Raised voices draw my attention. I stand up just as someone turns the music down. Three men in suits are standing near the front door, just inside, and they’re arguing loudly with Gino and two of my other guys, Jackson and Pierce.
“Where is he?” asks one of the strangers.
“Not here. So fuck off,” says Gino.
“You looking for me?” I ask loudly.
Everyone’s head turns toward me.
I step toward the men, glaring hard. Anger and bitterness are ripe in my chest, months in the making. I’m ready to hurt someone. To break something. Even if it only gives me a moment’s reprieve from being trapped in my own head with my thoughts and regrets, I’ll take it.
One of the men whispers something to the tallest of the three, who nods in response, eyes locked on me.
They reach for guns all at the same time, but Gino, Jackson, and Pierce were ready for as much. They draw their own guns too. It all happens in a fraction of a second. People scream and run for the exits, but the six men are completely motionless. Three guns pointed to my chest while my men have their own weapons trained on the intruders.
I look into the barrels of their guns. It’s not a feeling you get used to—knowing only the twitch of a finger stands between you and death. I could vividly describe every time I’ve ever had a gun pointed at me. Each is a memory my brain locked in with crystal clear detail, and I’m sure this will be one too, if I live to remember it. My heart pounds in my chest, breaths coming rapidly, but I walk closer to them until my chest bumps against the barrel of one of their guns. I look the tallest one in the eyes—the one I take to be highest ranking.
Moving closer goes against every instinct in my body. Every time I’ve looked before crossing the road or watched my step next to the edge of a cliff, or the times I’ve avoided driving so fast that I might risk crashing. Years and years and years of nothing but self-preservation all leading up to now, to one single moment where I gamble my future by assuming none of these would-be assassins want to die today. “Want to explain what motivated you three to commit suicide before my men gun you down?”
“You know what you did,” he says. He has thick, black eyebrows and a receding hairline that’s dotted with beads of sweat.
“Enlighten me. Because I have no fucking idea.”
“The boss’ daughter. You knocked her up.”
The four words lance through me like hot iron. They bounce around in my head, ricocheting and leaving ruin in their wake. “She’s pregnant?” I ask, voice strained.
“Don’t fucking pretend you don’t know,” says the man.
Gino takes a step closer, jabbing his gun in the man’s direction as a warning.
“Where is she?” I ask.
The men are all tense, eyes darting between me and my men nervously. They must not have expected to wind up at gunpoint like this. Maybe they thought we’d all be too wasted from the party to give them a proper fight.
Guess they thought wrong.
My fingers itch for the gun inside my jacket. I’d never live if I tried to pull it, but neither would they. They’d gun me down and they’d be punched through with holes by my men. It’d be a bloodbath. A minute ago, I might’ve welcomed the quick, painless end. Now though? I know Ana is pregnant.
My Ana is carrying my baby, and she’s out there somewhere without me. Alone and probably scared. Probably thinking I’ve already forgotten her and moved on.
“I’ll make you a deal,” I say when the men don’t respond to my question. “You tell me where she is, and I’ll let the three of you walk out of here. You can tell Rosiano I was gone before you got here. You can also tell him he’s a fucking scumbag for trying to have the father of his grandson killed, while you’re at it.”
The three men all share a look. No matter how men talk, very few are ready to die. From the way these three are fidgeting, I don’t think any of them wants to die here. Not today.
“How do we know you’d let us leave?” asks one of the men.
“Feel free to keep your guns drawn until you’re out the door. My men won’t shoot because they’ll know it’ll mean I’m dead. And you won’t shoot because you’ll know you’d be dead. It’s got a great kind of logic to it, doesn’t it?”
They watch me for a few moments before the tall one gives a tense nod to the other two.
“Rosiano’s house,” mutters one of the men, almost as if saying it quietly might negate the fact that he’s snitching.
They slowly begin to back away, then slam the door behind them once they’re outside.
Gino raises his eyebrows at me. “That escalated quickly. So, what’s the plan now?”
“We find out where they’re hiding her and take back what’s mine.”
13
Ana
You’ve hardly eaten, Anabella.” My father sits across from me with his hands templed in front of him. “You’re eating for two, remember?”
“No,” I say bitingly. “I had forgotten I was pregnant. Maybe because you won’t let me talk to the father.”
He flexes his jaw and presses his fingers together until his nails turn white. “The father was a mistake. I’ve gracefully chosen to look the other way and embrace this child as one of our own. You would be wise to stop reminding me about this mistake of yours, or I might change my mind.”
“God forbid my child doesn’t have the blessing of the great Rosiano Torretti. Maybe then my baby wouldn’t need to be caged if she’s a girl or dragged into your pointless wars if he’s a boy. How horrible.”
As always, Ronnie and Franco are sitting nearby, and I can see both of them tensing from the tone I’m taking with my father.
“Out,” he says to them.
They get up quickly, chairs screeching, and leave us alone in the dining room of my father’s house.
“I’ve given you some liberties because this is a difficult situation. But that is over. You will pay me the proper respect from here forward, or I’ll tighten the leash on you. Mark my words.”
