Chapter 36: Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia King: Chapter 36

The mob really is like a spiderweb. I shudder as I watch it efficiently spin its web around the carnage that took place today. Ren’s men file through the factory. Some have guns, some have badges. Salvatore Mori walks among them, helping orchestrate. Cold bodies are wrapped tight in sheets. Cocooned in barrels. The violence will be wrapped up, digested, dissolved—and vanish, as if it all never happened.

It’s an efficient, ugly creature, with too many limbs making the work seem light and effortless. Ren ushers Harper and me away from it as soon as possible.

I feel emotionally raw and am walking around in a daze. The aftermath feels like a dream, like maybe I did get thrown off that roof, and I am still falling, living out the life that could have been in those few seconds before I hit the ground.

Ren is alive. Here. Harper is safe. Sincere has reappeared as if by magic, along with a couple of old friends and a few strangers. I don’t really understand how it happened—how all these parts of my life snowballed together into what just transpired. Maybe that’s why it all feels like a fever dream, like reality is inventing its own rules as it goes along.

The stench of fear and blood keeps me grounded. Reminds me it’s really happening. I walk down the long, tiled hallways, Harper’s face tucked against my neck so she can’t see the aftermath.

We pass Elijah, and I find myself staring at him like he’s a ghost. He somehow made it down from the roof alive. He’s oblivious. A medical kit lies open at his feet, and Cali sits on a jacket spread across the floor. She holds her shirt up, where he tends a wound on her chest. His hands shake like leaves when he faces her with her tits out and open to him. Something about that in the chaos of everything else makes me laugh. The kind of bubbling, nonsensical laughter that feels like it might never stop.

Outside, sunlight feels sharper. The air crisper.

I step out into the alley where I would have fallen and died not an hour ago.

It’s all so strange.

Ren settles his coat around my shoulders, startling me out of the daze. It’s not cold, but he does it anyway, meeting my gaze. His hands are all bloody. I don’t know how I didn’t realize it until now. He’s covered. Even his teeth are bloody.

He makes a barrier of the coat, pulling me closer to him with it.

“I’ve got you,” he says, keeping me close like that. A lock of hair, dipped in crusted red, hangs in his gorgeous eyes. “We’re going to go home. Listen, Nadia,” he says, as if my attention had wandered. Maybe it had. I do feel strange, like the world is made of cotton, like my limbs move on strings pulled by some puppeteer. I gaze into his face, blinking him into focus until he stops being a dream again.

“I’m taking you home, and every part of this will be behind us. This is the past now, and I’m burying it. I’m done trying to repeat it. If—” his words catch for a moment, his eyes searching my face— “if that’s where you want to go, of course.”

My heart tugs in my chest, like he’s trying to coax it out of me.

“I’d like that,” I agree, something sharp stinging behind my eyes.

My hand slips into his, and I feel that slick, hot blood against my palm. Fresh.

“Ren…” I say, suddenly realizing how serious it is, how that blood—some of it, maybe all of it—is his . His good hand.

“It’s fine,” he says, in a voice that I know too well. It’s the one I use for Harper when I’m telling her everything is alright and not meaning it. Because you have to say it. “I’ll have it looked at.”

I try to get a better look, but he has a cloth wrapped around it.

“Are we going back to the big house?” Harper asks, peeking out from behind a lock of my hair.

“That’s right, baby. We’re all going home,” Ren says.

Harper is so relieved, she cries.

***

I’m sitting in the passenger seat of a car, staring at the red cloth wrapped around Ren’s hand when I finally come back around. My head pops up from my semi coma brought on by a crushing amount of fear and adrenaline. The animal in me just trying to survive finally slinks back into the shadows of my thoughts; I come to with a big gasp and trembling hands.

“Nadia,” Ren says sharply. The bandaged hand is around mine, I realize, and it squeezes.

His words drift back to me, finally settling, as if it took them that long to finally reach the bottom where I have been trapped. We’re going home.

“Sorry,” I say, voice stiff in my throat. “I’m fine.”

I’m not. I can feel that. A kind of uneasy, sick feeling lingering over me. But I will be fine. For the first time, I really feel like it might be possible. The next time I tell Harper everything is fine, I might actually be able to mean it.

We stop by the apartment first. I pick up Harper’s meds, and the letter, the suitcase and our own luggage. There’s so much in there that I have yet to process. There’s been no time. I walk through the kitchen where Olivia and I brawled, feeling like it happened a lifetime ago. Her earring glitters on the tile. I wonder what happened to her.

We finally make it home. Harper is still trembling, and this time, when I try to lift her, I feel the catch in my ribs. The pain that shoots through me like a knife. Ren swoops in for me, and this time, I’m grateful as he steers us inside.

It’s empty. Just the three of us as we step back into the life I thought I had left behind forever. I look at it as if seeing it for the first time. We make it to the couch, and then we all collapse down together, exhausted and relieved, falling into each other’s arms.

For a long time, we don’t even talk. Even Harper sits, quiet and shellshocked, just letting us hold her. Suddenly, Ren starts to speak. It sounds familiar. I realize he’s reciting that book he read her—the one he read from the hospital. He struggles to remember the words off the top of his head, but Harper knows them all, and she laughs her little manic laugh when he deviates wildly off the tale.

