Chapter 2: Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia King: Chapter 2

I lurch awake in my Queens apartment.

My bedsheets lay tangled on the floor and the mattress is damp with sweat. I peer through the darkness above my head, frantic to find what woke me up. I run my hands over my face and shoulders, feeling for roaches. Nothing. The digital clock face burns 3:17 a.m.

I lie back, staring up at the ceiling for a moment, my chest heaving with every breath.

I’m alone in my bed, just as I have been every night for the past six years. The past lingers in my thoughts, on my tongue, burning between my legs. It makes my face hot with shame that I still even dream about that night.

I have not spoken to Ren Caruso in those six years.

The boy who still adores me in my dreams, my first love .

Of course, he broke my heart. That’s what young boys do, I guess. But most failed teenage romances don’t leave a mile of bloodshed in their wake. Ours did.

His voice ghosts across my memory again, low and grinning,

“Nadia’s fun, but she’s not wife material.”

I block it out again.

When I dream about those times now, about the past, it’s starting to feel less and less real. My family legacy. My mob heritage. My “generational wealth.” The memories get less clear the more time passes. And Ren—he was the one who took it all from me.

A faint clamor draws my attention across the studio apartment. That sound that woke me up. I drag myself up in a daze. If Harper is trying to climb to the remote again—

I hit the bedside lamp switch. Sickly light falls over my six-year-old daughter. She’s sleeping soundly on her little bed, tucked into the corner of our studio apartment with her arms clutched tight around the world’s ugliest stuffed giraffe. My sleep-fuzzy brain clears as I see her there, her face perfectly peaceful and still.

My gaze drags toward the sound. The apartment door sits cock-eyed in its frame, highlighted in an orange glow. The light shifts as the door warps and shudders. Wood creaks and snaps from the outside. The lock jiggles.

There’s a saying I’ve heard, and I thought it was pretty corny at the time: The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing humanity that he didn’t exist. But if that’s true, then the mafia is taking notes. Everyone talks about the 1920s, and Prohibition, and the good old days , when you could crack open a warm newspaper and read about a man being left face-down in the street peppered with holes like Swiss cheese or a car engine that turned over in Little Italy and lit up like a fireball.

But the mob isn’t gone. They just write the headlines now.

And once again, they found me.

I bolt across the apartment, shoving our tiny loveseat full force toward the door and ramming it against the frame. I fling two bar stools on top of it, Harper’s backpack, a consignment-shop KitchenAid knockoff ($15.99). I don’t exactly have heavy furniture. The wood shudders violently. Whoever is on the other side gives up on being sneaky and starts ramming the door down.

I snatch Harper up. Her dead weight slumps against my shoulder. She whines, sharp and incoherent at being moved around in the dead of night. Cheap plywood shudders and begins to break. The door crumbles like cardboard as they kick it in piece by piece.

I wrench open the fire escape window, years of thick paint splintering for the first time. The rush of cold wind shoots up my arms and lifts the back of Harper’s shirt. She wakes instantly.

“Mommy?” She straightens up.

“It’s okay, baby. It’s okay, don’t look.”

I try to keep her face pressed against my neck as I ease backward out the window. Cold metal stings the bottom of my feet, and a howling wind shudders against my nightgown. I try to get my footing on the narrow platform. A shadow climbs over the couch, a biblical giant of a man, who comes stomping into my apartment.

The man-giant yells, “Come here, bitch!”

Well, since you asked so nicely.

Harper realizes what’s happening. She’s not afraid of the dizzying heights or the bitter cold or the man yelling at us from our front door. Harper’s eyes land on her ugly giraffe abandoned on her bed, and she lets out a bloodcurdling scream of despair. She clutches her stubby fingers to the windowsill, desperate not to leave it behind.

“Harper, come on!” I scream, and she screams back as I snatch her away, paint coming off under her little fingernails. She thrashes against me.

Dangling thirteen stories above dark New York City asphalt, I remember suddenly: I’m afraid of heights. Cold wind whips against my skin and blows my hair into my mouth and eyes. I cling to my baby as hard as I can, even as she knees me in the ribs and digs her fingers in my hair, reaching back for her toy with heaving sobs. I inch along the metal shelf bolted precariously to the weatherworn brick.

Organized crime is a spider web. It hangs all over this city, and if you have bad luck or bad genes, you might just run right into it face-first. And a spider web, once it’s on you, no matter how much you pull and panic and scream, doesn’t come off easily.

The spider scuttles toward me.

His hulking shadow blocks the light from the window.

“Stop!” he yells. There’s a gun in his hands, but it’s a useless threat. He’s not going to shoot me, and I know it. I have to be taken alive or I’m not worth anything.

