Page 61 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia King

The shadow stirs and slinks around my thoughts.

“What’s wrong?” Harper asks.

I sit straighter, but she isn’t talking to me. Nadia stares out the window. Streetlights reflect in a tear on her cheek, and she wipes it away.

“Nothing, baby. I just yawned.”

She wraps an arm around Harper and pulls her in against her side.

I wonder how much she loved the man that made her. I turn away, my thoughts static. I need to focus. Need my eyes set on the future, not the past. But I can’t stop imagining it. Imagining him. Some stranger. Did Harper get big enough to know him? Does she remember him at all?

I feel like I’m going mad.

I should reassure her—tell her that the dinner went fine because it did—but I can’t bring myself to speak. If I do, I know exactly how it will sound. We make the ride in silence.

Nadia sends Harper to get ready for bed when we get home. Elijah comes out to greet us as though he’d been pacing the floor. He’d asked to accompany us given the severity of the situation. How much depended on this. I’d forbidden it.

“How did it go?” he asks immediately. He does a double-take at Nadia and her wet dress, how the dark stain pools around her inner thighs. “That good, huh?” he says, eyebrows raised.

I’ve barely clocked the joke when my fist collides with his cheek. He staggers back. The handle of a pocketknife appears in my hand, the blade flicking out. I press the tip under his jaw.

“Ren!”

Nadia’s hand snags in my elbow, yanks my arm away. I stare at Elijah. I feel what just happened, but I barely remember it. I look in at the knife in my hand as if someone else put it there.

But it was just a threat. Just a threat.

Elijah takes a step back, his glare dark and angry.

“What the fuck—” he says in a shaky breath.

“Maybe next time you’ll think twice before disrespecting my wife,” I say, between angry breaths. I push away from the both of them, heading up the stairs. “The meeting went fine,” I add over my shoulder, ignoring the way they stare at me. I just have to get away, get somewhere that I can think without anyone else to lash out at. I don’t have the patience to field a bunch of questions. Not like this, with my head howling, the past circling like wolves trying to tear me limb from limb, my arm on fire, fire, fire.

I march upstairs, shedding clothes as I go. I catch my reflection in the mirror, the ugly scars running up my arm. I run my fingers up bumpy, white skin. Dead skin. No nerves. I trace the pain, try to dig into the flesh that I can’t feel. As if I can dig straight to the bone and pull the fire out of me. I grit my teeth; the pain is everywhere and nowhere at once.

I turn away and splash cold water on my face, trying to come back to myself. Nadia comes up behind me.

“Are you psychotic? Harper was right around the corner—!”

“I know.”

“I am not going to raise her in a house where people have knives pulled on each other for no reason! Oranyreason, actually—”

“He shouldn’t say things like that about you.”

“It was a joke! And you know that, don’t you?” Her wet dress hits the floor, and she slings it away, annoyed. “I know what you’re really upset about, so why don’t you take it out on the person who deserves it?” she demands. “Where’s the knife you want to pull on me, Ren?”

I reel around to face her.

“Is that what you want me to do, Nadia?” I demand. “Leave you black and blue? Put a knife to your throat?”

“I don’t give a fuck what you do to me, as long as you leave my daughter out of it and keep it behind closed doors,” she says quietly. Almost begging. She’s in nothing but her underwear now, black slips of fabric over her breasts and hugging her curvy thighs in a tight V shape.

My eyes roam her body, but they wander back to her eyes instead. There’s a slew of emotions there as she tries to grapple with what I am.

“Ren, I know…”

“Who was he?” I demand.

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