Chapter 11: Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia King: Chapter 11

Harper spends the day playing, a full-force little maniac getting anything she wants, anything she sets her eyes on. With a six-year-old calling the shots, we roam the city I’ve lived in my whole life like a bunch of tourists, following Harper wherever her heart and imagination take her. She hasn’t yet thought to ask for anything outrageous—God only knows how far Ren is willing to take this bit.

Still, I’ve never seen her happier. It breaks my heart as much as it makes me happy for her. Ren is like her own personal toy box. No matter how cold and emotionless he acts, his credit card keeps swiping. She interprets it as love. I interpret it as hate.

Look at everything I can do for her that you couldn’t.

He offers to do the same for me, but I refuse. On one hand, I don’t want to give him the satisfaction. But on the other…he’s already doing it. What would I ask for except for Harper to get to live like this? Happy and excited and thriving.

I smile and play along whenever she looks at me, no matter how much it hurts to know the truth about Ren Caruso and what he is. For her, he can be a bank account. An all-access pass to the life she deserves. He’s my captor, but he’s her key. That’s a fair trade.

But all at once, the spark just goes out of her. She suddenly hits that wall where all her energy is completely tapped. It’s like a light switch, on to off. She leans against my side, burying her face against my pantleg with a whine. I run my fingers against her hair.

“Are you tired, baby?”

She nods.

“Is she alright?” Ren asks.

“She gets like this. It’s normal.” Or at least, it’s normal where Harper is concerned. She always goes until she has nothing left to give, doesn’t know her limit until she’s already flown passed it. All the rambunctious energy of a child coming up against her body’s limits. She opens her arms up for me, but right in front of me, Ren scoops her up instead. She wraps her arms around his neck, buries her face against his shoulder, while my heart drops to the floor. He carries her on his shoulder and starts toward the parking garage. I don’t follow.

He turns around, looking at me as my feet turn to iron on the sidewalk.

“She asked for me,” I say, through a tension that feels like it’s got its hands around my throat.

“I can carry her easier.”

“That’s not the point!” I say, my nerves that have been fraying through the whole day finally snapping like the last thread of rope that had been holding me together. “She’s my daughter, and she asked for me! ” I step toward him, my voice low and furious, as I can’t hold it back anymore. “You can sweep in and play hero and give her whatever you want—fine, that’s great, do that—but she still needs me! You can’t just take her away,” I say, even though I know, know that he can. That he will.

But then he steps toward me and offers Harper up. Just like that.

I search his face, so confused that for a moment, I forget to hold out my arms. Harper comes swinging into my grip, not caring who’s carrying her as long as someone is.

I thought this was part of the punishment. That he was just trying to torture me, to push me out of her life and make me watch from the sidelines as he gave her everything I couldn’t, dangling my inadequacy in front of me like a silent taunt. Harper transfers over to me and tucks in against my side. I heft her up on my hip. She really is getting too big for me to keep doing this, but I refuse to complain about it or falter now that I’ve already made a scene.

The thank you gets caught in my throat.

Again, Ren puts his hand on my lower back and guides me wordlessly toward the car. My brain feels like it’s on fire, and if Harper weren’t right there between us, I think I would finally just break down and beg for him to explain all this to me. Line by line, rule by rule. I need to know.

I’m happy to clarify any questions.

Maybe those words weren’t as snide as I thought.

We make it back home in complete silence. Harper is already asleep by the time I get her to her bedroom. I tuck her in, just like I always do, with Applesauce right there under the covers with her. I turn off the lights and leave the door cracked, the fading sun still going down in the windows.

“…You’re sure she’s alright?”

I almost jump out of my skin as I spin around to find Ren still there, waiting for me.

“It’s just how she is.”

“I want the list.” When I’m struggling to fill in the blank, he adds, “Her doctors. The one you tried to give me before.”

“Oh.”

Before my mind can start its gymnastics, he says, “I want to verify that she’s getting the best possible care. That there’s nothing more that can be done for her.”

“…Why do you care? Do you care?” I ask.

“I do.”

Before I can question further, Elijah comes stomping in.

“Where have you been?” he demands of Ren, “I’ve been trying to get hold of you for hours.”

“I saw. It didn’t seem urgent,” Ren says.

“Every meeting we had today, including with Blackwell, didn’t seem urgent?” Elijah clarifies slowly. “Never mind that you didn’t even give me enough notice to cancel those meetings and left me on my own. I thought something might have happened to you.”

