Page 3 of Bound By Sin
Chapter one
TARA
Chicago
Eighteen Years Later
I ended the call and tossed my phone into the passenger seat of my car. “Damn it!” I shouted, beating my hand against the steering wheel of the car, ignoring the searing pain covering my palm and shooting up my wrist. “God damn it!”
The passenger door opened, and I quickly buried my anger, plastering the fakest smile on my face as my daughter slid into the car seat beside me.
She handed me my phone, and the smile on her face fell when she looked at mine. I wasn’t sure what she saw, but I tried to bury the fury swirling inside me deeper so she wouldn’t question what was wrong, even when I knew she would.
“What’s wrong?” my daughter asked, concern etched in her features.
Nia’s seventeenth birthday was just three days away, but she had such an old soul. It was eerie how perceptive she was.
Just like her father.
I needed to work on hiding my emotions better, especially now that she was older. She didn’t need to worry about me. My problem wasn’t something she could fix, anyway. Even though my baby girl believed she could save me from any kind of heartache, this wasn’t about a broken heart she could cure with one of her amazing hugs. This was something only I could fix with the help of my lawyers. At least, I hoped it was something that could be fixed before the news reached her—or before it reached him.
The local tabloid,Exposé,got an anonymous tip about the identity of her father. I paid a shit ton of money to keep me and my child out of the tabloids and newspapers after she was born. Her birth and Valentino being her father was one of the reasons I stopped modeling and taking movie roles, trying to keep myself out of the spotlight as much as possible.
I paid even more money to keep her father’s identity a secret, giving birth in Belize so there would be virtually no trace of her birth in the United States. It was the only way I could keep it secret from everyone.
No one knew her father’s identity, not even my sister, famed chef Laila Weatherly, and I aimed to keep it that way. Now, some scumbag reporter was putting my baby in danger because they wanted some fucking exclusive. They wanted to sell papers no matter whose lives they destroyed. Over my dead body would I let that trash trying to pass itself off as a respectable newspaper put a target on Nia’s back.
“Nothing, baby girl.” I pushed the engine start button and then pulled away from the curb in front of her school with Nathan, her personal bodyguard, trailing close behind us. “How was school?”
While Nathan Brooks, an ex-Special Forces officer, had been Nia’s bodyguard since she was four, I always dropped her off and picked her up from school with him following closely behind us. This was our bonding time. A time when we could talk about anything without someone listening. I was close to my daughter, and this was one of the ways I made sure we kept that close connection, especially now that she was older. This was the time teens tried to keep their parents out of their personal business.
She sighed, laid her head against the black leather headrest, and closed her eyes. “How do you think it was?”
Nia absolutely hated her private school. Since freshman year, she’d wanted to go to public school, and I didn’t have any idea why. According to her, she wasn’t getting bullied. She had made plenty of friends at school and through sports in town. She just didn’t like it.
Despite growing up wealthy, Nia was humble. The friends she did have from school were known at their school as the scholarship kids. They didn’t have famous or wealthy parents like her, and the only way they attended was from the few scholarships given out every year.
Nia stayed away from the rich kids, which was fine. Whatever made her happy. As children, me and my sister didn’t grow up poor, but we were far from rich. Our dad was a factory worker, and our mother, an elementary school teacher. Both worked hard to give me and my sister the good life we had growing up. We didn’t want for anything, and if we had, we didn’t know it. The life we both lived now was far from where we started.
Nia wouldn’t want for anything.
But because of her father, she needed to be in a more secure school, especially now. She attended one of the most prestigious private schools in the country with top-notch security. Along with Nathan, her school’s security measures would keep her safe, especially if I couldn’t stopExposéfrom running their story. When the world found out about Valentino being her father, there was no telling the shitstorm that would happen or the kind of danger she’d be in.
My stomach churned thinking about it. What would Valentino do if he found out about her? Would he come for her? Would he come for me?
She blew out a breath, bringing me back to our conversation. “I hate it there.”
“Nia,” I sighed, “I understand you don’t like your school, sweetheart. You’ve made it very clear without telling me why, which I haven’t pressed you on, but you also understand why you can’t go to public school, right?”
She didn’t answer, but we’d had this conversation many times. She knew the security risks because I’d laid them out to her, but that didn’t seem to matter; she still wanted to go.
“There’s no way a public school would allow you to always have a bodyguard on school grounds, honey. It would bring too much attention and cause a distraction for the other students. And Nathan is non-negotiable. Where you go, he goes. Always.”
Because her school was a private school for the elite of Chicago, bodyguards were not out of the ordinary, and the school allowed them on school grounds.
Kind of like extra security.
While she believed the reason Nathan followed her everywhere was because of me, it wasn’t. When I found out I was pregnant, her father had already become one of the most dangerous men in the country. According to my research, he became the head of one of the Five Families, his territory Philadelphia. Along with his infamy came enemies. Enemies I’d never be able to keep her safe from if Valentino was revealed to be her father. I wasn’t naive to the world in which he was now a major figure.
