Page 50 of Soulmate of the Mafia King
He stopped in front of one of the houses, and everything clicked with a rush of adrenaline. That was the Mansion. Kind of. It had been painted a soft blue, and a banner I couldn’t read from the street hung over the door.
“Surprise,” he said.
I looked from the house to him. “What did you do?”
CHAPTER 38
PAIGE
Tom led me up the stairs to the Mansion, the building where my nightmare started, and I dimly remembered just waking up in the basement the first time around. This close, I could see the banner much more clearly.Raphael’s Angel Haven – North Philadelphia. The sign looked hand-lettered and sloppy, like Tom or one of the contractors had painted it at the last minute. I ran my hand over the outside, trying to convince myself the sky-blue paint was real.
“I’m sorry I hid this from you,” Tom said as he pulled out a ring of keys. “It just took so long, and you kept getting more and more stressed, so it seemed smarter and smarter to just make the aesthetic decisions and let you change them if you wanted.”
He unlocked the door and pushed it open. The foyer of the Mansion spread out in front of me. The beautiful wood floor remained, and so did the sweeping staircases, but everything else had been changed. The dour walls became pastels much like the ones Sera and I had agonized over for the shelter. The rugs had been replaced with soft geometric patterns that matched the walls. In the middle of the foyer sat a circular desk with a chair in the center, already set up with three different monitors. I drifted inside and ran my hand over the top.
“I figured, with a space this big, it would be useful if you had a central person in addition to your day manager,” he said quickly. “The computers are keyed into a couple of the security features, just enough that they’ll be able to find all of the staff quickly.”
“Security features?” I repeated. My brain was spinning, and I could barely take in what I was looking at.
“Yeah, those are mostly”—Tom led me past the foyer, through a side room, opened a panel in one wall, and gestured to the secret room that panel revealed—“through here.”
I stepped inside. Monitors covered one wall of the small, dark room, displaying different angles of the Mansion. Was it still the Mansion? Could I still rightly call it that?
“I kept most of Riccardo’s set-up, though I obviously had Lyle re-code the whole thing so none of his associates had back door access.” He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “That means cameras covering damn near every inch, especially outside.” He swallowed. “I took out a lot of the ones in the basement.”
Oh, God, the basement.
Tom seemed to see the expression on my face and skittered forward to show me more. “The desk is hooked into this tracking system.” He hit a few buttons, and softly glowing dots appeared on a few of the screens. “They’re just little tags you can carry. I figured you’d put them on lanyards with nametags or something so nobody feels trapped, but they can figure out where you or Lauren are anywhere in the building.”
My heart hammered in my ears. I grabbed Tom’s arm. “Show me something else.”
He nodded and pulled me out of the security room. From there, the tour blurred a little. Tom showed me room after room. Three common areas. More bedrooms than I could count, each with four double beds, each light and bright like Sera and I had tried to achieve with the Haven. They even hadtheir own ensuites, which would actually stem the constant fights over bathroom time Lily spent half her days adjudicating now. Two kitchens. Three dining rooms and a snack area. A computer room, like I remembered from elementary school, for women to start to live their own lives inside the walls, work remotely, or learn important computer skills they could use on the outside. Dozens and dozens of secret rooms, secret passages, secret nooks we could use to store anything and everything we wanted. Spare towels, non-perishable foods, clothes in all sizes, the billions of puzzles we were quickly accumulating. Mentally, I pulled one of the secret rooms, with steel-reinforced walls and a fingerprint lock, out of the group of storage rooms. If anything ever went south, that would be where we kept the women safe. Any bastard who wanted to touch us would need a rocket launcher to get through there. In the back of my mind, I counted beds. We could house double the number of women we had in the shelter currently without even squeezing.
Tom had turned the place into a women’s shelter of a magnitude so much better than the house we’d bought last year. Bigger, brighter, better prepared. With how much yard the Mansion had, sprawling gardens I spotted through the various windows, we could even expand in the coming years. I visualized another house for Lauren back there, if she ever wanted to move out of the city proper. But I couldn’t get my mouth to move, to shape the words I wanted. This was the Mansion. Sort of. Kind of. What could I say?
“I have one last thing to show you.” He shut the door of yet another secret storage space. “If you’re willing. It’s okay if you’re not.”
Tom stopped in front of the door to the basement. My heart leapt into my throat, but I’d survived my last trip down there. Surely, I’d survive this one, too. I nodded, and he opened the door.
For one terrible second, I thought he’d left all the soundproofing and horrifying protections to keep women down here. Something padded the ceilings, the floors. Then, I blinked, and the jagged silencing material I remembered turned into rubber mats. I picked my ways down the stairs. Weights lined one wall. Fighting dummies and punching bags the other. The mat reminded me of the gym in our house, springy and responsive. On the back wall, a sprawling mural of women holding hands around a stylized planet Earth pulled my attention. I drifted over to the mural and discovered, in the very center of the line, a woman with bright red hair and the top of a thin scar peeking out from between her breasts. Tears filled my eyes.
“Do, uh”—Tom cleared his throat—“do you like it?”
I turned to him. He noticed my tears and paled.
“This is a self-defense gym, isn’t it?” I said.
He nodded slowly.
I threw myself at him and held on as tight as I could. “I love it.”
He exhaled in relief and wrapped his arms around me. “You’re sure? You’re not mad? We can change?—”
“Nothing,” I interrupted. “I’m not changing anything.”
He smiled and kissed me, breathless and happy. I pushed up on my tiptoes and kissed him back with all the energy I could muster. Here, in this place where so many women met the same fate as me—and worse—new women would learn what they needed to never be victimized again. I couldn’t imagine a better used for the house.
“I love you,” I said against his mouth.
