Chapter 37: Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia King: Epilogue

Ren and I sprawl in bed, side by side, my body half draped over his. The scar tissue on the inside of Ren’s palm gleams pink and silver, a matching mark on the outside of his hand. I trace it until he finally draws it away.

“Stop,” he mumbles.

“It’s just a habit.”

“I know you were thinking about it.”

And he’s right. I was thinking about it, even now, with long and hazy weeks stretching between us and that day. It has slowly sunk into time’s horizon, the light of that horror still visible, but growing just a little dimmer each day.

“I was just thinking about how lucky you got. How lucky we got. Everything that happened. Even where the knife hit…”

The blade somehow managed to miss the seemingly infinite number of nerves and delicate bones in Ren’s hand, slipping right past anything important.

He shrugs.

“Doesn’t matter. As long I can still pull a trigger.”

I smack him on the arm because his days of pulling triggers are supposed to be far behind us. I put him under me, straddle his waist and take both scarred hands into mine.

“Excuse you. I also have a vested interest in your fingers.”

Ren’s smirk darkens the corners of his smile, shows those pretty teeth.

“Is that right?”

His thumb brushes my lower lip, until my lips part and I wrap my mouth around his fingers.

“Don’t worry, baby. I’m not letting anyone cut out my tongue, either.”

He flips me under him as I yelp, and he uses his fingers and that devilish tongue on me until the past melts away and traps me in the hot, immediate, melting present.

“I don’t want you thinking about it anymore,” he says, as he works his fingers softly between my legs. “Promise me.”

“I’ll try, Ren.”

He doesn’t ask for more than that. He leans his head against my leg as he gazes down at me, the two of us tangled lazily in a heatless foreplay, his motions so automatic and familiar, they don’t hold his attention. I grin at his obvious distraction.

“What?” I finally ask him, giving him a bump with my leg that shakes him back to reality. He grins. That grin that tells me my pretty, broken boy is up to something he probably shouldn’t be. His thumb swirls between my legs until I draw my knees up, sucking in on my lower lip.

“Impatient,” he teases me.

His hand rubs warmly between my legs, slow and steady.

“You’re the one getting sidetracked.”

His silence stretches for a moment, his hand going still.

“What?” I press again, more serious this time, as the heat in my belly gives way to sheer curiosity.

“I just…I want to give you a life that’s worth our past, Nadia,” Ren admits, “Until you never have to look back at it and regret anything that happened. But with a past like ours, something that makes it all worth it is…that’s a hell of a price tag.”

“You are worth it, Ren. Just being like this—”

He shakes his head, as if he’s not enough, but he is.

I push up off the mattress until we are both sitting up in bed, meeting in the middle where I can kiss him. This is my favorite kind of arguing with him now. The long, heavy kisses until one of us comes out on top. It’s usually him. But not this time—I won’t let him win this one.

We tangle over the covers, the fight turning heated in all the right ways.

“Let me convince you,” I beg him.

“It won’t work,” he admits, breaking the kiss to look into my eyes. “Not for me. Everything that happened, Nadia. Your family. I can never give you back what I took. What I’m still taking—”

The mood cools steadily as I realize he’s serious. Something is actually bothering him, throwing the mood off entirely.

“What are you taking, Ren? Because I feel like there are a lot of things up for grabs right now, and you’re kind of missing out—” I tease gently, searching his face as I crawl into his lap to straddle him. “You were the one who said it, right? That we can’t undo what happened between us. We can’t ever put those pieces back the way they were, so what’s the point in trying to repent for it over and over—”

He waves a hand. “No, I know. And I know better than to think I can make up for that, no matter what I do. I just…” his expression flickers briefly. “I suppose I just don’t understand. I thought you knew what was going to happen to my family,” he says, forcing the words out. “But now, I know that wasn’t true. You really had no idea. No involvement at all.”

I nod.

“So then…” his jaw clenches and unclenches, his laugh bitter, “God, it’s so stupid to even bring this up now. Why did you cut me off?” he finally asks. “If there wasn’t anyone else in your life, and you couldn’t have known about any plan? Why else would you do that unless you were done with us?”

I don’t blush easily, but my neck makes an honest effort of it.

“Oh.”

The stupid reason feels so juvenile now.

“It’s not a good reason, Ren. It was just stupid teenager stuff, that’s all—”

But I know that’s not a good enough reason. That won’t make the way it all happened make sense to him, not without the truth. I bow my head, hiding behind a few loose strands of hair as I force myself to tell him.

