by Sam Mariano
Dread moves over me and I look down at Dom. Now he’s happily gnawing on his egg, but just this brief interaction stirs up fears for his future. Truth is, Mateo and I didn’t like each other even before Mia happened, and our dads didn’t get along either. Raising Mateo’s son and my son as brothers seems like a terrible fucking idea. This isn’t how it should be. I should be around. Mia obviously loves him more than anything, but she’s too loving and soft, she tries too hard to see the good in people. How is she going to be Dom’s champion when Mateo’s other kids are his competition?
This isn’t right. Mateo can’t raise my fucking son. I need to be here for him. He’s going to get walked all over without me here to teach him to stand up for himself. He’s already sweet and happy—that may have worked for Mia, but it sure as fuck won’t work for him.
I can’t leave. I can’t leave him here to be kicked around by Mateo’s other kids. Dom deserves better than this shit, and once I leave this house, I can’t protect him.
I should be the one raising him with her, not Mateo. I could do a better job.
Crazy impulses try to rise up in me again. The white house in the sticks where I should have stashed Mia instead of taking her to Vegas.
No, I can’t kidnap her. For one thing, he’d find me. Also, I don’t think Carly would be down with it.
What if I could stay? Mateo let me come back for a week; he’s seen that I haven’t tried to hurt Mia, that I’m still with Carly….
Granted, it’s been hard as hell, and I can’t imagine living this way.
But I can’t just abandon my son. My father left me in Chicago to pursue a better life for himself and look how I turned out. I was old enough to have an opinion, to choose to stay behind. I didn’t know what I was biting off, but Dom’s just a baby. He has no say.
He’s gonna need me. Hell, Mia might even need me.
I look up at Mateo and find him watching me. “We need to talk,” I tell him.
His lips curve up faintly, like he can read my mind. “Tomorrow. Let everyone enjoy Easter today.”
I don’t want to wait, I want to talk now, but I nod anyway. I haven’t even talked to Carly about this. Now I try to imagine the look on her face if I tell her I want to stay in Chicago. Goodbye, peaceful house in Connecticut. Goodbye, milkshakes and movies.
Moving to Hell is the second to last thing I want to do, but abandoning Dom to grow up the way I did comes in dead last, no contest. It doesn’t matter that I’ve only known about him for a few days—this is my son.
“Don’t do it, kid.”
I look up to the couch again, but this time the voice isn’t Mateo’s, it comes from beside Mateo—Rafe. He’s shaking his head at me, like he, too, can read my thoughts.
“Don’t listen to him,” Mateo advises, smiling faintly. “You do what’s in your heart.”
“This isn’t a game,” I state, glaring at him.
Mia grabs hold of my arm briefly before pushing up off the ground. “I think Dom needs a diaper change. Want to come with me?”
I hold Dom a little more protectively against my chest, but I rise up and follow Mia as she drags me along by the sleeve of my shirt. I’m surprised he lets me follow her out of the room alone with Dom, but Carly’s words come back to me. She swears he wants me alone with Mia, because that does the most damage. Alone with Mia and Dom might be even better.
I hate this house and all the bullshit politics that go along with it. I hate that he uses Mia and she doesn’t even know. I loathe that he’s fathering my son. Right now I feel desperate to stop that, like I’d do anything.
Frankly, if I could kidnap her right now, I might, just to get her and Dom out of here.
Mia pulls me into an empty sitting room and flashes me an almost apologetic smile.
I want to ruin my life. Not for self-destructive reasons, but for good ones this time. I fucked everything up. I want to take her and Dom away from here. I need to keep them safe.
Mia doesn’t know how close I am to blowing both of our lives up, so she gently touches my arm again, moving close so she can smile at Dom and kiss his little head. My heart aches. Every second of these past few days have been painful and hard, but I don’t know else to make it stop. I don’t know how to keep Dom safe and happy and keep Carly. I don’t know how to do any of this. I’ve never been this fucking stuck before, and I have felt stuck in my time.
Clearing her throat, Mia nods toward the bathroom. “His diapers are in there.”