“Then it’s lucky it didn’t since you did nothing about it.”

Elijah’s annoyance darkens. He glances at me apologetically.

“Right,” he says tensely.

“I presume Olivia had everything rescheduled,” Ren says, shrugging out of his jacket with the same ease he shrugs off Elijah’s complaints.

“She did.”

“So why am I hearing about it?”

Elijah can’t come up with an answer, swallowing his anger like it doesn’t go down easy. He fumbles his response, then gives up on trying to scold or guilt his older brother, who seems so far removed from those emotions they may as well not be real.

“Sorry to disturb you,” he says, pointedly to me instead of his brother, and sweeps off into the house. He passes Olivia, who watches from the doorway, her arms crossed and her glare solidly on me. She turns to join him. Their voices fade as they move deeper into the house and I catch other voices somewhere far off down the hall.

Ren and I stand in the remnants of an awkward silence.

“You were saying?” he prompts me, as if nothing happened.

“…I don’t understand how you’re going to torment me in a wedding dress one day and then treat my daughter like a princess the next. I don’t…I don’t understand you, and I don’t know what to expect, and I am terrified constantly, so if you could just tell me what your stupid plan is—I—” I run my hands over my hair, trying to find a way to put so that it makes sense. “It’s like I’m constantly bracing for impact, but I don’t know when it’s going to come, so I’m just flinching constantly and waiting for it to hurt. So just…can you just tell me? ”

“Does it not all hurt?” he asks.

“Of course it hurts,” I mutter. “Just standing here with you hurts, Ren.”

“Then that’s enough. It will keep hurting. When I take you to bed. When I walk you down the aisle. When you have my children. Your life belongs to me, Nadia. That’s torture enough. I don’t need to go out of my way when it’s already easy.”

“…But why are you doing this to yourself, too?” I demand. “You didn’t want me. You sure as hell didn’t want me to be your wife back then. Sure, you’re trapping me here with you—but you’re trapping yourself, too. What happens when you finally realize you got me, and now you’re bored, and you can finally move on with your life—”

His hand comes up my face, fingers digging into my jaw.

“There is no moving on. ”

I’m held on my tiptoes, dancing in his grip.

“You think every person in this house, every person in my inner circle, didn’t beg me to let you go? Do you know how much I’ve spent looking for you, Nadia? Money. Time. Sanity, of which you did not leave me much to spare—”

My hand wraps uselessly around his wrist, the two of us stumbling back and forth in a fruitless tango. My back hits the wall.

“So how many times do I have to tell you—” he snarls.

“Until it makes sense!”

Suddenly, Ren captures my captive lips against his own like he’s trying to take the breath from them, as if there’s an answer somewhere in the gesture, in the dark taste of him. He doesn’t care if I don’t kiss him back, if I pull back against his grip that wraps around both my arms. His mouth chases mine, hunts it down until I’m drowning in the taste and feel of him again.

“I’ve had six years to make sense out of what I feel for you,” he says, between breaths. “So good fucking luck getting those answers. I still don’t have them.”

That feeling from last night, like the air itself was about to catch on fire, stirs again. I can’t resist it. I don’t want to. I surrender, let my walls crumble under him and pretend, for just a few minutes, that he is exactly as I remember him. Hell, maybe he is .

I kiss him back, my lips meeting his with the same urgency, the same taste of desperation and longing.

Ren breaks the kiss.

He stumbles back from me, glaring at me as though he’s never seen anything like me before. He runs the back of his glove across his lip like I’ve punched him.

“What?” I demand, marching toward him across the tile, giving him no distance and pushing my hands into his chest. “What’s wrong, Ren? You can dish it, but you can’t take it? Is it suddenly too complicated now?”

He stares at me for one long, suspended moment. Then he scoops me up over his shoulder. I squawk like a kidnapped macaw and shut my mouth before any other stupid sounds can come out of it. I’m hauled up the stairs like a piece of furniture. Ren takes me up one easy step at a time, as if I weigh nothing.

“Ren!”

He ignores me, carries me along. I end up in his bed again. Vast and empty and cold. My back hits the mattress, and we are right back where we were. Except this time, Ren has the good sense to shut and lock the door behind him. We’re locked in together, just us.

