Technically, Dr. Glendaver cleared me for sex six weeks ago, but the truth is I’ve been too exhausted to do much more than feed Luca Jr, consult on a couple of cases with Matti, and throw together dinner before falling into bed most nights.
However, last week, Luca Jr., who we call Lucky, started occasionally sleeping through his midnight feeding, so we moved him into the nursery that used to be Naima’s room a few days ago. He must like his new digs because he’s been sleeping through the night ever since. Hence me waking up finally feeling like a human being capable of having actual desires outside of a “eat,” “sleep,” “pee,“ and “feed.”
Taking advantage of my restored ability to lie facing down, I scoot on my stomach until I get close enough to reach down to check whether Luca feels the same.
The answer to that question is instantaneous. Luca goes from soft to hard and long beneath his briefs, as soon as my hand cups his junk, no stimulation required.
“Heya, Reynolds. What’s what?” he asks, his voice gravelly with sleep.
“Morning, Ferraro,” I answer, finding his mouth for a kiss as my hand begins moving up and down on his hard length.
I don’t get many strokes in before he removes my hand and takes my mouth, re-establishing dominance with a single roll on top of me.
My nightshirt gets pulled up and over my head, and if he notices the extra bit of tummy beneath my breasts, there’s no indication of it. He kisses the extra baby weight, too, as if it’s just as sexy as the rest. Then he pulls off my underwear and his tongue finds its way between my legs.
“Oh, Luca…,” I breathe out because it’s honestly been too long.
But delightful as his mouth is, I soon find my body squirming for more. “Luca, fuck me,” I gasp, pulling on his silky hair. “Please.”
Luca’s proven to be a wonderful family man so far, loving and doting and wholly sympathetic to my up and down emotions, during these first few months of motherhood.
However, this morning he ignores my pleas. “Don’t rush me,” he says, his voice muffled in my pussy. And a few minutes later, I come underneath his ruthless tongue.
It’s not quite the gushes I experienced when I was pregnant, but plenty for lubrication. I sigh my thank you in Luca’s mouth when he finally comes back up, and his lips captured mine. I can taste myself on him, as he lines himself up and pushes in so carefully, I only feel a twinge of pain. And the groan that escapes from his lips as he begins pumping tells me he’s been missing this, too.
Still, he manages to keep his grind impossibly slow. “Tell me if I’m hurting you,” he mumbles against my lips.
Of course, he’s not hurting me. I love this. Love all the missionary skin-to-skin and kissing him. Love the feel of his tight butt underneath my hands as his hips roll into mine, taking me like he used to before my pregnancy.
“I love you,” I murmur in between kisses.
His hips falter, losing the rhythm as his head lifts from my lips. I usually don’t get this sentimental in the middle of sex, and I can tell I’ve surprised him.
“I love you, too, Ambs,” he answers nonetheless, and I get the feeling he’s staring down at me, bemused.
Then he drops his head back down, his lips re-capturing mine, right before the orgasm blooms. Announcing the spring better than the smell of flowers, the call of birds or the melody of any Frank Sinatra song ever could.
I love Luca, and he loves me. Yes, this is most definitely what happily ever after feels like.
17
I’m Beginning to See the Light
LUCA
So, this is what happily ever after feels like.
“That house is fucking perfect for us,” I tell Stone as we get back into the car to head back into the city after saying goodbye to the realtor and Zahir. “One floor, open plan. Easy stairs. Huge bathrooms and kitchen. Next door to Prin and Zahir. The only thing working against the place is the location. Think I’ll have trouble convincing Amber to move out of the city?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care,” Stone answers, still too much my cousin to even pretend to be any kind of polite. “You want to live in Jersey, keep your bromance going with the sheikh by moving in right next door, that’s between you and the missus. Don’t see why you’re asking me.”
“Because Rock’s not here,” I answer truthfully, missing the more talkative of the Ferraro twins. He’d be all over this HGTV pickin’ a new house shit.