I feel blindly for the next rung of the fire escape with my bare toes. My hair is in my face, my baby screaming in my ear. It doesn’t matter what’s below me. It doesn’t matter that just climbing a step stool turns my knees to Jell-O or that I can feel in my palms the years of acid rain that has eaten away at the rungs of metal anchoring me to the side of the apartment complex.

I work my way down to the next landing. The man’s shadow falls over us. He steps onto the fire escape with us. I make it down one set of steps, then two—rushing, tripping. He’s right on my heels, coming down two, three steps at a time. He grabs me by the arm. I scream and thrash, jerking away until I break his grip and go flying, launched by my own desperate momentum. My back hits the metal railing. Terror branches through my belly as I feel that yawning expanse behind me. The banister holds.

The man and I come face to face. He’s bald, all face tattoos and cigarette breath. He tries to drag me back up the stairs, toward the apartment window. I curl my fingers tight around the rusted metal banister, holding myself anchored, but he’s so strong. He yanks me up toward him again and again, trying to break my grip on the banister as I scream. With my other arm, I crush the full weight of my six-year-old daughter to my chest. Her little arms wrap so tightly around my neck, she threatens to choke me out, her terrified crying blowing out my hearing.

“It’s okay,” I hear myself saying.

It’s not okay.

“It’s okay.”

Between the wind and her screams, Harper can’t hear me, but I say it anyway. I am compelled to say it, just as I have said it for years. I dig in my hands, my feet, the last measure of my strength holding out as the giant yanks me back up toward him again and again. A flashlight cuts through the street below us. Someone is down there, waiting at the bottom of the fire escape. His partner, probably.

Bad, bad, bad.

Six years of having mostly a toddler for company, and you forget how to curse.

Suddenly, the monster gets his hand around Harper—into the back of her shirt. He starts pulling her away from me. She takes a chunk of my hair with her.

“No!” I scream and break my stubborn grip on the railing just to get both my hands on her. He tosses her aside on the landing now that he has me where he wants me, gets both those big, sweaty hands on me. His grip crushes my throat as he pushes me back against the banister, dangles me over the edge of the railing. I twist against the open air as the wind howls.

“Did you think we wouldn’t come after you just because you’re a woman?” he snarls. “A princess?” His gold tooth glints in the light before he spits on my face. I turn away, my hands clawing blindly for his eyes.

Harper huddles in the corner of the fire escape landing, where she hunkers down and screams as the mob man and I dance in the dark. There’s no room on this narrow scaffolding, and I keep fighting him, keep twisting, like a mad dog in the catcher’s leash, kicking and thrashing and hitting like my life depends on it.

I get my knee between his legs. The air leaves his lungs in a furious, sickened snarl as he stumbles back away from me. His back hits the opposite railing. When I slammed into it, the railing’s height reached around my belly button. Totally safe. But this man is taller, much taller, and so top-heavy. His hips catch the rail. I realize that at the same moment he does, that split second of terror, as his center of gravity pulls him groundward.

Funny how split-second decisions seem to take a cartoonishly long time to make. I fling myself at him with a shriek, shoving on his chest with all my strength, finishing the momentum.

He topples over the bars.

His hand snags around my wrist. My shoulder threatens to rip from its socket as the weight of a full-grown man pulls me down with him. I scream in agony as I grip the railing. He doesn’t let go of me, his desperation threatening to drag me over the metal railing that groans against our weight. I dig in my feet, armpits hooked over the metal edge.

I think my arm will snap off.

His other hand clings to the bars, his feet kicking over the open air. I stare down at him, my heart pounding.

“Don’t let me fall,” he begs suddenly, trying and failing to haul himself up. “Don’t let me fall!” he screams, his voice thick but small, like he’s aging backward into a scared little boy. His body pendulums in the open air. I look into his eyes. He could be one of Ren’s men. One of my uncle Marlow’s. I’ve made too many enemies; I can’t even tell them apart anymore.

But his words have tipped me off—this one was sent by Jon Dellucci.

I guess, at this point, it doesn’t matter. It’s just who gets billed for the grave.

I lean down and sink my teeth deep into his hand.

The giant plummets with a scream, then there’s a crack like an egg dropping. I hear it all the way up here. Humpty-Dumpty, right onto the top of the closed dumpster, where he belongs. Ashes to ashes, trash to trash.

My chest heaves, lungs shaking. I turn away from the sight. His partner’s anguished yells reach me. I scoop my sobbing girl up into my arms and climb back up the fire escape and through the window.

The apartment is silent. Empty.

These are the ruins of our little life. The year or so of safety I had managed to eke out before the past caught up. All gone now. Harper wheezes for air. I push her hair back from her face, urging her to breathe. I check her pale face, the color of her lips. I rub her back, desperately trying to soothe her and calm her down.