“You know my worst mistake, Nadia, was letting you ruin me,” he says. His fingers undo the buttons on his shirt one at a time as he watches me, the neck of his shirt opening up. “But just like everything else between you and me, there’s no undoing it. There’s no cure for what you’ve done to me. Take off your dress.”

“I never did a damn thing to you,” I whisper.

He storms across the room, his hand fisting the front of my dress and hauling me up so his fingers can make quick work of the zipper at the back. He tears it down my body, leaves it crumpled around my waist with just my strapless bra left behind.

The dress is dragged down, over my hips, leaving me in nothing but my underwear. He throws it aside on the floor like it’s trash and slings himself over me again. Still in his pants and shoes, the top of his shirt hangs open, and along one shoulder I see the skin patterned and marbled with white. A map of scar tissue. I push the curtain of his open shirt aside, revealing the hint of an old burn running up his arm.

He shrugs off the shirt. A pattern of old webbed scars paints the skin from wrist to shoulder along the outer side of his arm. Time has faded them, drained out the color and left them hard and raised against the skin.

“Is that what you want to see? Your handiwork?”

I reach out, mute and horrified, as my fingers graze the brand of fire that kissed his flesh, tracing the raised tissue.

“I didn’t do this, Ren,” I whisper, so close to begging him to believe me. “I couldn’t.”

“Maybe you didn’t want it to happen, but you sure as hell didn’t stop it—”

“I didn’t know!”

He snatches my hand away and pins it down. “Don’t lie to me,” he snarls. “Not now.”

It doesn’t matter what I say. Ren is too angry, too sure of himself. He’s had six years to decide what the truth about that night is going to be, and I won’t be able to change that. Not in this moment.

“Your family left their mark on me, but I can hide those scars. I can numb the pain that the doctors say shouldn’t still be there. But you—the damage you did runs deep, and everybody can see it. They take one look at me and they just know somebody got the best of me. And that kind of pain, you can’t drown it out. Everything just makes it worse. See, you keep begging me to make this make sense, but I can’t do that for you, Nadia. It doesn’t make sense. What I feel for you is not sensible . I’ve waited six years to find you. And when I say I waited, I mean I waited —”

His hands roam over my breasts, unhooking my bra and letting my breasts spill free. His breathing shifts, the anger in him surging like a current.

“I never touched another woman after you. Couldn’t have anyone else. No one else was good enough. I waited for you. For this.”

The words try to slit my heart, to carve it in half and lay it out, bleeding.

He waited for six years?

“Bullshit,” I whisper. The Ren I knew wouldn’t wait. He was a playboy even before our worlds fell apart. When I first met him, he always had some girl around. They came and went like fashion trends, whoever looked better on his arm or in his bed that season, until we ended up together for those few sweet months and he promised me that that was all behind him. Like he probably promised everyone else. “Why would you? You didn’t even want me!”

Something thunders in his expression.

“I didn’t want you?” Ren whispers. “I didn’t want you, Nadia?”

Ren peels off the rest of his clothes, zippers and buttons undone. He only leaves on the one glove, where his burned skin snakes down to the leather at his wrist and is obscured from my sight. Just how much he does want me is obvious and on full display. His pierced stiff cock stands erect and glistening at the tip.

Ren hand cradles my cheek, draws me into kiss after biting kiss.

“God, you better pray I don’t show you how much I wanted you because it would tear you apart,” he threatens.

He slides between my legs again, just like he does in my dreams. My breath hitches, a pained sound escaping as it feels so right and so wrong at the same time. He drags us hip to hip; his cock nudges between my legs with a hard, threatening pressure again and again, toying with my expectations the way a cat toys with a mouse. I gasp, eyes rolling back as he teases me and threatens me all at once.

“I should have killed you. But all I wanted, from the moment I first started chasing you, was to have you back here. Right here —”

Ren punctuates the words by sinking a little deeper against my pussy, his new piercing dragging against me in a deliciously wicked way. I shudder as I remember how hard it was to take him, how gently he always worked me open for him. He’s right—he really could ruin me if he wanted. Ren shivers, expression washed in some silent emotion. Tension radiates off him.

“Oh God, you… You feel different—”

“Do you like it? I thought of you, when I was getting it done. I thought about you feeling it, tasting it. It’s all for you, Nadia.”

“You expect me to believe it? That you haven’t been with anyone else since me? That you got this piercing done and no one else hasn’t even seen it? Please. I’m not that stupid.”

