Chapter 12: Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia King: Chapter 12

If Ren wants us to play at being a proper husband and wife, I can play that game, too. More importantly, I can beat him at it. If we’re going to fuck and fight like a married couple, then we’re going to do the rest of the charade, the full dog and pony show.

Ren has thought about this for six years. He keeps going on and on about it. I’m not impressed. I, once upon a time, was a little girl with no worries and all the money she could ever want. I have daydreamed about being married for my whole life . Ren has stepped into the ring with the wrong bitch; he just doesn’t know it yet.

As the days pass, I help myself to Ren’s lifestyle. I share his bed; I waltz around the house in his stolen shirts and sweatpants; I casually swipe pieces of food off his dinner plate; I put my legs up in his lap when he sits down on the couch after Harper asks us to look at her homework.

Ren got what he wanted—putting me under him again, fucking me in his bed and branding his love bites on my neck—and he thinks he’s torturing me with it.

I play the role of his wife, and I torture him right back. He starts watching me like I’m walking around with a knife instead of a smile.

He responds just enough to remind me that he owns me. Firm touches and bruising kisses come free, nothing else.

I still haven’t caught a glimpse of his old self again, but that doesn’t stop me from looking for it. Ren hunted me for years and I’ll hunt him for just as long if that’s what it takes.

Harper goes to school. Ren manages his business and takes meetings around the city. My days start to feel empty. At first, there was plenty to do, too much. I had to rebuild everything. I had to restart our whole life here in this house. At Ren’s insistence, I enrolled Harper in a private academy nearby. He’s given her the kind of education that, if she does well, it will quite literally alter the course of her life. I drop the act long enough to tell him that I’m grateful for that, and I mean it sincerely. Still, no reaction. He seems very busy, and yet everyone around us seems exasperated with him, as if he isn’t doing enough. One night, I overheard Elijah yell, asking if Ren wanted him to take over so Ren could focus on playing house.

Ren had barely said two words to me that entire day.

Work used to eat up my daytime hours, but now, I stand in a strange house with a busy housekeeper who handles the little day-to-day chores, the cooking and the cleaning and the grocery shopping as her nine-to-five. It leaves me with infinite amounts of nothing to do.

I complain to Ren about it. He slides me a credit card the way you’d give a crying baby a pacifier.

…It helps.

And since Ren doesn’t give me any rules or limits, I take his money, and I do the one thing I always told myself I would do if I was ever financially able: I go to a strip club.

***

Black windows reflect the city street, mirroring the church that stands facing the seedy establishment. It’s not even noon yet. Neon signs over the door are off—barely legible when washed in the daylight.

The club’s emergency exit lets out onto a crooked alleyway, and I go stand by the locked door and send a one-word text—

Here.

When my mother sent me into hiding, she entrusted my safety to her brother, my uncle Marlow. The man was all but a reject in the family. He managed scummy little businesses that popped up and failed year after year. He was more of a family burden than a family member.

I heard his name more through gossip around the dinner table than I ever saw of him in person, but when our lives were on the line, my mother turned to her family first. If there was one place no one would expect to find me, it was with him. She trusted that my uncle would hide me from Ren and keep me safe, just for a little while. She promised she would send for me once she had found a place to settle out of the country.

I never saw her again.

But Uncle Marlow still hid me and kept me safe, as was in his best interest. With both parents dead, the family inheritance legally shuffled toward me. Whatever was left after the financial advisors and attorneys raided what assets they could, the remaining fortune should have all gone to me. All my dear, desperate uncle had to do was keep me alive until I turned eighteen to cash that check. To him, I was not a young, terrified teen who had just lost her entire world in one fell swoop; I was an investment. He looked at me and saw dollar signs that he could cash in on in just a few months.

I always said I would come back and help those who once helped me. But that sure as fuck wasn’t Marlow.

The door is thrown open with a squeal of, “ Nadie! ”

I am dog-piled by three women rushing out and swallowing me in short, strong hugs. It’s been a few years since I last checked in, but it still feels so natural as I move from embrace to embrace. Of the seven or eight girls I knew here, only three are left:

Luna, Cali, and Sincere—none of which are their real names.

“Oh my God, you come see us and don’t bring along your baby? I should beat you—” Sincere complains, even as she’s trying to separate my spine into halves from the force of her hug.

“I missed you, too.”

I hug her back, though not as tight. She’s grown so thin; I worry I might break her. It hurts to have to hold back like that, to see her so skinny, almost frail. We were always the closest.

“I miss all of you.”

“Don’t miss this,” Luna says, rapping her knuckles against the brick. And she’s right. I don’t miss this place at all.