Stone shrugs unsympathetic in the driver’s seat. “You’re the one who wanted an extra man on her without her realizing you were putting an extra man on her,” he answers. “Not that Rock’s much protection, especially since he started dating that Naima chick.”
“Yeah, tell me about it,” I answer, pulling out the phone to text Amber’s assistant about the house.
“Still don’t know how I’m going to replace Rock now that he’s given me his two-weeks’ notice,” I say to Stone as I forward the listing for the A-frame estate I want to put an offer on to the hidden assistant. “You’re a lot better in the protection department, but you lack his finesse when it comes to middleman negotiations.”
“Rock quit?” Stone asks.
I statue, my thumbs freezing in mid-air. Stone not knowing something Rock was doing before me is a lifetime first. Quite frankly, up until this very fucking moment, I’d been operating under the assumption that they had some kind of twin ESP going for the shit they didn’t say out loud. “He didn’t tell you?”
“No,” he answers. One word, but he’s white-knuckling the wheel, and I’ve got the feeling his death grip doesn’t have anything to do with all the asshole drivers on the Palisades Interstate Parkway.
“This how you felt when I announced I was going legit?” I ask him—as close as sympathetic as I’m going to get with a dude like Stone.
“Nah. Knew you’d be back,” he answers, voice tight.
I did come back. As bad as I felt after Amber divorced me, becoming the head of the Ferraro Family felt and still feels inevitable—even if I know it doesn’t sit well with Amber. She’s only ever come to those two morning meetings before Lucky’s birth, and when I try to bring Ferraro Family stuff up at dinner, she acts like she doesn’t want to know. Often changing the subject to the legitimately good work Ferraro Disaster Management does all around the world. She’s even been talking about joining FDM’s legal department when she goes back to work, instead of rehanging her shingle now that Matti’s closed out most of her cases.
I can feel her building a case for me to go legitimate as sure as the hard-ons I haven’t been bothering her with since she gave birth. But no matter how well she presents that argument, my answer’s going to be a Frank Sinatra song about doing it my way. I’m the Ferraro Don. It’s who I was meant to be, and I’m not going to make the mistake of going against my basic nature again.
That’s not the case with Rock, though. He’s always been incapable of living up to the Ferraro name, no matter how Stone tried to train him. Unlike me, it’s easy to imagine Rock never coming back to our crime family. He’ll get some job. Settle down with Naima. Have babies. Hang out less and less with his dark shadow of a brother. Until one day the fact that they’re identical twins become a party conversation topic instead of a fact everyone in both their worlds know.
But I guess Stone doesn’t much want to talk about his brother’s decision to quit the family business. He thumbs the volume button on the Cadillac’s wheel, cranking Frank Sinatra to drown any further conversation on the subject of his deserter brother.
“How Lucky Can One Man Get”—feels ironic where Stone’s concerned, but it’s the perfect narration for my life.
And maybe we would have listened to Frank all the way back to my office, but the phone goes off, and Naima’s name appears on my caller ID.
“Hey, Naima, what’s up?” I ask, heart thumping because she, Amber, and Rock were supposed to go to Lucky’s three-month wellness check-up a couple of hours ago.
“Are you sure Amber’s n
ot mad at me about the birth?” Naima demands in reply.
Oh, I let out a sigh of relief, though I’m beginning to regret giving Naima my personal number when she moved out. She didn’t seem to hear the “for emergencies” I tacked on when Rock handed her a new phone with my digits already programmed in. This isn’t the first conversation we’ve had behind Amber’s back about whether she’s forgiven Naima for the argument that sparked her early delivery.
“She’s fine, Naima,” I tell her. Again. “And she was grateful for the extra help with Lucky today, trust me on that.”