A pinprick of relief trickles through me. A bathroom. There are no cameras in the bathroom.
Mia closes the bathroom door behind us, but before I can turn to her and beg her to leave with me, impulsively destroy every bit of happiness both of us have managed to grasp, Mia starts talking.
“He would have done that if you weren’t sitting there.”
My mind is rolling downhill fast, so I don’t quite follow. “What do you mean?”
“Mateo. He doesn’t let Roman get away with being mean to Dom. He loves Dom. He’s a good father to him. He’s just not showing you that because he wants to see if he can provoke you. I know it’s mean, but…” She shrugs. We all know Mateo can be mean.
I don’t know if I trust her. She’s a shitty liar and she seems sincere, but of course Mia thinks Mateo loves Dom. Like Carly said, it benefits him to make her feel that way. “He is provoking me.”
“I know,” she says, placing a calming hand on my arm, like old times. “Please resist. I know you love Dom. I can see that. I loved him immediately, too. I get it. But please don’t throw away your last chance at happiness for him. Please. I’m so happy you found Carly, I’m so happy she’s surviving this week, don’t throw it all away. I can see that look in your eye, and if I can see it, so can Mateo. He will pounce. He’s running out of time. He has one day left to make you screw up. Don’t fall for his tricks.”
I shake my head, looking down at Dom. “How am I supposed to…?”
“Trust me,” she says, simply. “I love Dom. He’s my world. He’s our world. Dom is well taken care of. He’s a happy kid with loving parents. Mateo is, to an extent, performing for you. I’m rooting for you so hard. Don’t screw up in the home stretch. We don’t need saving.”
It’s hard to trust her words. It’s hard to reconcile what I know about Mateo with the idea of him having legitimate affection for a child I foisted on him. Then I look down at Dom and he hits me in the face with an Easter egg. He squeals with delight and grins up at me, and just like that, my resolve weakens. He’s already stolen my heart and I’ve only known him for a few days. Maybe he has worked his way into Mateo’s. He’s half Mia, after all. Maybe he got my looks, but he got Mia’s lovability. And I haven’t seen them together much, probably in part because Mateo is trying to convince me he’s a shitty father so I want to save him, but when I got under his skin in the bedroom, when Mateo came over and took Dom away from me, I saw Dom’s affection for him. Would he give his trusting adoration to someone who didn’t love him?
“I can’t trust anything in this house,” I mutter.
Mia nods sympathetically. “I know. Trust me, I know. It’s usually calm here, but you know how it can be when Mateo is running a show.”
“You promise he’s good to Dom?”
Mia nods fervently. “Cross my heart.”
The door flies open and Mia jumps back. I think we both expect to see Mateo, but Cherie stands on the other side, eyes wide. “What the hell are you two doing?” She looks at me holding Dom, then back to a guilty-looking Mia and scowls. “Stop messing with my brother’s head.”
“Cherie, she’s not. Back off.”
“And why are you so obsessed with Mia’s baby? What did Francesca mean earlier?”
I sigh, looking down at Dom. Seeing us together, I feel like she should see it just looking at him, but I guess that’s because I know. It wouldn’t make sense to Cherie that Dom could be mine. She knows Mia was with Mateo when Dom was conceived.
“Dom’s mine,”
I tell her.
I’m already braced for her to shake her head, face twisted up in confusion. “How the hell is Dom yours? You and Mia split up years ago.”
I don’t want to fucking tell her this. The words get caught in my throat, but I force them up. “I came back. Last year. For Mia.”
Not being a complete moron, Cherie loses some of her fire. Now instead of barging in here to tell off Mia for fucking with me, she has to consider something else. Something she doesn’t want to consider. “Mia was with Mateo a year ago,” Cherie states, but her tone is already subdued. I can see the dread I feel mirrored back at me. Once she hears the truth, there’s no taking it back.
I nod my head. “She was. I…”
“We were drunk.”
Cherie’s head snaps to Mia. I look at her and frown.