My uncle’s only remotely successful business venture was pimping out girls at this strip club. He paid off some international network of “talent agents,” otherwise known as con men, to find pretty young foreign girls and promise them New York wages and a big-city American lifestyle. They paid no rent. He’d provide housing. All they had to do was keep fit and dance to a few songs a night and give lap dances for tips. A dream.

In reality, he recruited pretty, vulnerable girls who couldn’t speak a word of English and who had no support system in the entire continent. Their so-called housing is a bunk room in the belly of the strip club. Last I saw, they slept like soldiers: communal quarters and one shower, with curtains hung up to give themselves the illusion of individual rooms. Marlow paid them just enough to keep them strung along.

This was where my uncle hid me. At seventeen, pregnant and hiding for my life in a windowless basement with seven other women I couldn’t communicate with. The walls shook from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m., and strange men were always roaming through the back rooms.

It felt like karma, like I had such an easy and affluent childhood that I’d had it coming all along, building up my bad luck until life cashed it in all at once. Jackpot.

To make it all worse, the dancers hated me at first. I didn’t know why. They thought I was there to be their competition, some spoiled American brat coming along to show them all up and flirt with their johns. I could barely talk with any of them. But once they figured out my situation, once they realized I wasn’t a threat, not even a dancer, that I was pregnant —they did a one-eighty. They rallied. They watched over me and took care of me. In exchange, I helped them with their English. I would have never gotten away from my uncle if it weren’t for these women, and I will never forget that.

“Where’s the baby? It was a girl, and you named her Cali, right?” Cali teases me.

“No one names a baby after a troublemaker,” Sincere says. “Should have thought of that before you were always bad girl, making bad impression all the time.”

Cali flips her split-dyed hair.

“The men don’t complain.”

“It’s good she didn’t bring her! It’s a bad place for a little girl,” Luna says.

“It’s a bad place for us, too. We should get out of here just in case,” I say, feeling uneasy just being back in this alley, which still smells like vomit and trash, just like it used to. The girls promised me Marlow wouldn’t be awake or at the club for hours. I believe them, but standing so close to this building still puts me on edge. “Besides, we’ve got better places to be.”

I flash them Ren’s credit card. It’s met with approving and awed stares. If anyone knows a hefty black card when they see it, it’s New York dancers like these. We pile into the car, where I am wedged between Sincere and Cali. Luna takes the front seat and apologizes to our driver before we have even pulled out onto the street.

I’m put right back in the thick of strip club gossip: who got pregnant, who got bailed out by getting hitched, who got arrested, and who just…vanished for better or worse.

That’s the fate of most, and everyone knows it.

Luna tells me she’s in charge of the dancers now. It’s no surprise. Marlow liked his drinking and his opioid habit too much, even back then, to actually manage his girls. He’d take the one with the best English and make her represent the rest. Luna says her English is better than it’s ever been thanks to having to yell at “the idiots” all day.

Sincere demands photos of Harper, so I show her off and how big she’s gotten.

“See?” Cali cries, swiping at my phone screen with extra-long, glittery acrylics. “She looks like a Cali!”

“Bitch, it’s not even your real name,” Luna yells, our squabbling filling up the car.

I’m going to have to tip the driver double.

We hit the first store like a hurricane, and whatever the girls want, I buy. There’s a surprising lack of miniskirts and halter tops and knee-high boots. They probably have all those things, at least on rotation for theme nights. Luna and Sincere want blouses and classy shoes and new pairs of jeans, things that clients and their handlers weren’t as willing to buy them when it doesn’t turn a profit for the club.

Sincere slides up next to me as I pay, and she snatches the credit card from my hands when it’s passed back to me. I fumble against her cat-like reflexes, caught off guard as she swipes it and looks at the name. Her eyes do a double-take between me and the name on the card, her mouth opening and closing. She hands it back, but her eyes say it all—

What the fuck am I doing with Ren Caruso’s credit card?

She swallows her concern and acts as though she saw nothing until we’re out of the store. “I thought that was the name I saw when you held it up earlier,” she mutters, under the rustling of bags. “I thought I was crazy.”

“I couldn’t have pulled this off on my own.”

As we walk to a coffee shop a couple of streets over, Sincere and I fall behind. We keep our voices low.

“What are you doing with him, Nadia?” she asks. “He’s dangerous, yeah?”

“…He can be.”

“Your family. He was after them. You were with us because of him,” she says, as if desperately trying to make sense of it. “Did he find you?”

“…It’s complicated.”

Her eyebrows agree with me. She shakes her head and mutters something in a language I don’t understand. I’m only a couple of years younger than Sincere, and somehow, I still feel like a scolded child.

