Page 33 of The Mafia King's Baby

He gives me a concerned look before he arranges the bundle carefully to fit properly, making sure nothing protrudes or seems obviously body-shaped. From a distance, it might look like we’re moving a rolled carpet or some furniture. The mundane camouflage of extraordinary circumstances used to hide the disposal of a body. It seems like something I might read in one of Lee Child’s books. No, more like a mystery than a thriller. Or maybe?—

“Celia, are you with me?” His voice is tender.

It gets my attention, and I nod slowly, though my brain feels wrapped in cotton. “Present,” I say with a hollow giggle that deepens his look of worry.

The trunk closes with a solid thunk that sounds like finality, like the period at the end of a sentence I never wanted to write.

“Do you have a shovel?”

The question shouldn’t surprise me—of course we need a shovel—but it does. Another step in this process I’m not prepared for, another tool in an inventory I never wanted to compile. I like to make lists, but I never expected to make a Body Disposal List. “In the garden shed.”

He sounds firm but exasperated when he speaks. “Get it and anything else we might need. Gloves and a tarp if you have one.” When I stare at him, he says almost harshly, “Get your shit together and get it done, Celia. You can fall apart later.”

For some reason, his demented version of a peptalk works, snapping me back to the present. I rush to retrieve the gardening supplies from my shed, moving on autopilot through the familiar space. My gardening gloves, still stained with soil from planting bulbs last fall, are covered in flowers, and I almost giggle again imagining Aleks…no, Yefrem…donning them to bury a body. I find the shovel I bought at Home Depot, excited about my first real garden, and there’s a plastic tarp left over from painting the guest room ceiling.

All of it will now be repurposed for something I never could have imagined. The irony feels deliberate, like the universe has a twisted sense of humor.

When I return to the garage with my arms full of supplies, Yefrem is standing by the car, checking his phone. The light fromthe screen illuminates his face, throwing sharp shadows that make him look dangerous in a way candlelight hadn’t. This is what he really looks like, I realize. Not the charming guest who shared wine with me during a power outage, but the man who kills federal agents and knows exactly how to clean up afterward.

It crosses my mind that maybe he’s both, but before I can give in to the odd compulsion to ask who he really is, he interrupts.

“We need to go. Now.”

I blink and nod. “Where?”

“I know a place. Somewhere quiet.”

Somewhere quiet. A euphemism for somewhere no one will find Marcus Lang’s body. I climb into the passenger seat, and the leather is soft and expensive under my legs. The car smells like leather and something else—aftershave, maybe, or gun oil. These scents belong to Yefrem’s real world, not the fake identity he’d worn in my house.

He backs out of the garage into the night, and I catch a glimpse of my house in the side mirror. It looks normal from the outside. The usual peaceful and suburban façade where I’ve been so happy. There’s no indication that a federal agent died in the kitchen an hour ago, that the woman who lives there just helped wrap his body in a rug, and I’m about to help bury that corpse.

My neighborhood is dark and silent, with no streetlights to illuminate what we’re driving past. The houses around us are full of people sleeping peacefully, unaware that a federal agent’s corpse just rolled by their windows in the trunk of a sedan. Mrs. Patterson, who bakes me cookies at Christmas, is still asleep, likely with Sariah tucked in safely beside her. The Hendersons, who always wave when they’re walking their dog, would neverguess I’d be involved in such an activity. My neighbors are normal people living normal lives, oblivious to the fact I’ve has crossed a line into territory they can’t imagine.

We drive in silence through streets I’ve traveled hundreds of times, but everything looks different now. It’s all foreign and threatening, like I’m seeing it through the eyes of someone who helps hide bodies and lies to federal agents. The familiar landmarks of my daily routine all seem to belong to someone else’s life now.

“Are you okay?”

The question surprises me. Am I okay? I’m sitting in a car with a corpse in the trunk, driving to bury evidence of a murder I helped cover up. I’m as far from okay as it’s possible to be. “I don’t know.”

His mouth curls into a grim smile for a second. “That’s honest.”

“Is honesty still an option? After this?”

Yefrem glances at me, and in the dim light from the dashboard I see something like sympathy in his expression. “It’s the only option, at least between us.”

“Between us.” I test the phrase, evaluating the way it implies some kind of partnership or a bond forged by shared criminality. “What are we now?”

“Survivors.”

We’re Survivors. People who do what they have to do to make it through the night and wake up free the next morning. It’s reasonable but feels incomplete. “How much further?”

“Ten minutes.”

Ten minutes to the place where we’ll bury Marcus Lang. Ten minutes to complete my transformation from innocent civilian to criminal accomplice, to seal my fate alongside Yefrem’s.

The road narrows as we leave the residential area behind, winding through patches of forest that seem to swallow the headlight beams. I’ve driven this way before during the day—it leads to some hiking trails and a small lake—but at night, it feels ominous and endless. “How do you know where to go?”

“Le…my associate identified a location for me.”

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