Chapter 14: Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia King: Chapter 14

Nothing works out the way I think it will. Never.

I thought I’d die handing myself over to Ren Caruso; I’m still alive. I thought Ren would kill Marlow for me; he won’t even discuss the possibility. Hell, he hasn’t even looked me in the eye since I brought it up. Every time I think I have a sure thing, it goes up in smoke.

I knew Marlow was a piece of shit. He always was, so my view of him isn’t shattered. It’s just made worse. So, so much worse, until I want to cry with rage when I even think about it. I didn’t know he sold out my mom. His own sister . Somehow, even the people I hate most find new ways to disgust me.

I wonder how much I would disgust them. I always felt guilty that I still had a soft spot for Ren. But I never really blamed him. I was disgusted with my father, too, when I learned what he did.

But I still wonder sometimes what they would think of me. How ashamed they would be.

Not wife material. Not mother material. Not daughter material.

Maybe I’m no good for anybody.

I keep scrolling back to that selfie with Sincere, looking into her gaunt but gorgeous face, and I want to do something . I want to help her. Maybe good friend material is still within reach for me.

I assume Ren will continue avoiding me, but while Harper is at school, Ren has me dress for another day out together.

As usual, I’m not told where we’re going.

Visions of wedding dresses still swirl through my head. I wonder, maybe dread, what he has on his agenda this time. When Harper is around, everything is fine—usually. He behaves in front of her. Without her, our true selves come out, history and all. Volatile, unstable elements.

I meet him in the foyer where he and Olivia are talking. Her mouth twists into a sour pucker as she watches me come down the stairs. Ren holds out an arm for me, like a gentleman. In front of Olivia, I’m more than happy to slide my fingers around his arm and stand next to him.

“You’re leaving?” she says. It doesn’t sound much like a question.

“We’ll be back this afternoon,” he says. “Unless you think there’s something you won’t be able to handle?”

That doesn’t sound much like a question either.

She clutches the tablet in her hands, her face washed in unmasked tension that starts turning different colors, like the horse in The Wizard of Oz .

“Of course, sir,” she says, through a tight jaw. “No problem.”

“If you run into any trouble…call Elijah.”

Her glare doesn’t leave me. I don’t know how I’m the problem when I’m basically just a dog being taken out for a walk.

Ren steers us out. His driver already has the car—a low-slung black one with equally black windows—waiting out front, idling on the side of the street. I am forced into the backseat of it. Ren sits next to me this time, props his arm up over my shoulders.

My heart thunders like horses running through a canyon. His close proximity and the smell of his cologne make my skin flush.

I close my eyes and try to block him out like I always do.

I am irrationally terrified that Ren will realize how I still feel for him. I don’t know why it matters. I’ve always carried that emotion like a badge of shame, hauling it around with me everywhere I went. But if I tell him, it’s just another thing he’ll have to use against me.

The street is busy when we get out, but I recognize it right away. A big gulp of nostalgia slides down my throat. We are just down the street from the academy I attended my junior and senior years. It looks about the same, though some of the surrounding storefronts and institutions have changed. The architecture is classic, timeless, utterly indifferent to what happens to the people that churn in and out of that building through time.

My eyes sweep the street as the car abandons us here together, like a fickle time machine vanishing back into the slipstream and leaving us in the past.

My jaw drops like I’ve never seen an ice cream shop before.

“Why are we—”

I am corralled inside, the hand on my shoulder pushing me forward. A cold blast of air hits me in the face and tastes like artificial winter. Outdated summer pop music bounces from the speakers, and the room smells sickly sweet, tickling the back of my throat with nostalgia.

My heart thumps to the beat.

This was where Ren and I would always go after a round of tennis after school.

I played on my school’s team—like all stereotypical private academy girls; I wasn’t breaking new ground there. Ren had already graduated, and he would sometimes come to watch me play. Tennis is not a thrilling spectator sport, no matter what the Olympics might try to tell you, so I always figured Ren showed up to my matches because of the abundance of girls in short-shorts. But I never complained too much. I always played better when he was there.

And some days, when the courts were open, just the two of us would play.

(He wasn’t much good at it.)

When he was finally tired of me showing him up, we’d walk down here and get ice cream and pretend to be two normal teenagers for a little while.

I don’t much want to be a teenager again. I don’t think I have it in me. Once you’ve had to choose between paying your electric bill and groceries, after-school clubs and cliques and yearbook superlatives drastically shrink in importance. Much like ice cream, I don’t have a taste for it anymore.

“Do you still get strawberry?”

“…What?”

“Strawberry. Two scoops. Hot fudge.”

He repeats my usual order back to me the way some people recite the gospel.

“Uhm. Sure.”

I don’t know.

The girl behind the counter is around the same age I was the last time I was here. I hadn’t even thought about this place in ages.

“Why are we—”

“If you burn off too many calories, you’ll get too skinny.”

