Her Mafioso King (The Vitucci Mafiosos Book 4)

by Terri Anne Browning

  I stroked a hand down Ryan’s back, soothing him as well as myself. “No, no. This is fine. I didn’t expect him to miss me. If I had known, I would have stopped and picked him up on my way to work earlier.”

  Ryan leaned back in my arms, his little face scrunched up with emotion. “I was worried about you. You weren’t there when I woke up this morning and Papa said you were okay, but I didn’t believe him.”

  I gave him a reassuring smile. “Ah, l’venok, you don’t have to worry about me. I promise, nothing will ever get me.”

  “Can I stay with you?” His brown eyes, so like his father’s, pleaded with me. “I’ll be good, I swear. Please let me stay with you, Anya.”

  “Of course you can stay. I was feeling lonely without you to keep me company anyway.” Kissing his cheek, I hugged him against me and met Scarlett’s gaze. “We’ll meet you for lunch.”

  “Are you sure you can keep him with you?” she asked hesitantly. “I know how busy you are. I just wanted to show him you were fine, not pawn him off on you.”

  I laughed. “You aren’t pawning him off. I really do want him here with me.”

  “Okay, great. That is a relief. Well, in that case, we’re going to head out. I have a few errands to get done before we have our lunch.” She touched Ryan’s back, but he flinched at the contact, and she dropped her hand with a sigh. “Be good, kiddo.”

  I waited until they were out the door before I set Ryan on his feet. As soon as he was standing, his hand grasped mine and held on tight. “I didn’t like waking up without you at home,” he told me with a stubborn tilt to his chin that made my heart catch at how much he looked like Cristiano. “You should marry Papa and live with us forever.”

  Everything in me went completely still as I looked down at him. “Did Papa tell you to say that, Ryan?”

  “No. I just want you to marry Papa and be my mom.”

  My next breath shuddered out of me, and it took all of my willpower to keep my tears at bay. Somehow, I wasn’t sure how, but somehow, I was able to smile brightly enough to make him smile back. I lasted long enough to get him into his usual spot under the blanket fort and get to the bathroom before the tears fell.

  The sob that left me echoed off the bathroom walls, but I couldn’t control it and I couldn’t find the energy to care that I was crying so hard. For several minutes, I just allowed myself to cry. For the pain of the past.

  For the love of a child I wished with every fiber of my being was my own…

  For the love of a child—my child—whom I would never get to hold and love as I did Ryan.

  Chapter 19

  Anya

  Leaning my head back against the wall in the bathroom, I touched a hand to my stomach. Even now, five years later, I could still feel the phantom kicks of the baby I’d once carried.

  My pregnancy came as the biggest shock of my entire life. One of the conditions of the special school I had been forced into when I was twelve was to be sterilized before reaching adulthood. It was considered the graduation ceremony from student to assassin, and once the surgery was over, I was given a day to heal and then handed my first target.

  Children were something I knew would never be a part of my future.

  Yet, there I was, very much pregnant.

  Bringing a child into the world when there were so many enemies who could use such an innocent against me seemed unfair. Two days after that last night with Cristiano, I was sick and went to my doctor because I couldn’t keep anything down. Less than an hour later, my pregnancy was confirmed.

  As soon as I knew life was growing inside me, I started making arrangements to get out of the assassin business. I went back to St. Petersburg, where it all started, and I made sure every possible threat to my unborn baby was eliminated. No loose ends. Nothing and no one who could ever try to take my child away from me in any shape or form could be left breathing.

  When I got back to New York, determined to tell Cristiano I was pregnant, it was to find him married to Sheena. Finding out the man who only the week before had been sharing my bed was now someone else’s husband made me go oddly numb. Of all the reasons why he would break things off that night, for some reason, another woman hadn’t been anywhere on the list.

  For more than a week, I stayed locked in my apartment, unable to face the reality that the man I loved—the man I thought loved me just as much—was no longer free to love me. We’d created life, yet he wasn’t going to be there to help me bring that life into the world. He wouldn’t be there to see our child take his first steps or say his first word.