Stone looks over at me from the driver’s seat and rolls his eyes like he’s wondering how the hell his brother ended up with this needy chick. Can’t say I’m not thinking the same thing. Amber still says the argument was her fault because she didn’t understand how much Naima wanted to raise a child. But I’ve got to wonder why Naima’s still calling me about her friendship with Amber when she should be concentrating on settling down with Rock and starting a family of her own since she wants a kid so bad.
“I’d love to trust you on that, but she didn’t even show to pick me up, and she’s not answering any of my texts. So apparently, Rock and Joey are good enough substitutes for me. I can totally be replaced.”
“Wait, hold on,” I say, all my alarm bells going off. “What do you mean she never showed up?”
Part V
Everything Happens to Me
18
Ill Wind
Amber
“You really should have kept our extraction appointment,” a voice sing songs above me.
I don’t lift my head, because I refuse to give him the satisfaction of watching me react. But I know who’s come to visit me in my frigid, dank prison.
It’s Peter. My brother. In DNA only, as it turns out. But unfortunately, I didn’t fully understand that before I woke up on a concrete floor.
That had been hours ago, and I hadn’t been nearly as cool as I’m acting now when I tried to rush forward in a panicked search for my baby only to discover a set of cold steel bars where I’d expected air to be.
Flashes of memory came back to me then. Playing with Lucky in the back seat of the car ferrying us to his three-month check-up… Rock asking Joey to stay behind with the car…Rock confessing me there was something he wanted to talk with me about regarding Naima as we entered the building with him carrying Lucky’s car seat….a sudden pinch of pain…followed by a woozy collapse to the ground.
I’d been kidnapped I realized after running into those bars. Kidnapped and put in a cage, like the one my dad built beneath our house in the Massachusetts woods. And moreover, Lucky, my baby, my heart had been kidnapped, too.
The only thing that kept me from losing my breakfast was the intense, primal need to find my son. “Where’s my baby? Where’s my baby? Bring him to me!”
I’d screamed that demand at the top of my lungs, only to have a hard voice immediately answer from the other side of the bars, “Kid’s alright. More alright than you anyway.”
I’d startled then. Not just because I hadn’t realized there was someone else in the room I could only assume was a basement with me, but also because the voice sounded exactly like my father’s. How could that be though? Was this some kind of trick? His ghost? A hallucination?
But then I got a hold of myself and forced my rational part of my brain to cut off the hysteria trying to collapse my mind. The voice was the same, but the tone…it was nothing like the one my father used with me. This man’s voice was harder, tighter…like he hated me. The opposite of my father’s husky tender.
“Danny Jr?” I’d realized out loud. “It’s you, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Who the fuck else would lock you in an exact replica of Dad’s basement?”
Okay, never mind that I couldn’t see where I was being kept. “Oh, I didn’t realize it was an exact replica.” I’d answered, falling back on the purposefully non-confrontational tone I use when I suspect a prospective client might be a little crazy. Then I’d wondered out loud, “How did you even know what that basement cell looked like?”
“What? You think dad didn’t have a basement cell at our house, too? Yours was for the VIPs, but he used ours to deal with everybody else who got out of line. Don’t believe what that asshole Ferraro told you. You weren’t anything special, Bella. Your ma was just another place for him to go when mine was being a bitch.”
It was hard, so hard not to react to any of that. A dumb primal need to defend my mother against a member of my dad’s real family rose up like a shadow inside me. And I wanted to scream at him that we were special to my father, no matter what Danny Jr. had decided on his own. But no, it would be unwise to waste my breath defending the dead, and at this moment my mother wasn’t what really mattered.
“My baby. Is he okay?”
“He’s fine. My girl’s taking care of him upstairs…. For now.”
His voice was all menace, but I’d forced myself to stay calm because dogs smell fear. “I exist, and you don’t like that. I get it. But please, whatever revenge you’re planning against me, my baby doesn’t deserve to die. Do what you need to do to me. But please, don’t murder my baby.”
