Page 8 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia King

What’s that other saying about devils?Better the devil you know…

I dial Ren’s number. I still have it memorized, the only number I ever bothered to remember. I brace myself, shaking as I clutch Harper to me as it rings and rings.

“Hello?”

A woman’s voice.

My heart shatters.

All this time and jealousy still rips me in half. Assumptions go spinning through my head like a top, bouncing off the corners of my skull, and sending me reeling. Who is she? His girlfriend? Mistress? …Wife? Did he finally find someone who checked all those tidy boxes that I didn’t? The right pedigree, and bank account, and family legacy?

What I hadn’t considered in all this was that Ren’s life has gone on, too. If I show up at his doorstep with his baby…maybe he wouldn’t be as accommodating as I imagined. As if anything between Ren and I could just be simple and work out for the best. Not us. Never us.

Harper stares up at me, those big eyes and tear-stained cheeks looking to me to fix all this.

“…I’m looking for Ren,” I force myself to say, even when the words taste like sand.

“Ren?” the woman snips, and at first I think the number’s changed, and this is some poor stranger I’m calling up in the middle of the night, and she’s never heard of Ren Caruso in her life. But she asks, “Who is this?” and there’s a certain possessiveness in her voice that I recognize.

She knows exactly who he is. My mouth opens and closes around my own name, refusing to say it.

“We used to know each other—I just—”

“Mr. Carusodoesn’t take unprompted late-night calls,” she says, “What business do you have with him?”

“…It’s personal.”

“Right,” she all but sneers with that preppy, self-satisfied voice. “Well, he also doesn’t takepersonalcalls from past flings—”

The engine behind us revs.

Oh, God.

“…N-Never mind,” I say, “This was a mistake.”

“Sir?” Before I can hang up, the woman’s voice grows suddenly distant, the line crackling with movement. My breath freezes in my chest.

“Hello?” says a familiar baritone.

My heart bursts like a rain cloud. I feel a rampant flood of emotion just hearing his voice after six years. I grit my teeth, trying to force down that awful pain that tears open in me. Sorrow and anger, hatred, and longing—they all clash. I think I keep it all inside, but Harper leans up and presses her little hands to my cheeks, wiping at tears I didn’t know had fallen.

“Don’t cry, Mommy,” she chants, just like I’ve done for her my whole life, babbling and unaware that I’m on the phone. “We won tag. Did you see? We won,” she chirps.

I crush her to me.

“Hello?” Ren repeats, more urgently, as if he already knows who it is.

“Ren,” I whisper.

The line goes quiet with recognition. I force back a sniffle, force myself to be practical. The cabbie curses the car revving aggressively on his bumper. I stare into my daughter’s eyes as I choose my devil.

“Ren, I need your help.”

3

Ren

Forty-two thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean, a Gulfstream G700 banks hard and diverts course back to JFK International. The jet barrels straight into a flickering storm, nose-first into the turbulence it had just escaped. The pilot does not question it. Lightning flashes against the window as I stare out at the swirling dark, the cabin of the aircraft lurching violently under us.

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