My mouth twists.

That was always our excuse for coming here. Tired and freshly showered after being on the court, Ren would bring me here and tell me to eat, that I’d burn off all my curves if I kept it up. It was just a silly excuse, but it was our excuse.

I sit down with two pink scoops of ice cream and a drizzle of thick fudge, and I stare at it like an alien confronted with human food for the first time.

“…Eat,” he orders.

I eat, and Ren watches intently. It feels a little perverse, that heavy stare.

Memories flood back at the taste. Nostalgia has a gritty quality, even when the strawberry goes down smooth. I push the ice cream around in the bowl.

“You know…I think it tasted better after I’d just humiliated you at tennis.”

Ren doesn’t smile, but he doesn’t quite frown either. He just looks at me, ice creams melting slowly even under the blast of the AC. He nods, and then bows his head over the ice cream again.

“Next time, maybe,” he says.

Next time? Is that a joke, or is that an offer?

I wonder why we’re sitting here, pretending to be caricatures of our past. It would be easier to enjoy it if I knew I was supposed to.

“I think my tennis days are a little behind me, Ren. I’m out of practice,” I say.

“Then I’ll finally have a chance.”

A warm, tentative heat floods my chest, chasing off the artificially flavored chill that sits in my belly. Is Ren…joking with me? I search his face like he might rip off a mask and throw it aside.

He’s been different since we made love. His edges are blurred, his glances more lingering and less glaring.

Except for the night I confronted him about Marlow. Then, he was a different man altogether. No relation to the one sitting across from me now, neglecting his salted caramel swirl. He stabs at his ice cream methodically, like eating it is a chore instead of a treat. Feeling bold, I reach over, like I used to, and swipe a spoonful out of his cup and plop it in my mouth.

Ren stares at me. His eyes darken, but I can’t name the emotion on his face. It’s not anger. He gives me no reaction.

“…No? You’re just going to let me get away with it?” I ask, trying to be playful.

“I’ve let you get away with worse.”

The butterflies in my stomach suffer a mass extinction event.

We finish our ice cream in fresh silence, waterboarded by a bubbly love song shaking the shop’s walls.

Ren walks me along the sidewalk, a hand on my lower back. As we walk, the shape of the day is starting to form in my mind. It’s a show. A time capsule of the past, revisiting all the things we used to do. A literal walk down memory lane.

Ren curls his hand around mine, and the grip almost hurts. We linger outside the bar where we used to drink—underage, and both of us with plenty of expensive liquor we could have stolen from home. But the alcohol wasn’t the point. It was just the getting away with it. Playing pretend.

Maybe that’s what we really like doing? Playing make-believe.

Ren walks to the door.

“I don’t think they’re open,” I say. It’s far too early for a bar to be operating. But Ren goes to the doors anyway, bringing me along with him. He pulls out a key.

My thoughts short-circuit as he opens up the bar and lets himself in, locking the door behind us and disabling the security system as he goes, like it’s second nature.

“…You own this?”

“I own a key.”

“What, did you pick up a side job? Does the family business not pay the bills anymore, so you started bartending—”

Ren doesn’t rise to my teasing. He walks behind the bar and slides two clear glasses across the bar top. He motions for me to join him, draws me deeper into the half-dark of an empty bar with the stools and chairs all perched on the tables. Stealing a bottle of bourbon, Ren smoothly hops back over the bar. He takes down a couple of the stools and pours us both two neat shots.

The room is so monumentally quiet. Like a morgue. I almost miss the pop music of the early 2020s blaring at me from every direction, drowning out my thoughts.

“Sit,” he orders. I sit, but I don’t drink, swirling the liquid in my glass. A physical representation of my swirling thoughts, around and around.

“…Why do you have the key, Ren?” I ask.

The house near the East River. This bar. It’s gone beyond coincidence now. And he waited…

“They were going out of business,” he says. “I made a few investments to prevent that from happening. In exchange, I got a key, and an open-door policy whenever I wanted it.”

“…Right, because locally owned family businesses are just so special to you.”

“This one is.”

I wish the lights were on. A strip of LEDs behind the bar throws a faint orange glow across us, but it only deepens the shadows on his face.

“Do you not drink anymore?” he asks, when I do nothing but hold my glass.

“…I haven’t exactly had a booze budget.”

Ren reaches out, presses his fingers under the edge of the glass and guides it toward my lips. He follows through the action until I swallow the shot. The burn strips my throat raw. I cough a little. Embarrassing.

“Does it not taste as good now that we’re allowed to be in here?” he prompts.

I scrunch my face.

“I don’t know if it ever tasted good at all.”

I swear he’s smiling. I swear he’s smiling at me. My heart pitter-patters, then thumps hard like a hammer.

He downs his own shot then holds out his hand for me.