I’d begged Danny Jr. But my pleas were met with silence. And the next thing I’d heard was the sound of his footsteps going upstairs that groaned under his weight. And I had to wonder if this replica basement even had a set of old wood stairs like ours.
I’d guess then that Danny Jr and his younger brother, Peter, weren’t quite as estranged as the Boston-born Assistant D.A. had led the rest of his colleagues and me to believe over his past few years in New York.
So now I’m zero percent surprised to hear Peter’s voice, not on the other side of a crappy burner phone, but just beyond the bars of my prison cage. And this time I don’t bother to get up from my seated position on the hard, cold floor
“You really made this harder than it had to be by marrying that animal a second goddamned time. Plus, you ruined my original plan to put him away with his own wife’s testimony,” Peter says, his voice hard with the same cold disgust as his brother’s. But his tone takes on a gleeful note when he adds, “At least that’s what I thought at first. But thanks to my guy on the inside of Ferraro’s org, I was able to come up with a new plan. Even better than the first.”
Rage. Pure and white-hot fires within me. But…no…no…I tamper down my primal instinct again because I’ve got to keep my lawyer hat on here. I’ve got to make my case.
I swallow down my anger and fear and somehow manage to keep my voice from shaking as I guess, “You’re going to kill me, your sister. That’s your new plan, isn’t it? Then you’re going to pin my murder on Luca. Actually, you won’t do the killing, will you? You’ll leave that to Danny Jr. And you’ve probably told him this is all about avenging Daddy. But, of course, it’s not about Daddy, because we both know he wouldn’t have wanted you to kill his only daughter. This is about your need to prove to everybody you’ve got what it takes to become a legal superstar, even though you’re a mobster’s son.”
His tense silence tells me more than anything that I’ve hit the nail right on the head.
“This is one of the things that’s annoyed me about you from the start, Bella,” he says after a long while. “You somehow manage to be both smart and incredibly stupid at the same time. You’ve spent the last five years, developing your career only to let your rising star get pulled down by that animal you decided to remarry.”
There comes the firm click of hard soles walking forward on concrete, and then the air in front of me is filled with the scent of department store cologne. “Make no mistake here, Bella, your stupidity over Ferraro is why you’re in this cage now. That and only that.”
“Spare me your judgmental bullshit,” I say with a heavy pretend sigh. “And stop acting like you’re any better than him. You’d literally kill your own defenseless sister to get ahead. Your desire for revenge against Luca and your career ambition is why I�
�m down here and nothing else.”
Another beat of annoyed silence, then I hear a hard smack of hands coming together, clapping with mocking precision. “Brava, Bella. You’re even more defensive of that animal now than you were before I convinced those Deltano idiots to beat that baby out of you. Too bad I didn’t find out about the one upstairs until it was too late.”
I’m on my feet and across the cell before I can remind myself to stay cool and keep Peter on the defensive. He was the one! Not Luca. He was the one who brought the Deltanos to my office door. Peter was the reason I lost my first baby. The reason for the soul-crushing guilt I’ve carried around for nearly six years now.
With that realization, all traces of my cool inner lawyer disappear. I can’t stay calm. I just can’t. “Let me out of this cell. I will fucking kill you!”
“No, I don’t think so.” He cuts me off with a bemused chuckle. “Danny’s not done digging the graves yet. But, you know, I think I will take you up on your invitation to get ‘the hell out of’ your face, Bella. It’s a long drive from Massachusetts back to New York, and I’ve some important questions to consider. Like what to do with this baby of yours. I’d assumed we’d just kill the both of you, so that I could throw a double homicide at Ferraro along with all the other charges. But Danny Jr.’s giving me feedback about it. Apparently, his moolie girlfriend wants to keep Ferraro’s spawn and raise it as her own. So that’s another complication I’ll have to deal with.”
Moolie. It’s been so long since I heard that derogatory Italian word for black people, it takes me a few beats to understand what Peter is telling me. But when I do, my head fills with static, drowning out the rest of Peter’s complaint.
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