“Do you remember the charity gala you went to here in Manhattan?”

“…Not specifically.”

“Well, you wouldn’t,” I admit. For Ren, I’m sure it’s just another night, blending in with the countless other events and dances and auctions that we used to frequent at our parents’ urging. “I was going to surprise you. I’d picked out this dress and—” I wave away the old details, because they aren’t important now. “Instead, I overheard you talking to Elijah. I only caught bits and pieces—something about who you were going to dance with that evening. Elijah said your wife might disapprove. And you said…that I was fun, but I wasn’t wife material.”

I glance down at my hand, where the wedding band still hugs my finger. “I guess the joke’s on you, isn’t it?” I say, self-deprecatingly, forcing a smile. “So, I did what any stupid teenager would do. I blocked your number and locked myself in my bedroom for a week to cry it out.” I shrug, “It probably didn’t help that I was pregnant at the time. I just didn’t know it then.”

It still hurts to talk about it, to realize that we are still two people in a bed, both of us thinking that we settled for the other.

“Nadia, I…”

“Don’t apologize,” I wince, jumping on that grenade before he can set it off on both of us. “I shouldn’t—it doesn’t matter now. It’s been years, and…clearly it didn’t matter anyway with how it all turned out…”

“Nadia,” he interrupts, his stern tone causing me to falter and shut my mouth, “I told Elijah I didn’t want to marry you because I didn’t want him to know how serious I was about you. I told everyone that. I couldn’t let them know that you were different.”

I stare at him, a numb disbelief spreading through my chest.

His hand curls around mine, tight and grounding, making sure I am dialed in to every earnest word. And I can always tell when Ren is being earnest. It makes him look younger. “My family had their own ideas about who I’d end up with. You know how they were—but my father said it would be good for me to enjoy dating while I was young and before I settled into the business and the family life. I knew if they found out, they’d try to interfere. And Elijah was always an insufferable little snitch when we were younger.”

My eyes feel too wide; the hinge of my jaw has come loose.

I feel like an animal that’s had a plastic ring around its neck for most of its life, cutting into the skin so deep that the pain had become a part of it. An inescapable truth of existing. And then someone comes along suddenly and rips the garbage off and you remember what it was to live without that awful pain that had been with you in every breath.

“I wanted to marry you, Nadia—for the right reasons, at first, and then for the wrong ones. But I always, always wanted to.”

“That’s what I wanted, too,” I confess, the words ripped out of me. “Even after everything. And I hated myself for it for so long—”

I hide my face in my hand and push down the stupid, soft feeling hammering in my chest. I tell myself again that crying doesn’t do anything. There’s just so much relief, and so much regret for how long I let those words haunt me, and everything they caused. Ren pulls me in against him, and my near-crying bubbles into a wet, miserable laugh,

“This was supposed to be sexy,” I complain dramatically, and Ren laughs into my hair. I wipe my face, grinning, his emotions holding mine back.

“Hey. Who says it can’t still be?” he says, putting me down onto my back again.

A sliver of moonlight falls over him from the window. I know, out there, the water is dark, the city lights dancing in tremble of their reflection. Ren comes into focus over me. I trace his cheek bones with my hands, cup his gorgeous face and feel him here with me.

I close my eyes as Ren lies over me, not fucking or teasing, just kissing and nuzzling in the dark. When he finally spreads my legs, and takes me slowly and gently under him, it feels like a first time of its very own.

***

Before the weather can turn for the season, I am brushing off my wedding gown again. A lot of women don’t get to wear their wedding gown twice in their lifetime; I get to wear mine twice in a single year.

I told Ren we didn’t have to have another wedding—a formal one, with plans and guests and a budget that could buy the moon—but when he asked if I wanted one, I couldn’t lie well enough to convince him I didn’t. Of course I want a real wedding, but even with all of Ren’s wealth and security at my disposal, a part of me still functions in terms of want versus need . I’m trying to get back into the pampered life, like a house cat that lived outdoors for a little too long.

“I have something I want you to look at,” Ren says one evening as I watch for the hundredth time as Harper practices her skipping walk as the flower girl. Despite the reputation of most brides, I’m not the one making her perfect it. Harper just likes jumping around, throwing flower petals around the hallway and wearing a “fairy” dress.