He shakes his head and kisses the words from my lips, robbing my defenses and making me lie under him. Breathing heaving, body aching with need.

“There’s no one else for me but you, Nadia, and it’s fucking torture.”

I want to tell him that I waited for him, too, that I never wanted anyone else, that I never even considered it—but then he would know the truth about Harper. I swallow the words, instead. I can’t trust him with that truth, not yet. The only thing he’s told me that I believe to be the complete, unquestionable truth is that he’s unstable enough to be dangerous.

“I’m going to make you live out the life you tried so hard to escape from,” Ren continues, voice as ominous as a thundercloud, like he can’t think of anything worse. “You don’t get to leave me that easily. You don’t get to take everything from me and just run away—”

The heat in my belly flutters as he grabs me by the hips and draws toward him, underneath him, right where wants me. He stretches me out like an art piece on silk sheets, rolling his hips in low, threatening waves until the need is throbbing in my core. His gloved hand tightens on my throat.

This is the part of the dream where I’m supposed to wake up.

His eyes blaze darkly, his weight a looming threat. His hand on my throat hardly matters. There’s no air left in the room, anyway. It’s burned up now, the tension ramping hotter and hotter until I think the room itself might combust around us.

His motion pauses when he feels the wetness between my legs, his expression closing off. Emotion twists through his face. Doubt becomes anger then disgust. He snarls, menacing grip tightening until my breath sputters and chokes. My back arches off the bed.

“…Look at that, Nadia. Your body is just as pathetic as mine. Wanting the thing it’s supposed to hate the most.”

I shake my head, unable to defend myself. The grip on my throat is just tight enough to make the world spin. I can’t argue, can’t explain, can’t do anything but writhe under him as his cockhead drags slow, torturous circles against my pussy, his metal bar a bit cold to the touch. I grind my hips into him like the whore he accuses me of being. I can’t help it. I need him. I’ve always needed him. I wordlessly urge him on, begging for him. After years and years of longing for him, dreaming about this moment, I can’t stand another second.

“You don’t even need to be worked up,” he mocks, but it doesn’t stop him from grinding deeper into the shallow well of my pussy, teasing it. My eyelids flutter. God, it’s been too long. I’d almost forgotten how good this could feel and he’s barely even touched me yet.

It’s easy to forget how dreams are all soft, pillowy impressions of the real thing, all heat and no friction. They lose the important little details. But now I feel all of Ren, down to every last detail:

His weight settles on top of me. His skin drags under my nails. The wetness of his mouth warms my neck as he dips his head to kiss the arch of my throat. He forces my head aside and sucks angry, possessive marks into the soft skin. My pulse point flutters with a primal rush of panic as he goes after the softest, most vulnerable parts of me. My pussy clamps and clenches for attention as he teases her, over and over, never going inside the way I need.

“Ren,” I manage to rasp out through the sweet torture. Begging .

His expression flashes for a moment, all lightning and thunder, as he breathes out slow and steady. He gets a hold of himself, his eyes black and pupils blown wide in the dim light.

I break the force of his hand on my throat, bring us into another kiss—a real kiss, mouth to mouth, wordlessly trying to tell him all the things he refuses to let me say. He groans against my lips.

“Please,” I manage to say through the strain on my vocal cords. I’m barely able to lift my head enough to connect our lips, but I manage it. The shallowest, softest kisses—again and again—even if it hurts to chase them. “Please.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking for,” he snarls. I draw that first big gulp of air as he lets me go and hitches my legs back. I’m poised under him, feet up, thighs spread. He stares into my face as if we’re playing chicken—and I’m about to lose.

He rolls his hips up into mine, my just-gotten breath leaving me as quickly as it came. I pant and mewl and whimper. Pounding, rolling friction throbs up between my legs as I feel him move inside me. Rough and merciless, his hips rolling deep, snapping upward.

It drives me up the bed, drives my senses wild as I twist and tremble.

The sensation swells like a wave, building at first then cresting all at once as I twist under him.

“Aah, aah, aah—!”

My hands scramble for something to grab onto, some anchor point to hold me against the waves of pleasure hammering up through my pussy. I haven’t so much as touched a sex toy in years, much less an actual cock. My pussy is oversensitive, neglected, suddenly caught in the midst of a mob shakedown, claimed like a new piece of territory up for grabs.

