of her first love. The sudden explosion of it hurts, blinds you, and the radiation lingers in you for days, tearing you apart at some subatomic level. At least, that’s how it feels when you’re that young and heartbreak is the worst pain you’ve ever known.

I blocked Ren, ghosted him, swore to myself up and down that I wouldn’t be someone’s good time just until something better came along.

…And then Ren lost both his parents, not a week later, to a hitman on my father’s payroll. Arson. Burned alive in my seventeenth summer, before I had realized I was pregnant with his baby girl.

We were supposed to be going to Rome together that year. Instead, we went to war.

Maybe Ren was right. Maybe I’m not wife material—and maybe I’m not mother material either.

A dark car goes barreling past, no headlights. The rumble cuts through my thoughts and makes my feet move faster. A driver honks as I sprint across the crosswalk. Standard New York manners.

I try to walk normally, keep my head down, my eyes forward—but I hear the car pop a U-turn in the middle of the empty intersection. Is the driver looking my way? Muttering into a phone? Training a gun on me this very second? I keep moving, keep walking, looking for anything—an alleyway, an alcove I can dip into. The car approaches like a predator, smooth and slow, planning its pounce.

A blazing yellow beacon comes down the opposite way. A taxi looking for a fare. I hail it immediately and dip into the backseat.

“Where are you headed?” the cabbie asks.

Eventually? Hell. Tonight? Dealer’s choice.

Glancing into the back mirror, I see the grill of the black car behind us. No headlights.

“Just drive for now,” I say.

I shrink lower in the seat, just in case.

The cabbie asks if I’m okay. And I guess you have to be in pretty rough shape to attract a cab driver’s attention, to stand out amid all the countless oddities they ferry around this city every day. All at once, the pain hits me like a truck. My bare feet throb and bleed, my arms ache. Harper has wrung a tiny red band around my neck, and we’re both still in our pajamas with no shoes.

I’m exhausted, panting, sweat slick on the back of my neck.

“I’m fine,” I lie. I check the rearview again, trying to think up a safe haven.

In my heart, I know there’s only one.

My baby has cried herself to exhaustion. The silence is worse than her screams. She’s too miserable to even wail anymore. What is this kind of life going to do to her? How much therapy will it take to undo it, if it can ever be undone? What’s her heart rate right now? Is she going to have another episode, another stay in the hospital, because of this?

Because of me?

I can already feel the tears biting at the back of my eyes, but I don’t shed them. I learned a long time ago that crying doesn’t do much except make your face wet.

I always knew this could happen. That one day I would have to admit the truth: Maybe I can’t give Harper the life she needs. Not even the life she deserves, the life sheneeds. I swallow hard. My fingers shake.

Ren Caruso broke my heart, destroyed my family—he might want to kill me, too. He’s been hunting me. I am a loose end in his vendetta. But there is only one thing I still know for certain about Ren: He’s never hurt a child, and he is ruthless to those who do. It’s part of his reputation as a mob boss now, the legacy he’s built for himself in only six years.

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