Getting scared like this isn’t good for her.

“Come on, baby. Come on, we have to go. We have to go right now.”

I walk toward the door, swiping my phone from the dresser along the way, grabbing Harper’s countless pill bottles and shoving them in my bag.

In the hall, snippets of normal life drone all around us. Muffled late-night infomercials yap from behind closed doors— Three easy payments of $19.99— contends with the domestic dispute breaking out in the apartment across the hall. I breathe in the waft of weed and stale cigarettes. The world goes on, while mine turns upside down and spins out of orbit.

Finally, my brain kicks into gear, and I start running .

“Mommy,” Harper sobs as she bounces against my shoulder. I shush her as I keep moving.

“It’s okay, baby. It’s okay. We’re just playing tag. You love tag.”

Jon Dellucci is one of those devils who everyone believes no longer exists. Another mob man. I owe him money. A lot of money by now. It’s pointless to count. I know how mob interest works. Even if I could put a figure on it, it would never be enough. When the bills kept coming, and Harper was just a baby then, I went to him for a loan; just something to get me on my feet when the world kept slipping out from under me.

I didn’t know then that I was on a slippery slope. I didn’t know how far I could fall. I kept slipping, and slipping, and I needed more, just a little more…

Eventually, Dellucci’s generosity ran out.

We spill out into the alleyway on the opposite side of the fire escape. I make a break for it before anyone else can arrive on the scene.

I sprint past the window of a computer repair shop, its logo a cartoon of a manic, smiling printer. A siren roars to life in the distance. My mind is a blur, my feet moving with no direction in mind.

What’s next? What’s next?

I don’t know.

I’ve just killed a man.

What am I supposed to do?

Repeatedly, only one name comes to mind. My thumb shakes as I open my phone. I swore I’d never turn to him, that nothing would ever be worth it.

But…

I’m on solid ground now, but I still feel the yawning depths stretching out under my feet. Enemies circle me on every side. On one side is Dellucci. On the other…

My finger hesitates on the screen, lingers over the call button a moment too long.

I hate that my first instinct is to still reach out to him.

I hear shouting in the distance, which means I need to run again, just as I have been for the last six years. Apartment to apartment. Job to job. The past is always right there, like my shadow, never far behind.

I push the urge to call Ren aside and focus on putting distance between me and the men. The crime scene . I keep moving through the gridlock, street to street, while trying to avoid stepping on old trash and broken glass with my bare feet.

Wading through garbage in a back alley gives me that same numb, curious disbelief about how I ended up here. The way the dead man snarled the word princess echoes in my head. I spent my teenage years globetrotting across Europe, booking private flights, and dancing in ballroom galas with the sons of royals and billionaires. Who would know any of that by looking at me now?

For six years, I’ve bounced between bed bug-infested apartments and working two or three jobs to scrape together the month’s rent. My past sounds like a fairy tale, even to me, the girl who once lived it; just a bedtime story someone read to me once. But it was true, back then. I was the daughter of a crime boss in the New York underground, the fifth generation of the Petrone family legacy.

But they’re all gone now.

Harper cries and cries, begging me to fix it. And I don’t know how to fix it. Not this time. I’ve started over so many times. New jobs, new friends. I have to move whenever the crosshairs get too close. That’s the mob. The web.

But it was never like this. They’d never gotten this close. They’d never come into my home. They’d never put their hands on her —

There’s no one left to run to. Everyone I once had was killed by the only man in the world who might be able to help us. Help Harper. Ren might want me dead, might want to wipe me out like I am the last stain of my family’s lineage, but maybe Ren Caruso will save his daughter.

My grip tightens around my phone again.

Nadia’s fun, but she’s not wife material.

I wasn’t meant to hear that when Ren said it.

That is an atom bomb to a seventeen-year-old girl, who has already mapped out her future on the arm of her first love. The sudden explosion of it hurts, blinds you, and the radiation lingers in you for days, tearing you apart at some subatomic level. At least, that’s how it feels when you’re that young and heartbreak is the worst pain you’ve ever known.

I blocked Ren, ghosted him, swore to myself up and down that I wouldn’t be someone’s good time just until something better came along.

…And then Ren lost both his parents, not a week later, to a hitman on my father’s payroll. Arson. Burned alive in my seventeenth summer, before I had realized I was pregnant with his baby girl.

We were supposed to be going to Rome together that year. Instead, we went to war.

Maybe Ren was right. Maybe I’m not wife material—and maybe I’m not mother material either.

A dark car goes barreling past, no headlights. The rumble cuts through my thoughts and makes my feet move faster. A driver honks as I sprint across the crosswalk. Standard New York manners.