I gently set my fork down. “How much tighter can it get, exactly? You’ve already forced me to drop out of my classes. To stay locked up in the house. To stop talking to my friends. What more is there, exactly?”
“That fucking—” my father’s nostrils flare and he relaxes the fist he was making beside his plate with a visible effort. “That Luciani piece of shit can’t see you pregnant. He’d do something stupid to get you back. I know he would. Once you’ve had the baby, we’ll just need to be sure you’re not seen in public with it for some reasonable amount of time, maybe until we can get you married and it would be conceivable that the baby was another man’s.”
“May I be excused?” I ask sweetly, even though the thoughts in my head are anything but sweet. The love I have for my father has been ebbing away like a great wall before a relentless storm. No matter how big or immovable it may have seemed even a few months ago, it can only withstand so much, and now I can feel how every step deeper into this threatens to bring the wall down, to erode away one of the foundational pieces that would bring the whole thing crumbling into a ruin.
He watches me a long time, as if he’s trying to decide if I’m still feeling insolent or if I’m sorry. He must misread my face, because he smiles slightly and nods. “You should get some rest. Yes. Remember, I need you dressed and ready first thing in the morning. We’re meeting with an important guest who has come a long way to visit me.”
I close the door to my room less than a minute later, pressing my back to the wood and sinking down with a sigh. I put my hands to my stomach, feeling the way the skin is already growing tighter as the baby grows. It’s a pleasant feeling. Comforting, even. It makes me feel less alone, even when I’m practically a prisoner in my own father’s home. He can force me to stay away from Angelo, but no matter what he does, the baby will be a part of Angelo he can’t take from me. No one can.
There’s a scraping sound from outside my window that has me on my feet. I inch closer, briefly th
inking about yelling for help but deciding against it because some feeling deep down is telling me to wait.
A head appears in the window, even though I’m three floors up. I don’t comprehend at first. It’s too dark outside to make out the features, but there can’t be a person outside my window this high up, except…
I can see from the way he moves that he must be using a ladder.
I’m paralyzed. Even if I wanted to scream now, I couldn’t, like I’m deep in some nightmare where no matter how hard I try to scream the only sound is a suffocated, whispering hiss.
When the stranger manages to pull the window open, my fear evaporates as the soft light from my room falls on his face.
“Angelo?” I ask.
He presses a finger to his lips, eyes never leaving me as he eases himself through the window with surprising grace for a man his size. He walks to me, eyes so hard that I can feel his intention from across the room.
With a single look, he wipes away months of doubt and indecision. He still wants me. He still wants this. When his eyes fall to my stomach with a meaningful flicker, I realize he knows about the baby, too.
He stops just inches from me, hand rising to touch my cheek and brush my lips with his thumb. He studies my face like he hasn’t seen me in years. “Are we safe here?” he whispers.
“Yes. They don’t come into my room.”
“Good.”
“Angelo,” I say as firmly as I can. “They will kill you if they find you here.”
“I know.”
I want to push him back to the window and beg him to run, but I’m too weak. All I can do is wrap my arms around him and lean my head on his chest, where I can breathe in the spicy sweet smell of him. Fresh and masculine. “It’s yours,” I say.
“I know.” His deep voice vibrates through his chest against my cheek, warm and comforting.
“What are we going to do?”
“Try,” he says simply, as if it’s the most obvious answer in the world.
I pull back to look at him incredulously. “It’s not that easy.”
“Usually, that’s how you know it’s worth trying.”
I want to groan in frustration. “This is serious, Angelo. My father wants you dead. Do you know what he’d do if he knew you were here?”
“He can only want me so dead. If he finds me in here, is he going to want me more dead than he did before tonight?”
I glare at him.
He gives me a small grin in contrition. “I realize it’s serious, Ana. But you have to realize you’re carrying my baby. He’d need to threaten me with a lot more than death to stop me from being with you. The mother of my child.”
His words seep into me like warm water on a cold day, wrapping my bones in his comforting embrace and making me feel totally weightless and safe, even if it’s just for a moment. Because they’re only words after all, no matter how good or strong his intentions are. “There’s no way everybody can win here. If you and I are together, it means you found a way to get my father out of the picture. He and I have our differences, but he’s still my father. I can’t just happily sit by while I wait for you to hurt him, or worse. And if—”
“Ana. I’m not going to hurt your father. He’s your family. That makes him mine. There’s another way. I just haven’t found it yet.”
I push my cheek to his chest again, wanting to believe and trust him to fix everything for me, but knowing deep down that it can’t be that easy. I can’t just close my eyes and hope everything will magically resolve itself.
“Come with me,” he says.
“What?” I ask.
“You said they don’t come in your room. You can come with me tonight and I’ll have you back before morning.”
“Come with you where?”
He shrugs. “Wherever you want to go. The club. My place. Enzo’s place. Just somewhere I can have you to myself.”
I work my lips to the side, wishing he didn’t make it so easy to be stupid. “You’ll have me back before morning?”
“Scout’s honor,” he says.