I don’t know what to do except take it. Ren pulls me to my feet in the dim light. Outside, the silhouettes of people pass behind the lettered windows, oblivious. We stand in our own little world. Ren pulls me flush against his chest. The cold leather of his glove curls gently around my hand, his other at my waist. I stare, my feet heavy and clumsy, as Ren begins to move.

“What are you doing—”

“Dancing.”

“There’s no music.”

That doesn’t stop him. He moves me like a marionette on strings, glides me around the room the way we used to practice together for all those fancy charity balls and galas every other week. For the exclusive birthday clubs in villas and on the decks of yachts. We veer through the silence, bodies moving to a tune neither of us hears.

My fingers curl around his, tightening.

Emotion bubbles up in my throat and stings my eyes. I look at him, his empty expression, his closed-off eyes, his tight, downturned mouth. He dances me around joylessly, our footsteps the only beat.

He’s holding me so tight, it hurts, even with the hand he can’t close all the way. The tips of his fingers dig into the thin bones on the back of my hand.

I keep my face stony, my mouth a flat line. Maybe he wants me to get upset. To cry. I won’t give him the satisfaction. Instead, I bump up the pace and I take the lead. I turn our somber, funeral two-step into a sweeping, quick-footed tango. Ren almost stumbles to catch up.

“Come on, Ren. I know you can do better than that,” I challenge him, our eyes locked as I take the lead.

We weave around the room as if it’s populated by ghosts.

This dance should feel ridiculous without music, but the past is loud, and it’s all around us.

“I can’t believe you lied to me all those years,” I accuse. His eyebrow twitches. “Always complaining about how you hated ballroom dancing. Look at you now.”

He draws me ever closer, as if telling me a secret as we wheel about the room.

“I hated ballroom dancing because other men could cut in.” My hand and waist grow numb from his hold. “Not here.”

“No one is going to cut in anymore, Ren, no matter where we dance. Why are we here?”

“Because I want to be.”

I look up at him, our faces too close together now. My throat hurts. There’s a lump in it, but I swallow it down and clear it out of my voice.

Don’t let it get to you.

“Why?”

His dark eyes answer, but his mouth doesn’t.

“Do you miss it?” I dare to ask.

And this time, I know he smiles. A mean, crooked smile that cuts.

“I never left it.”

My steps grow clumsy, distracted, and Ren wrests back control from me, effortlessly stepping back into the man’s role and steering me around and around the tables. Circles around circles. I think I’m going to be sick.

“That table over there,” he says, nodding his head towards a corner booth, undistinguishable from any other. “That’s where we sat on New Year’s, when the ball was dropping. Where you said you only had one resolution. Do you remember it?”

“Of course I do. I said—” Why does it feel harder to say now than it did then? “—I said that I was going to kiss you. That you had ten seconds left to get away from me.”

“And that all of New York was counting.”

Did I say that? I don’t remember it that clearly now.

“I think about that moment a lot. What might have changed if I had done something different in those ten seconds, the whole city counting down to the moment that would change everything for me.”

Our motions jerk as we misstep, lose the rhythm, growing almost violent. Ren is stronger than me by multitudes. There’s muscle and anger under that fitted suit, and he uses both to steer me around the tables again and again. I try to keep up, clinging to him now in the same way that he is clinging to me.

“Nothing would have changed,” I tell him. “What could have?” My father would still give his orders. His parents would have still been in that fire. What does that have to do with us?

“Everything would have changed.”

I shake my head. He’s wrong. Our love was not the only butterfly that could have flapped its wings and changed the course of history. There are a thousand innocent little things that could have gone differently and changed the trajectory of our lives. Why blame our relationship?

But Ren is sure of it, and more than sure, he is angry about it. Suddenly, our veering, tumbling dance pins me up against the booth we sat in all those years ago. The table’s edge presses against my back. Ren towers over me, pinning me there as if he’s caught me all over again. He’s so close, leaning in, until the past becomes a flimsy, transparent sheen between us. I feel it, hear it. The silent bar screams in my memory: “5, 4, 3, 2—!”

I had kissed him first.

What kind of fireworks would it set off if I kissed him now?

I don’t find out. This time, Ren kisses me. A steely kiss, firm and demanding. He isn’t looking for my approval. He’s not even looking for my consent. His hand knots in my hair, and he kisses me as if it is his right to kiss me, whether I want it or not. No warning, no countdown. No ten-second start to get the hell out of here. At least I’d offered him that much.

I feel like our dance churned my ice cream a second time, cold nausea frothing in my stomach as his mouth reminds mine of its place.

Our foreheads rest together, our breathing evening out in the same pattern.

Outside, the world spins on.

But Ren and I are here, fixed to the spot. Anchored in the history playing out behind our closed eyelids. That night that was so happy. That first brilliant kiss, when Ren had smirked against my mouth and let me kiss him, and kiss him, and kiss him. A new start. Him and me.

This feels like a new start, too.

The start of something bad.