“Daddy, look!” Harper says, urgently, scrambling to try and pick up the petals so he can see her do her walk. For him, she puts a spin on it.

While Ren applauds her, I skim through the gallery of pictures he’s handed me on his phone. Lush valleys and quaint, low cottages settled on hillsides.

“Spain? I’ve never been.”

“For the honeymoon,” he suggests.

I arch an eyebrow at him.

“Why there?”

“Because, as you said, we’ve never been. And…” a flicker of hesitation in his voice. “I have some other business there.”

“Really?” I grin at him, accusing and stunned at the same time. “You’re going to do business on our honeymoon?”

Ren backs me up, towering over me until there’s barely any space left between us as he crowds me into the wall.

“I’m going to do you on our honeymoon. Often, and for a long time until you will be grateful to get rid of me.”

He nuzzles against me, our noses touching. I grin right back.

“Do your worst.”

Truly, the past few weeks have felt like a honeymoon, now that I am becoming Ren’s actual, consenting, worthy bride. I can stand to lose him for one night on our actual honeymoon, if the rest of our time spent together is like this.

***

While Ren’s life winds down, mine gets busier—

“Tell your husband you need his boot on someone’s neck,” Luna says, marching angrily through the strip club with me following her stride. One of the long-term patrons disagreed with the club’s new management policy. My management policy. Just another scumbag who can only learn lessons the hard way. He hails from the Marlow days, when a certain amount of loyalty to the place got you in the backroom with the dancer, and it wasn’t just lap dances they were paying for.

When he realized sex wasn’t for sale anymore, he left us a firmly worded review all over the floor. The bartender pushes a mop around the mess of alcohol and water, with broken bottles and glasses tossed into the trash.

Security wrangled him out. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened, but I have a feeling we’re quickly nearing the last. Once people catch on that Ren is fully in charge now, people are going to learn how to act real fucking quick.

“Ren’s already heard, and he’s going to handle it. Personally.”

I don’t know what Ren will do with him. I just know the man won’t be back here again.

Outside of doing the odd request for me, Ren has stayed true to his plan. He never returned fully to the family business. He is still the don—in the sense of decision-making, respect, obligations, punishments—but Elijah is fully in charge of the financials and the mob roster, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if, one day, Ren just gave it all up and let Elijah take the reins. I think he’s grooming him for it.

But the club— my club —Ren takes a personal interest in that.

I fulfilled his promise and took over the strip club, the one piece of the pie that Ren carved out just for me instead of his brother. There’s still a lot of work to do. Fake IDs to forge, remodeling to be done, financials to consider. And all this kind of thing, while the dust still settles. Endless, day-to-day drama that comes with managing a place like this.

I offered all the girls the chance to leave, enough money to make it home and settle in somewhere if they wanted. A few took the offer. The newest girls. Most didn’t. They’re willing to try it out, still holding onto the dream of the life they were sold by men who with no intention of giving it to them, and too entrenched in the family they’ve made of each other.

“If Ren kills him, get him stuffed,” Luna sniffs. “We hang him in the corner, make an example.”

“See, this is why I can’t just put you in charge of everything—” I fuss at her, her smile never faltering as she grins at me, totally unashamed. When Luna isn’t planning on human taxidermy, I try to work as best I can with her, rather than just have her working for me. She knows the ins and outs of this place, and she knows the girls, and frankly, I still owe her. She was the one who realized things were going south that night, that Marlow knew I was trying to save Sincere. She sensed it like a bad storm, and she sent Sincere off with the money I left with her, enough to get her a room for just a couple nights to hide out in before the whole world imploded.

If it weren’t for Luna’s foresight, willing to risk herself and her girls for my sake— again —everything might have played out differently. I’ve finally come to accept that all I can do is do the best I can by her and the girls here. There will never be a time when we are even. There are some things you can’t repay, even with all the money in the world.

Her and Sincere and Cali—they’re part of my business, and my life, and soon my wedding. They’re an extension of my family, and all the protections that come with being a part of a family.

But I’m still not letting Luna stuff anybody and put them on display. For that, she’ll have to talk to my husband.

***

Our wedding is so perfect, I could have dreamed it.

Every color, dress, and song is all just the way I imagined it. And after all that planning and nitpicking, the only part of it that really matters is the man who takes me into his arms at the end of the aisle and doesn’t let me go.

But there is one extra surprise that Ren has for me on our day. He does the impossible, the thing he said he couldn’t do, putting the broken glass of the past back together one grueling sliver at a time, just for me.