I laugh a little. “Somehow I doubt you were a boy scout, so that doesn’t count for anything.”
He shrugs. “Swearing on my honor as a mafia boss didn’t seem as compelling.”
“It’s not,” I agree.
“Then I swear I don’t want to do something reckless that will make it even harder to sneak you out of here next time. How about that?”
“That’ll do.”
The waves lap at the shore, making a sound like thousands of leaves rustling in a breeze. The moon’s reflection is broken into countless tiny fragments across the waves, constantly reforming into a whole only to be broken up again.
Angelo’s beach house is one of the only along the coast with the lights on. We’re sitting on his extended patio, which surrounds a huge pool that overlooks the beach and is furnished with hammocks, lounge chairs, and a full bar with an outdoor grill and refrigerator. It feels like having a five star hotel’s amenities to ourselves.
“I kind of expected you to take me to your club,” I say as we lounge beside each other in two of the chairs beside the pool.
“I wanted you all to myself tonight.”
I turn, arching an eyebrow at him. “What does that mean, exactly?”
He studies the waves. “Whatever you want it to, I guess.”
I think that over. I still can’t completely decide if I’m really more to Angelo than some kind of passing fixation, a temporary toy that he’ll get bored of and toss aside in the end, baby or not. The cynical side of me thinks he means he wants to sleep with me again. The optimistic side thinks it means he wants to get to know me more.
“Maybe we should talk about how this is going to work,” I suggest.
He shakes his head. “There will be time for that later. I just want to enjoy you tonight.”
I grin. “Is that just your smooth way of saying you don’t know how this is going to work?”
“It’s my smooth way of saying I can’t stop thinking about you and I’m hoping to add another enjoyable memory to the too-short list I have with you.”
“I see. And would this enjoyable memory involve us in a horizontal or a vertical position?”
“Does it always have to come back to sex with you, sweet, innocent Anabella,” he says, adding the last in a cheesy Italian accent to imitate my father.
“Play it off all you want, but it’s hard to think of much else around you. I want to believe I can trust you, but my instincts keep telling me you’re just a wolf in sheep’s clothing, waiting for me to let my guard down.”
He laughs. “Harsh. But with my baby growing in your belly, I think I’ve earned a kind of right to take you whenever I want, don’t you?”
“I don’t see it that way,” I say, feeling a little coy. The truth is, I’d let him take me right here and now. I know I couldn’t stop him, not if he made it clear that he wanted to. My body isn’t worried about consequences or the future—no matter how my brain may be hung up on those minor details. Around him, it’s only possible to think about the immediate moment and how good it would feel to have his rough hands enveloping me.
Still, I don’t know what I’m doing here. I may be carrying his baby, but that can’t mean anything. Nothing real, at least. Maybe if I was someone else with another life, maybe then it would be enough. For a prisoner like me, it’s only one more reason I should stay away from him and stop letting myself fall into his arms again and again, because every time is only going to make it that much harder when we have to go our separate ways—and we will eventually, my father will make sure of that.
“Then I suppose I’d better start earning my right to another taste,” he says, rolling to one side and resting on his elbow as he shifts his gaze from the ocean to me.
Heat rolls through me, like his attention is a spark that lights the dry kindling inside me in the space of an instant.
“You could start by telling me how a nice guy ended up at the head
of a organized crime family.”
He smiles, but the corners of his mouth turn down after a few seconds, making him look deeply sad.
“What?” I ask.
“Nice guy,” he chuckles. “I’d have an easy time finding some people to disagree with you on that one.”
I frown. “I’m not talking about what you’ve done, Angelo. I’m talking about who you are.”
He flicks his eyebrows up, dismissing the concept. “There’s no difference. You are what you do and what you do is who you are.”
“Then everybody who has ever messed up should just throw in the towel? Accept their label and live with it?” I ask the question with more heat than I intend to, but some small part of myself takes offense to the idea, maybe because I’m not proud of how I’ve let my father rule me for so long, especially at how I let him come between Angelo and I.
He shakes his head, laughing. When he looks back up at me, there’s affection in his eyes. “You don’t think we’re defined by our pasts?”
“I don’t,” I say. It’s true, too. It’s how I found a way to keep loving my father, even after hearing rumors of the things he’s had done—the people he had hurt. He had done bad things. He still did bad things. But he wasn’t a bad man. I had to believe that. I had to. Loving him has become more impossible lately, and as much as I might try, I can only feel a bitter anger when I think of my father now.
“There are some things that you don’t come back from, Ana. Some sins have a price too high to ever pay off.”
I want to ask him what he’s talking about, to argue with him or try to convince him he’s wrong, but something in his eyes warns me off. I study the dark, inky black waves instead. “I had an uncle who was a gambler,” I say after a while. “He’d show up to these illegal card games my dad would host—the kind where you could bet as much as you wanted. He was always betting more than he could afford, and my father would help him out of the holes he’d dig. But eventually my father cut him off. No more money. No more bailouts. Well, my uncle kept on gambling anyway. He ended up owing money to the wrong people.”
Baby for the Brute_A Fake Boyfriend Romance Page 9