“His brother comes to the club.”

“Elijah? What is he doing at Marlow’s place?”

“Whatever he wants,” she snorts. “VIP.”

I don’t understand why Elijah would want to set foot in a place like that. It’s hard to picture him in a strip club at all, much less one run by my own uncle. And he has privileges there?

“All that bad blood, I thought him and Marlow would kill each other—”

“It’s a big city, Nadia, but a small world,” Sincere says, searching my face, and I know exactly what she means. The mob ties are always complicated, always crisscrossed somehow. I briefly lose myself in how worried she looks, as if it’s all taken too much of a toll. She has an almost alien quality to her face now, so gaunt, the way that’s fashionable with movie stars these days. But I know Sincere didn’t go under the knife to hollow out her sharp cheekbones. “Are you and Ren…together?” she asks.

“I…”

The words stick in my mouth like taffy.

“We are; we’re getting married.”

“Married?!”

I bump into her hard, making her hush before the other two overhear.

“Married, how? Do you want to be married? How has this happened, Nadie, tell me—”

“It’s better for my daughter. He’s taking care of Harper. Financially, anyway.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

Luna realizes we’ve fallen behind, turning to face us with a hand on the jut of her hip. “What are you two gossiping about?” she asks. Cali stops, too.

“Boys,” Sincere says with a tone.

Cali wrinkles her nose. “Naaasty.”

Luna’s glare doesn’t soften, and she pulls us up into the group, keeping the pack tighter together as we’re steered into the shop. Sincere and I exchange a final glance before the smell of freshly brewing coffee beans smacks us in the face.

For a half hour, I try to forget about Ren. We catch up with old memories, the good and the bad, because every other night at a strip club is its own bizarre story, and we have plenty of them. Eventually, Cali drags Sincere off to the restroom. Luna watches them go, her plump mouth pursed into a frown. The silence weighs.

“…What’s going on with her?” I finally ask. There’s no question as to who I’m talking about.

“She’s on something. Heroin, I think. Says she’s clean now,” Luna says, fiddling with her straw and rattling the ice in her frappe.

“You don’t believe her.”

Luna shrugs.

“I’m not stupid. I don’t believe anything.”

I stare at the square of the distant bathroom door, my thoughts pinched. “Is there anything I can do for her?”

“I don’t know,” Luna admits. “I tried to stop it. They won’t let her dance like that much longer. One day, a new girl will come, and Sincere will go like the others. I don’t know where. But it will happen, soon, I think.”

My coffee tastes bitter as it goes down.

For years, I’ve always felt like I had my hands were tied. Every situation, I was always on the defense. Maybe I’m not on the defense anymore.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I say.

“She’s not your responsibility—”

“I wasn’t your responsibility or Sincere’s.” I shove my cup away. “It’s what Red would do.”

Luna smiles, a pained look on her face at the mention of the dancer who used to be in charge of the girls.

“I get her,” she admits, tapping the side of her head. “When Red stole that money for you, I thought, oh, Red’s fucking crazy. Wondered why the older girls like her didn’t leave. They had a little money. They knew people. So why stay? Why not try? But now, I get it. Someone gotta take care of the new ones. And now, look, that’s me.” She rolls her eyes, lash extensions fluttering. She mimes a gun next to her head. Bang . “Red, she was the same. That’s why she stuck her neck out for you.”

“…I still wish I knew what happened to her.”

“Fuck that,” Luna sighs, looking out the window, “I don’t wanna know.”

When I was close to having Harper, the girls pooled what money they had to give to me. But Red, she was the one who turned it into a plan. She slept with Marlow. Got him nice and drunk and passed out, so she could raid his apartment and his wallet for all the cash he had on him and all the night’s tips and every cent that came out of the register that day. She could have taken that money and run herself, but she gave it to me and sent me off with the firm direction that I would take care of my baby, and she would never see me there again.

I know what probably happened to her. I just don’t want it to be true.

Luna and I don’t say much else to each other, both lost in grim thoughts, until Cali and Sincere come back. They drop back into chatter, warming the mood. It never hits Luna’s eyes. She’s gorgeous, with a big, brilliant smile and heavy-handed makeup, but underneath all that, she looks just as hollow as Sincere, just in a different way.

I sip the last dregs of my coffee. Sincere drops her head onto my shoulder, grinning as she snaps a selfie of us together, her smile big and wide. The shutter noise clicks, a multi-lens camera capturing my resolve on a cracked screen. My mouth smiles, but my eyes are steely with determination. I’m going to see just how much power the wife-to-be of Ren Caruso has.