I try to walk normally, keep my head down, my eyes forward—but I hear the car pop a U-turn in the middle of the empty intersection. Is the driver looking my way? Muttering into a phone? Training a gun on me this very second? I keep moving, keep walking, looking for anything—an alleyway, an alcove I can dip into. The car approaches like a predator, smooth and slow, planning its pounce.

A blazing yellow beacon comes down the opposite way. A taxi looking for a fare. I hail it immediately and dip into the backseat.

“Where are you headed?” the cabbie asks.

Eventually? Hell. Tonight? Dealer’s choice.

Glancing into the back mirror, I see the grill of the black car behind us. No headlights.

“Just drive for now,” I say.

I shrink lower in the seat, just in case.

The cabbie asks if I’m okay. And I guess you have to be in pretty rough shape to attract a cab driver’s attention, to stand out amid all the countless oddities they ferry around this city every day. All at once, the pain hits me like a truck. My bare feet throb and bleed, my arms ache. Harper has wrung a tiny red band around my neck, and we’re both still in our pajamas with no shoes.

I’m exhausted, panting, sweat slick on the back of my neck.

“I’m fine,” I lie. I check the rearview again, trying to think up a safe haven.

In my heart, I know there’s only one.

My baby has cried herself to exhaustion. The silence is worse than her screams. She’s too miserable to even wail anymore. What is this kind of life going to do to her? How much therapy will it take to undo it, if it can ever be undone? What’s her heart rate right now? Is she going to have another episode, another stay in the hospital, because of this?

Because of me?

I can already feel the tears biting at the back of my eyes, but I don’t shed them. I learned a long time ago that crying doesn’t do much except make your face wet.

I always knew this could happen. That one day I would have to admit the truth: Maybe I can’t give Harper the life she needs. Not even the life she deserves, the life she needs . I swallow hard. My fingers shake.

Ren Caruso broke my heart, destroyed my family—he might want to kill me, too. He’s been hunting me. I am a loose end in his vendetta. But there is only one thing I still know for certain about Ren: He’s never hurt a child, and he is ruthless to those who do. It’s part of his reputation as a mob boss now, the legacy he’s built for himself in only six years.

What’s that other saying about devils? Better the devil you know…

I dial Ren’s number. I still have it memorized, the only number I ever bothered to remember. I brace myself, shaking as I clutch Harper to me as it rings and rings.

“Hello?”

A woman’s voice.

My heart shatters.

All this time and jealousy still rips me in half. Assumptions go spinning through my head like a top, bouncing off the corners of my skull, and sending me reeling. Who is she? His girlfriend? Mistress? …Wife? Did he finally find someone who checked all those tidy boxes that I didn’t? The right pedigree, and bank account, and family legacy?

What I hadn’t considered in all this was that Ren’s life has gone on, too. If I show up at his doorstep with his baby…maybe he wouldn’t be as accommodating as I imagined. As if anything between Ren and I could just be simple and work out for the best. Not us. Never us.

Harper stares up at me, those big eyes and tear-stained cheeks looking to me to fix all this.

“…I’m looking for Ren,” I force myself to say, even when the words taste like sand.

“Ren?” the woman snips, and at first I think the number’s changed, and this is some poor stranger I’m calling up in the middle of the night, and she’s never heard of Ren Caruso in her life. But she asks, “Who is this?” and there’s a certain possessiveness in her voice that I recognize.

She knows exactly who he is. My mouth opens and closes around my own name, refusing to say it.

“We used to know each other—I just—”

“ Mr. Caruso doesn’t take unprompted late-night calls,” she says, “What business do you have with him?”

“…It’s personal.”

“Right,” she all but sneers with that preppy, self-satisfied voice. “Well, he also doesn’t take personal calls from past flings—”

The engine behind us revs.

Oh, God.

“…N-Never mind,” I say, “This was a mistake.”

“Sir?” Before I can hang up, the woman’s voice grows suddenly distant, the line crackling with movement. My breath freezes in my chest.

“Hello?” says a familiar baritone.

My heart bursts like a rain cloud. I feel a rampant flood of emotion just hearing his voice after six years. I grit my teeth, trying to force down that awful pain that tears open in me. Sorrow and anger, hatred, and longing—they all clash. I think I keep it all inside, but Harper leans up and presses her little hands to my cheeks, wiping at tears I didn’t know had fallen.

“Don’t cry, Mommy,” she chants, just like I’ve done for her my whole life, babbling and unaware that I’m on the phone. “We won tag. Did you see? We won,” she chirps.

I crush her to me.

“Hello?” Ren repeats, more urgently, as if he already knows who it is.

“Ren,” I whisper.

The line goes quiet with recognition. I force back a sniffle, force myself to be practical. The cabbie curses the car revving aggressively on his bumper. I stare into my daughter’s eyes as I choose my devil.

“Ren, I need your help.”