Page 35 of Mafia Toy

“Friend?” Pietro asked. “Hot girl for me?”

“Pietro,” I scolded, wishing that our parents had dropped him on his fucking head when we were babies so I wouldn’t have to do it now if he didn’t shut the fuck up and take this seriously. “If they find anything else on us—”

“Relax,” my brother said, placing his hands on my shoulders. “Relax. I’ll take care of it.”

“Good,” I grumbled, turning toward my office.

But Pietro stopped me. “On one condition.”

I rolled my eyes, knowing that he was about to crack a fucking joke that I really couldn’t take right now. All I could think about was how to keep Laila safe, to keep her out of this mess. She hadn’t done shit, but those fuckers would try to charge her with something.

“You get your ass home and get Laila pregnant,” Pietro said. “I want to be an uncle.”

While I wanted Laila pregnant evenmorethan he wanted to be an uncle, I couldn’t tell him that we had already tried. Multiple times. Multiple positions. Multiple ways. And I hadn’t been able to put a baby inside her.

I felt like a fucking failure as a man.

If I told Pietro, he wouldn’t let me live it fucking down. Half the family would know by noon, which was—I glanced down at my watch—in twenty minutes. I trusted him more than anyone in this family, but he had a loud mouth.

“Constantino!” Laila called from somewhere in the empty club, her voice traveling.

“In here!” Pietro called, smirking wickedly at me as we walked into the office.

“Laila,” Pietro cooed, wrapping his arms around my wife and throwing me a wink. “I told Constantino to take you home, make yourestfor the day.”

Laila playfully pushed him away and arched a brow at me. “He’s bad.”

Pietro grinned like a fool. “Only for you, Laila.”

“And about a hundred different girls at the club every Friday night,” Laila shot back.

“Ooh,” Pietro said, murmuring Italian to himself and backing out of the room. He threw me a smirk. “She has some punch in her today, Constantino. You’d better watch you back before she snaps at you like that.”

When my brother finally left and shut the door behind himself, Laila walked over to my desk, placed her purse on top of it, and climbed into my lap. She rested her head on my shoulder and wrapped her arms around my body.

“We need to find him a girlfriend.” Laila giggled, her warm breath fanning my neck.

He needed more than that.

“He’s still too immature for a girlfriend,” I said. “Give him a couple of years.”

“Or you know,” Laila suggested, “we could just cut down his ego a bit. Hire a pretty girl to tease him and then shut him down every time he tried to put a move on her, unlike every other girl in this entire world would.”

I chuckled and placed my hand on her knee.

It was a plausible idea, but I didn’t even know if that’d work on him.

“So, what is it, doll?” I asked, dragging my hand up her bare thigh. “Why are you here?”

“Do you want to … maybe go to the store with me?”

“What do you need? I need to finish up some work.”

“I wanted to get some supplies to start sculpting.”

My eyes widened. “Sculpting?”

She wants to start creating art again? What happened?For years, she had been adamant about not wanting to paint or draw or even sketch. She thought that being part of the family meant that she had to give up that part of herself.

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