Mia nods her head, clearing her throat and looking down. “We had too much to drink. It was just one time. But… you know, it only takes once. It was obviously a mistake, but Mateo was willing to get past it on account of… well, he slept with someone else for four years, so one drunken one night stand with my ex—is it even called that with an ex? I don’t know. Anyway, yeah. Let’s not mention that to anyone else, huh?” She forces a completely fake laugh. I want to smack myself in the forehead because she’s such a bad liar, but I can’t push away the life raft she threw me.
I look at Cherie to see if she bought any of that. She appears mildly skeptical, but since she wants to believe it, she tries really hard. “You cheated on Mateo,” Cherie repeats, unconvinced.
Mia can’t help grimacing, but she nods. “That’s what I said.”
Cherie casts a skeptical look between us. I lift up my shirt so she can see my abs. “She couldn’t resist?”
Mia rolls her eyes and comes over to get Dom. “Put those away before someone gets hurt.”
Cherie watches at Mia takes Dom from me, but Mia’s level of comfort around me probably helps sell what her terrible attempt at lying did not. If I hurt Mia, she shouldn’t be this comfortable so close to me, taking our baby snuggling him against her chest.
Cherie doesn’t understand the way Mia is; she’s been sheltered from much of our history. Cherie knows Mateo hurt Mia, but she doesn’t know I ever did.
Now, thanks to Mia covering my ass again, maybe she doesn’t have to.
“I have to change his diaper,” Mia tells us. “Why don’t you two go back in there and I’ll be in as soon as I’m finished?”
Chapter Thirty Two
Vince
Carly stands in front of me, sliding her hand up my tie and giving me a sultry little smile. “God, you look good in a suit.”
“Seems like I can afford to buy a lot of them now,” I mutter.
The reading of my father’s will was this morning. I knew I would inherit a lot, but I ended up with even more than I expected. If I just burned the Vegas house to the ground instead of selling it, I’d still be set for the rest of my life.
“Well, you should,” she advises me, running her hand down my chest, letting her warm gaze follow. “If we had time, I’d take all this sexy clothing right back off you.”
I smirk faintly. “Maybe later.”
“If I’m lucky, huh?” she teases, leaning close to give me a kiss.
I wrap my arms around her waist and look down at her when she goes to pull back. “I’m the lucky one. Thank you for this week. I have not been my best self here.”
She lightly shrugs, dismissing the real threat we had to navigate this week. “Nah, you did all right. It could have been much worse.”
“Could have been better,” I admit.
“You have the rest of our lives to do better,” she informs me, wrapping her arms around my neck. “I didn’t expect you to bring your A-game under these circumstances. I knew these people brought out the worst in you. If this is the worst of it, I can handle that.”
Thankfully she doesn’t know about the fleeting thoughts of kidnapping that passed through my brain last night, so I damn sure don’t enlighten her. Instead I smile at her and lean in to give her another kiss.
Carly finally pulls back, wrapping her arm around me. “Now, let’s go get this over with.”
---
My father’s funeral is about as full of love as his life was.
Since he was important, the graveyard is flooded with people, but no one is sad. He may have touched all our lives, but the nature of his influence is easily expressed by how little any of us seem to care that he’s gone.
It’s easy for the women to forget who we are when we’re safely tucked away inside Mateo’s house. It may not be safe for me—especially in an emotional sense—but it’s easy to forget that he’s careful for a reason. That house is a fortress, populated with people who protect him and carefully monitored. It’s the only place men with as much power as Mateo has can relax a little and let down their guards—at least as much as men like that can ever put down their guards.
It’s not a surprise that this grave yard is crawling with soldiers, armed to the teeth, casting untrusting looks in every direction.
It is a surprise that most of the men are Rafe’s.
After spending the weekend relaxing at my old house, enjoying Mateo’s hospitality, and fucking my sister-in-law, now he stands alone in front of my father’s grave, surrounded by men who would die to protect him. He meets my gaze across the coffin and offers a grim smile.
His message is clear: Vegas belongs to him now. If I have a problem with it, there are more than a dozen well-armed men at this location alone who will happily gun me down.