  How would I even go about telling Cristiano that I was pregnant when he was someone’s husband?

  There was no fucking way I was going to share my baby with his wife, a woman I didn’t even know. Nor would I share my child with a man who could so easily walk away from the people he cared about. I wouldn’t let Cristiano hurt our baby the way he hurt me.

  I decided to keep my pregnancy a secret, telling no one but Jenny, who had become my confidant and friend, even as young as she was, and I returned to St. Petersburg. I was reeling from the pain and shock of what Cristiano had done, but I had my baby to think about. The weeks dragged into months, and I only had the will to get out of bed or to feed myself for the sake of the baby.

  And then, suddenly, I didn’t even have that any longer.

  In my fifth month, when my baby bump had just started to form and after spending weeks falling in love with every little kick I felt from that tiny body moving around inside of me, he suddenly stopped moving. I didn’t even realize it at first. It wasn’t until later in the day that it hit me that I hadn’t felt him move in hours. I called the doctor, who told me it was probably nothing, to eat something and the baby would start moving around again.

  But I knew in my soul something was wrong.

  I went to the hospital, demanded they do an ultrasound as soon as I walked through the doors of the emergency room. My tears were already blinding me by the time the doctor looked up from the ultrasound machine screen and told me in a pained voice that my son had no heartbeat.

  The next twenty-four hours were the worst of my life. Having to go through the pains of labor, of pushing a lifeless baby into the world, broke the last piece of my sanity. The worst part, the moment I realized my heart was irreparably damaged and would never be whole again, was holding him for the first and last time.

  He was so tiny, so perfect, so beautiful. He had a full head of dark hair, and every feature told me that he would have one day mirrored his father. In that moment, I’d never needed Cristiano more. Yet he was home, with his wife.

  I held the little being who had no name on my lap, stroking my finger over his brow, praying with everything in me that it was just a bad dream. That I would wake up any minute and the baby in my arms would be screaming. That the one small thing I had to live for would still be a part of me. I would have given anything, my own life if it was necessary, if it meant my precious baby would just open his eyes and look at me.

  Then the nurse came in and took the baby away, and I was left bereft and broken. My last link to the man I loved was gone, taken from me just as swiftly and just as permanently as his father had left me.

  That was when my true downward spiral began.

  I lost everything when I lost my son. I had nothing. It felt like I was alone in the world, like no one cared if I lived or died.

  Who would miss me?

  Not a single person.

  My parents and second oldest brother were dead. My oldest brother had his own family now. Cristiano was starting a family with someone else. There wasn’t a person in the world who would mourn me if I just ended it all then and there.

  Somehow, I made it back to my house. To this day I still don’t remember how. I sat on my bed staring at the wall for days, neither asleep nor awake. Not moving, at times not even breathing. The pain consumed every cell; there wasn’t a part of my body big or small that didn’t hurt, and I was surprised the pain alone did
n’t kill me.

  It was Jenny who saved me in the end. Having been unable to reach me for over a week, she called Victoria and begged her to check on me. My sister-in-law showed up with my brother and rushed me to the hospital. I hadn’t eaten since before the birth of the baby, hadn’t had a drop to drink in just as long. It was a wonder I was even still alive, or so the doctors told them. I was a bag of bones, severely dehydrated and too weak to even lift my own head.

  Once I’d been given fluids and started to eat on my own, I expected my sister-in-law to ask about the baby. But she never did. I didn’t know if the doctor hadn’t told her, or if she just wanted to let me bring up the subject. Either way, the baby wasn’t mentioned, and I was thankful for that small reprieve.

  I was released from the hospital a few days later, and it was then that I realized the doctor actually hadn’t told them anything about my miscarriage. Victoria thought it was all because of her brother. She knew the pain of a bad breakup. I’d consoled her plenty of times during the weeks she and Adrian had been apart, after all.