It stops the ceremony for a full ten minutes when I realize who is sitting in the front row, with tears running down her face. I run to her like a child, throw my arms around her, and I cry into my mother’s arms.

***

Ren had already delayed our honeymoon by a week. The evening is already settling in, draped like a big purple shawl on the shoulders of the hillsides as we approach the house. It’s remote and beautiful, with miles of countryside around it.

“It’s gorgeous,” I say, craning for a look down into the valley we just drove up. The road bumps gently under the tires. When I turn back, a sedan parked in the driveway slides into our view.

“Is someone here?” I ask.

Ren stares ahead. I note his lack of surprise or confusion as we pull our rental up beside the strange car.

“Nadia, I have something for you,” he says. “A wedding present of sorts.” I snap my gaze back to him. His voice sounds different—steely and nervous for some reason. He kills the engine, sitting stoically in the driver’s seat while I try to press him.

“Okay. What is it…? Ren?” I try, as he stares through the windshield, his hand clutched as though he’s still driving.

“…Ren, what’s wrong?”

His mouth opens, then shuts again.

“Just…come on,” he finally says. It sounds as though he’s second-guessing, and my giddy nerves start to tense up.

“Ren—”

He closes the door and makes me chase him to the front door, where he punches in the security pin.

“Hey, come on. What’s the matter…?” I ask, my stomach twisted into a tight knot as he won’t look at me. I barely see the lovely house we’re supposed to be enjoying as he walks straight through the cavernous foyer, the sleek kitchen, marches right past the bedroom where we are supposed to be spending our night.

I am not swept over the threshold like a blushing bride, or carried in the nearest soft surface and drowned in kisses. My imagination starts to wither up, fear tugging at the back of my throat the farther into the house we proceed.

He pushes open the last door and steps back.

He won’t look at me.

I step inside. The last light of the day falls through the windows of a narrow laundry room, landing upon the figure there on the floor. Hunched over, hands bound, eyes glittering all black and reptilian with hatred.

Marlow .

I draw a stunned breath. The last I heard of him, he had fled the country upon hearing of Ren coming after him. No one had ever mentioned him again. I assumed he was gone for good.

I back out of the room, my uncle’s curses or pleas muffled by the gag in his mouth.

I look at Ren, stunned. This time, he meets my gaze.

“You asked me to kill him. I refused. And I shouldn’t have. Nothing you ask for will ever be refused again. But this one, I had to make up for. He framed your father. Killed my parents. Told your mother that I’d killed you, so she wouldn’t return. He stole everything from you.” His eyes slide toward the dark doorway, the sun creeping farther down the windowsill and making the shadows harsh. “This is what I wanted to give you.”

He looks at me warily, as if wondering if I’ve changed my mind, if I’m going to condemn him or be angry and disgusted that he’s done it on the night of our wedding. But the truth is that no matter what Ren might do—retire and leave the mob and put this life behind him—this will always be a part of who is. And I love it right along with the rest of him.

I look at Marlow again. My present .

And I smile.

***

Four Months Later

“Look, Mommy! It has a park!”

Ren and I wander into the shade of a tree, watching Harper do paces around the “park.” She’s never been in a backyard before. She goes jumping and tumbling and trying to somersault in the grass.

“Is this the one?” Ren asks.

I glance up toward the old colonial house, with three stories of windows gazing down on us beneath its grand architecture. Harper thought we were lying to her when we brought her along to see it today. She was sure they didn’t make houses this big, or at least, not houses that were wider than they were tall.

This is my third time viewing it. Something about it keeps drawing me back to it again and again. I can’t shake it.

“Doesn’t it seem a little much for just us and Harper?” I ask him.

“Well,” he murmurs, giving me a look that says: That could change at any time.

And he’s right.

My eyes drift back to the house and I can’t help but agree—it does feel right. Like a place we could raise a family. Like home.

“It has someone’s endorsement.” I gesture to Harper. She had run out into the backyard with a scream of “Daddy, Daddy, look! We can run all over the place now! Come on, Daddy—”

Harper takes off across the yard again, sun glinting in her hair.

“Catch me!” she yells.

Ren gives me that boyish grin as we share a look. He pushes up his sleeves, a new tattoo swirling up his scarred arm in the swirling shape of a tiger, and takes off after Harper with a roar, her laughter filling up the air.

“Catch me, catch me!”