Page 36 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia King

He responds just enough to remind me that he owns me. Firm touches and bruising kisses come free, nothing else.

I still haven’t caught a glimpse of his old self again, but that doesn’t stop me from looking for it. Ren hunted me for years and I’ll hunt him for just as long if that’s what it takes.

Harper goes to school. Ren manages his business and takes meetings around the city. My days start to feel empty. At first, there was plenty to do, too much. I had to rebuild everything. I had to restart our whole life here in this house. At Ren’s insistence, I enrolled Harper in a private academy nearby. He’s given her the kind of education that, if she does well, it will quite literally alter the course of her life. I drop the act long enough to tell him that I’m grateful for that, and I mean it sincerely. Still, no reaction. He seems very busy, and yet everyone around us seems exasperated with him, as if he isn’t doing enough. One night, I overheard Elijah yell, asking if Ren wanted him to take over so Ren could focus on playing house.

Ren had barely said two words to me that entire day.

Work used to eat up my daytime hours, but now, I stand in a strange house with a busy housekeeper who handles the little day-to-day chores, the cooking and the cleaning and the groceryshopping as her nine-to-five. It leaves me with infinite amounts ofnothingto do.

I complain to Ren about it. He slides me a credit card the way you’d give a crying baby a pacifier.

…It helps.

And since Ren doesn’t give me any rules or limits, I take his money, and I do the one thing I always told myself I would do if I was ever financially able: I go to a strip club.

***

Black windows reflect the city street, mirroring the church that stands facing the seedy establishment. It’s not even noon yet. Neon signs over the door are off—barely legible when washed in the daylight.

The club’s emergency exit lets out onto a crooked alleyway, and I go stand by the locked door and send a one-word text—

Here.

When my mother sent me into hiding, she entrusted my safety to her brother, my uncle Marlow. The man was all but a reject in the family. He managed scummy little businesses that popped up and failed year after year. He was more of a family burden than a family member.

I heard his name more through gossip around the dinner table than I ever saw of him in person, but when our lives were on the line, my mother turned to her family first. If there was one placeno one would expect to find me, it was with him. She trusted that my uncle would hide me from Ren and keep me safe, just for a little while. She promised she would send for me once she had found a place to settle out of the country.

I never saw her again.

But Uncle Marlow still hid me and kept me safe, as was in his best interest. With both parents dead, the family inheritance legally shuffled toward me. Whatever was left after the financial advisors and attorneys raided what assets they could, the remaining fortune should have all gone to me. All my dear, desperate uncle had to do was keep me alive until I turned eighteen to cash that check. To him, I was not a young, terrified teen who had just lost her entire world in one fell swoop; I was an investment. He looked at me and saw dollar signs that he could cash in on in just a few months.

I always said I would come back and help those who once helped me. But that sure as fuck wasn’t Marlow.

The door is thrown open with a squeal of, “Nadie!”

I am dog-piled by three women rushing out and swallowing me in short, strong hugs. It’s been a few years since I last checked in, but it still feels so natural as I move from embrace to embrace. Of the seven or eight girls I knew here, only three are left:

Luna, Cali, and Sincere—none of which are their real names.

“Oh my God, you come see us and don’t bring along your baby? I should beat you—” Sincere complains, even as she’s trying to separate my spine into halves from the force of her hug.

“I missed you, too.”

I hug her back, though not as tight. She’s grown so thin; I worry I might break her. It hurts to have to hold back like that, to see her so skinny, almost frail. We were always the closest.

“I miss all of you.”

“Don’t miss this,” Luna says, rapping her knuckles against the brick. And she’s right. I don’t miss this place at all.

My uncle’s only remotely successful business venture was pimping out girls at this strip club. He paid off some international network of “talent agents,” otherwise known as con men, to find pretty young foreign girls and promise them New York wages and a big-city American lifestyle. They paid no rent. He’d provide housing. All they had to do was keep fit and dance to a few songs a night and give lap dances for tips. A dream.

In reality, he recruited pretty, vulnerable girls who couldn’t speak a word of English and who had no support system in the entire continent. Their so-called housing is a bunk room in the belly of the strip club. Last I saw, they slept like soldiers: communal quarters and one shower, with curtains hung up to give themselves the illusion of individual rooms. Marlow paid them just enough to keep them strung along.

This was where my uncle hid me. At seventeen, pregnant and hiding for my life in a windowless basement with seven other women I couldn’t communicate with. The walls shook from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m., and strange men were always roaming through the back rooms.

It felt like karma, like I had such an easy and affluent childhood that I’d had it coming all along, building up my bad luck until life cashed it in all at once.Jackpot.

To make it all worse, the dancers hated me at first. I didn’t know why. They thought I was there to be their competition, some spoiled American brat coming along to show them all up and flirt with their johns. I could barely talk with any of them. But once they figured out my situation, once they realized I wasn’t a threat, not even a dancer, that I waspregnant—they did a one-eighty. They rallied. They watched over me and took care of me. In exchange, I helped them with their English. I would have never gotten away from my uncle if it weren’t for these women, and I will never forget that.

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