  To me, however, it wasn’t a lie. Everything I was feeling right then was because Cristiano left me. He broke me. Not even his child wanted to be with me. Why else would he have left me too?

  But now…

  Now, Ryan wanted me to be his mom. He wanted me to marry his father and be the mom he chose, not the one he was birthed to.

  It broke my heart all over again. Part of me felt like I was betraying the memory of my son, of the precious life I hadn’t been strong enough to carry to full term and bring into the world happy and healthy. But a bigger part ached to be Ryan’s mother. To get to call him my son and watch him grow up, to hold his hand and guide him through the trials of life and eliminate anything or anyone who got in his way.

  To do that, however, meant being with Cristiano. And I knew I wasn’t brave enough to do it.

  Chapter 20

  Cristiano

  Dante’s house wasn’t far from the compound, barely a five-minute drive. I got there first thing, unsure why I was sweating bullets at having to question a teenager. Fuck, I’d tortured grown men for more information than I needed from Jenny, without a single moment of regret. Yet the mere thought of having to force the girl to talk to me about Anya was making my stomach roil.

  Jarvis, the bodyguard who lived with my cousin and friend, answered the door when I rang the bell. He walked with a limp after the accident my uncle’s men caused him when they took Jenny, but he didn’t let that bother him. The guy was huge, bigger than the majority of my own men, and menacing-looking. Yet I’d seen him become as cuddly as a kitten when it came to Jenny, Adley, and Matteo.

  “Heard you were coming,” Jarvis said with a brief lift of his lips into a grin that was gone before it even had time to form. Stepping back, he let me enter the house. “They’re in the dining room. Good luck.”

  “Yeah, thanks. I’ll need it.”

  I found Allegra and Dante sitting at the dining room table, waiting with Jenny. She sat in her chair, arms crossed mutinously over her chest as she glared at the doorway expectantly. Despite being only Allegra’s half sister, Jenny looked so similar to her it was like going back in time and seeing my precious little cousin sitting there. That same long dark hair. That same tilt of her head as she contemplated me. Only Allegra never would have been so openly hostile as a teenager. She was too sweet, too kind, and too scared of her father back then to ever attempt to show her temper.

  These days, however, she didn’t let anyone walk over her. Proof of which was the look she was shooting me over her coffee cup. “Have a seat, Cristiano,” she offered, her voice tight. “Jenny has school soon.”

  “It’s only half a day,” the teenager reminded her. “I don’t see why I have to go anyway.”

  “We’re not arguing about this again,” Dante told her, his voice calm, but there was no room for disagreement. “School is important. Unless you’re sick, you go no matter how long the school day is.”

  Jenny rolled her eyes but didn’t argue. Instead, she turned her agitation on me. “Well? What are you waiting for? Sit. Let the inquisition begin.”

  As I took my seat, Eloise, the housekeeper, came in with a fresh pot of coffee and a cup and saucer for me. She smiled in greeting, filling my cup. “Good to see you, Cristiano.”

  “You too, Eloise,” I muttered, letting her distract me from my reason for being there. “How have you been?”

  “Same old, same old. How is your father?”

  My gut clenched at the mention of Pop. “He has his good days and his bad. More bad than good.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear that, dear.” She patted me on the arm before switching her gaze to the others at the table. “Why aren’t you eating? Are you sick?”

  Allegra gave her a tight smile. “We’re fine, Eloise. No one is very hungry this morning is all.”

  “Time’s a ticking away,” Jenny told me, her voice cold. “Start talking, or I’m going to head to school now.”

  There were so many questions I had, I didn’t know where to begin. I wasn’t even sure I really wanted the answers now. Wasn’t sure I could even handle the answers if Jenny did actually give them to me.

  But I needed them if I was going to figure out this thing with Anya.

  “How hard was my leaving on Anya?” I finally asked the first of a million questions swirling around in my head.