Mateo has his own men here, but they’re damn sure not going to protect me. I have no army, no dangerous friends, not a single intimidating man to follow me. I don’t want any of that, but given it was my father’s and the archaic way my family organizes, I’m the one all that power should rightfully pass to.
Laurel stands by her sister, holding her coat snugly against her body. Carly wraps a protective arm around her shoulders, her other arm looped through mine.
“See, this is why I don’t have one night stands,” Laurel states. “You might get good sex out of it, but it might turn out the guy who delivers the orgasms heads a criminal organization and forgot to tell you.”
“And he might kinda sorta be considering murdering your sister’s boyfriend for threatening his claim to power by simply breathing,” Carly adds.
Laurel nods grimly. “The statistical significance was plastered all over the wall. I should have known this might happen if I had a one night stand with a guy I met at a mob family’s Easter dinner.”
“I tried to stop you,” Carly states. “You didn’t want to listen.”
Laurel shakes her head. “It’s my fault. I was blinded by all the sexiness. It turns my brain off. I transform into a puff of cotton candy with the IQ to match. You know this about me.”
“I do,” Carly agrees, nodding. “That’s why I tried.”
“It was a valiant effort,” Laurel acknowledges.
“For the record,” I tell them, glancing at Laurel, “if he tries to kill me now, you have my blessing to seduce him if you think it might help change his mind.”
Laurel shakes her head. “He didn’t even invite me to stand over there with all his thugs. I don’t think I can be of much help.”
“Oh, shit, I think he knows we’re talking about him,” Carly murmurs, averting her gaze.
I look over to see why, and now he’s moving in our direction.
Instinctively, I shove Carly and Laurel behind me and take a step forward. He meets me over on this side of the casket, shoving his hands in the pocket of his long coat and glancing past me. “Ladies.” His gaze meets mine. “Vince.”
Tension sizzles in the air between us as we stand here in front of my father’s casket, surrounded by family and soldiers. There are so many reasons I don’t like the man standing before me. I think of Vegas, of the way he took control of Mia just to piss me off. I think of the night he took her from me
at my father’s house and hauled her back to his. I think of how fucking well he and Mateo seem to get along now, and Carly’s theories that he’s been with Mia.
He dislikes me, too, but we probably don’t have a single overlapping reason.
I don’t get men like him. Men like Mateo. I don’t understand them and I don’t want to.
Finally, Rafe speaks. “Heading to Vegas this evening?”
“Yep,” I answer, evenly. “Just tying up some loose ends so we can go back home.”
He nods. “Not planning to stick around for a little while?”
“Definitely not. If I never stepped foot in Vegas again for the rest of my life, I’d be just fine with that.”
Now he nods again, but with more approval. “That’s good to hear.”
I get the feeling I’m dismissed as he steps around me and heads for Laurel.
He stops and looks down at her with mild amusement. “What’s wrong, Laurel? You don’t look happy to see me this afternoon.”
Her brain is clearly more capable of rallying in the face of his reality. Instead of turning quite as quickly into a puddle of goo, she tilts her chin up defiantly. “Why should seeing you give me any feelings? We had sex a few times, that’s all.”
There’s amusement in his voice as he murmurs, “Mm hmm.” He reaches for the neck of her black sweater, tugging it down so he can look at the marks he left on her pale skin. “Why don’t you come with them to Vegas? We can have one more night together.” He turns to glance back at me, then to Carly, then back to Laurel. “You can all stay with me while you’re in town. I have plenty of room.”
“I don’t know,” Laurel murmurs, looking to Carly.
Rafe releases the neck of her sweater and takes her chin in his hand, turning her gaze back to him. “Should I word that differently, kitten? The answer I’m looking for is yes.”
Laurel’s brain struggles to hold its ground, but I can see her sinking. “I guess I don’t have class until Wednesday...”
Carly heaves a sigh, rolling her eyes.
Rafe looks over at her and smiles. “It’s settled, then. Vince knows where I live. As soon as you land, come on over. I’ll take you all out to dinner.” He presses a deceptively chaste kiss to Laurel’s forehead as he murmurs, “Then dessert.”