She can still giggle and laugh and kick her feet in excitement, and just like that, Ren takes all that pain and trauma of today and starts to wrap it up and dissolve that, too. Spin it out of existence.

My body hurts, and my mind is blank with exhaustion, but my heart feels a million times lighter than it has in years.

***

When it’s almost dark, we’re settled in with painkillers and exhaustion. A man comes to stitch up Ren’s hand. I don’t recognize him, but they seem familiar with each other. They disappear to somewhere in the house, putting at least a floor between us. I’d like to go with him, but I know how men are. They like to lick their wounds in private. Maybe later, when it’s just the two of us, I can get my hands on him the way I want and kiss away all that pain from him.

I leaf through Ren’s letter in the aftermath, all the dense legal paperwork with my mother’s name peppering the page. Proof of life, again and again. The possibility of seeing her again is finally settling in. If we can find her.

But then, what would that even look like? Would she even forgive me for settling in with Ren? Would she grab me by the shoulders and try to shake me out of it, or scream at me for betraying our family’s memory?

My head throbs. I put the folder down as Ren comes back into the living room. Harper has fallen asleep with her head on my thigh.

“Should I take her to her room?” he asks.

“I don’t want her to wake up alone, not after that.”

He takes a blanket from off the couch to tuck around her.

A clean white bandage now makes a stark contrast to the dark glove on his other hand. He’s patched up on that arm, too, but I can only see the bandage peeking out from under his shirt sleeve.

“How are you feeling?” he asks.

“Confused, mostly,” I admit. He settles down with a glass of something dark amber between his hands. He offers me one, but I don’t think it would help right now. “Who did that?” I ask, gesturing to his hands.

“A nobody,” he says. “Just someone who’s dead now.”

There’s a lot of filling in to do—connecting the dots, trying to figure out where all these lines of my life have finally intersected. Ren and Elijah knew that bringing armed men into Jon’s place was a sure way to get me killed; the only weapon they had in their arsenal was the element of surprise. Elijah’s loyalty was still a gray area, and Ren used it to his advantage. I don’t know if that means they’re on good terms now or not—but I know that family ties won out in the end.

“And what about…I mean, strippers ?” I ask, giving Ren a sideways glance. The corner of his mouth twitches, and he gives one of those lazy shrugs.

“Dellucci said women were his weakness.”

It doesn’t feel right to joke about a dead man, but Ren’s grin is infectious.

“Stop,” I mutter, nudging him with my elbow, but there’s no conviction in it. “Why would Marlow agree to that? He and Dellucci—I thought they were on the same side.”

“Marlow didn’t have any part in it. I couldn’t roll up with a bunch of men to Jon’s place without getting you killed in the process, but a strip club? That was easy. Marlow ran at the first sign of trouble. Elijah has an in with one of the girls there.”

“Cali,” I fill in for him. He seems surprised I would know that, but he continues.

“She and a few others were willing to help right out the gate—”

My heart flutters, skipping with gratitude. I need no explanation for that. I know what women like that do when there’s a child in danger, when there’s something that they can do to help—they rally .

It makes sense to me, finally. We try to help others the way we wish to be helped ourselves. I’m sure plenty of those girls have sat up at night thinking about someone coming and rescuing them. I know I used to.

“But for the holdouts, she helped negotiate a deal. And…I did make a few big promises to get their help. And it involves you.”

“Me?”

Ren hesitates, looking into his glass.

“Well, I was going to bring this up later, once things are settled, but…how would you feel about running a strip club?”

I gawk at him.

“You want me to run a place like that? I’m not Marlow, Ren. I’m not…I couldn’t —”

“I don’t want you to run it the way Marlow ran it. I want you to make it legitimate. Aboveboard. You can turn the offer down, if you want. But I’ll have to find someone else to do it, and I won’t trust them half as much as I would trust you. And neither will they.”

I search his face, finally realizing that Elijah must have told him that we were all old friends. That I had been trying to help one of them. And now, I have the chance to help all of them. To actually make that difference I had always dreamed of.

“So, you run the family business and I run a strip club under your name,” I say, feeling the idea out.

“Not…exactly,” Ren says.

I glance at him.

“When I was trying to make sure you and Elijah both would be taken care of, I handed over the business to him in full,” Ren explains. “He got the revenue. You’d get the fortune, when I died. It’s not in my control anymore. The family is in all the ways that matter, but legally, I’ve washed my hands of it.”

“Won’t Elijah give it back?”

“Knowing him?” Ren sighs as if it’s a fault. “Probably.” His eyes linger on Harper, his face passive. “But I don’t know if I want it. I have a lot of time to make up for, and I’m tired of distractions.”

“If I’m at a strip club half the time, and Harper is in school most of the year, you wouldn’t be very distracted.”

Ren laughs a low, sweet rumble. His arm wraps around my shoulder as he pulls me in against him, his lips pressing to my temple.

“Nadia,” he says, his voice soft, “You and Harper aren’t the distractions.”

His lips roam down and find mine, his kisses soft and sweet, with just the darkest little bite.