  She let out a small huff. “She was fine at first. She left a few days after you went to Chicago.”

  “So it was a while before she found out I got married?”

  She shrugged. “A week or two.”

  “Then what happened?” I asked when Jenny just sat there staring at me. Frustrated, I heard my question come out tighter than I wanted it to. “What happened when she found out I was married?”

  She clenched her jaw and broke eye contact with me. Slouching a little in her chair, she didn’t answer, and I didn’t have the patience to wait for her to decide if she was going to.

  “Allegra,” I urged, hoping my cousin could convince Jenny to tell me what she knew.

  “Why do you want to know now, Cristiano?” Allegra demanded angrily. “You left. Started a new life with Sheena. It shouldn’t matter now what Anya went through, because you sure as hell didn’t care then.”

  “Allegra baby,” Dante started soothingly, but the frost in her eyes when she looked at him had his mouth snapping shut.

  “Don’t you dare sit there and pretend like any of this is okay. And now he’s pulling Jenny into the middle of it. Anya’s secrets are her own. She told Jenny in confidence, and they shouldn’t be forced from her now just because Cristiano is suddenly ready to know about the pain Anya went through when he married some…some…some goddamn monster!”

  “You’re right,” I told her in a strained voice, pushing my barely touched coffee away. Scrubbing my hands over my face, I sucked in a pained breath. “You’re absolutely right, Allegra. It isn’t right that I’m asking for the truth about what happened when I hid my head in the sand and carelessly left Anya behind. It was stupid what I did, I’ll be the first to admit that. I never should have married Sheena. But I thought I had to. My mother always wanted the O’Brion family to be her family, and I’d promised her repeatedly that I would marry Sheena and make that a reality for her.”

  Allegra laid her hands flat on the table. “Sometimes our parents are selfish, Cristiano. And sometimes, no matter how much we love them, no matter how loyal we are to them, we have to lead with our hearts instead and do what is right for ourselves and not what they want. If my father had his way, I never would have married Dante. I wouldn’t have this amazing life I now have. I know how much your mother meant to you, but I remember her, and the woman scared the life out of me at times. You had something incredibly special with Anya, and you threw it away because of a promise you made to a woman who only saw the power that marriage would bring, not the happiness or nightmares that would come with it.”

  “Again,
you are right.” I wasn’t about to argue with her on any of that. Every word out of her mouth, no matter how hard it struck me like a physical blow, was true. Where was she when I needed some sense knocked into me five years ago? Then again, that was why I married Sheena without any of my family present, because I knew they wouldn’t have approved. “But I’m still asking Jenny to tell me what happened. I don’t deserve the answers. Fuck, I don’t deserve Anya. But I love her. I know the mistakes I made, and I won’t make them again. I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to make up for what I did, but I don’t know how to do that unless I know what she went through when I left her.”

  Allegra pressed her lips together, and I could tell she was considering what I’d said. But it was Jenny I really needed to convince. “Jenny.” I stood and put my hands on the table, leaning toward her and letting down all my walls, letting her see all the pain I had inflicted upon myself in the years without Anya. “I love Anya. My son, he loves her too. And I know she loves us both. No matter how hard she tries to hide her feelings, I can still see them. I want a life with her, a family with her and my son. I might not deserve that kind of happiness, but don’t you think Ryan and Anya deserve it?”

  “Why?” she cried, jumping to her feet. “Why should I trust you with any of this? You broke her. How do I know you won’t do it again? Why should I trust you with her heart and her secrets when you could hurt her all over again when something else grabs your attention and you walk away from her a second time?”

  “I’m never going to let her go again. The only way I’m leaving her is if I’m dead. Trust me or not, I’m okay with that. Hate me for the rest of your life. Whatever makes you sleep at night, sweetheart. But you know Anya is hurting. I caused that hurt, I admit that.” She sneered at me, but I ignored that. “I think both of us know that the only one who can help her finish healing is me, Jenny. Help me stop her pain. Help me make her whole again.”