“Oh, fuck,” I cry out, shocked at how sensitive I am, how I’m brought to buckling and crying out in a matter of a few thrusts. Ren gets hold of me, makes me focus, brings me to his level, and makes me look into his stormy face as he fucks me. Our gaze holds. I pant under him, chest heaving, the force of his pelvis rolling up and grinding against my hips.

“Nadia,” he gasps, as if I’m the one overwhelming him . “ Nadia —”

I bring him down into a crushing kiss, wrapping my legs around his hips, pulling him in deeper, firmer, his hips snapping hard and mechanical into me. The pace is rough, relentless, threatening to drive him too deep. But I want it. Every inch of him.

I long to slide my hand between us and feather my clit, but I resist. It would be greedy and I don’t need to. The way he moves is incredible. Dipping low and driving up between my legs at an angle that makes the bottom of my feet tingle. I feel him head to toe, pleasure rocketing up into my belly until it becomes a tight, blinding point that he’s chasing with his cock.

“Fuck,” he snarls, his motions growing more desperate, deeper and harder and faster until the bed is shaking under us. Like years and years of lost time has built up into this one blinding moment.

“Like that,” I cry out on instinct. “Just like that, just—”

I second-guess, biting down on my begging. My pleasure doesn’t have anything at all to do with this when I’m just riding out the force of his anger, his pain. But Ren obeys. It overwhelms me as he keeps that pace, steady and firm, never relenting even when his muscles tremble with the effort of holding back.

The rhythm holds, the force of it drawing my whimpers into honest, begging moans. I don’t know if I’m begging for it to stop or continue. I just know I’m there, right in the heat of his fire.

It’s building and building and building, and he knows just how to hold it, just how to keep going and never let up or break that perfect, mind-numbing tempo.

“There you go,” he whispers, soft, like he just can’t help himself.

I whimper.

“That’s it, baby. You come apart so pretty for me. Good girl,” he urges, his fingers threaded through mine above my head.

I look into his eyes and see him .

I shatter, gripping him tight—inside and out.

Orgasm twists in my belly, clenches in my pussy as I finish hard and that white-hot relief sweeps through my veins. He rides it out, harder and faster again, giving in to the relentless fucking that I suddenly hear and feel in crystal-cold clarity.

My Ren was right there, for one perfect moment. Then he vanished again. Replaced by the man riding me like an animal, fucking me hard and fast, with nothing in his expression except blazing-hot need. Using me to get himself off. He groans low and comes inside me with a crashing force. He lurches over me, finishing with the line of his body taut, every muscle exquisitely defined as he holds that tension for a long, shuddering moment.

Finally, Ren slumps over me. We stay locked like that for a moment, shaking in the aftershocks of our individual pleasure. Time feels meaningless in those first few moments after, but eventually, he pulls out and rolls away.

My chest heaves. My throat and lungs burn raw from trying to gulp down too much air. I push strands of hair back from my face and it comes away damp. It was so good, my hands are still shaking.

The aftermath is silent.

I don’t know what to say. Maybe if I knew how he felt—if I knew which side of him I was talking to. Even then, I don’t know what I would say. I want to tell him I missed him. But I’m afraid that will ruin it.

He slings his legs over the edge of the bed, sitting up, leaving me with just his back to look at, the planes of muscle and broad shoulders and the crevice of his spine. I sit up, the covers pooling. He’s looking at his hand, flexing the fingers of his wounded hand.

“Are you alright?” I ask, trying to reach out for him. He ignores my question and pulls his hand away, turning to look at me instead. In the aftermath, all the heat has been zapped out of the room. It feels more personal now that the wall of emotion and tension lays crumbled between us, both of us left exposed in the aftermath.

“I’m fine.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No,” he says offhandedly, almost as if it surprises him. His attention turns back to me. “Where are your scars, Nadia?” he asks, flipping it around back on me. I tense as he looms over me again.

It’s a stupid question. Just because I can’t show them to him, it doesn’t mean I don’t have them.

I take his hand and glide it to my chest, press his palm over the slowing beat of my heart.

“Right here,” I say.

He scoffs.

“You think I haven’t missed you, Ren? That these past few years haven’t been hell for me ? “Ren,” I implore when he doesn’t answer. He looks at me one last time, his eyes sweeping over me, as if trying to decide whether he believes me or not. He leaves me sitting there as he walks into the bathroom and closes the door, his mind still made up.