The Mafia’s Accidental Bride

CHAPTER 6 — DANTE

DANTE

I did not sleep that night.

This was not unusual. I had never been a person who slept easily — there was too much to manage, too much that required the specific vigilance of someone who had grown up understanding that the world was not a safe place and that safety was something you built rather than something you inherited. I had three hours on a good night. Four if things were quiet.

Last night things were not quiet.

I sat at the desk in my penthouse study on the forty-second floor of the Romano tower and looked at the photograph Marco had scanned into my files and thought about a girl named Mia Collins.

No. Not a girl.

A woman.

That distinction mattered somehow. It had mattered from the first moment in the hotel suite — the specific quality of her, the way she had looked at me without the performance that most people put on around me, the fear they tried to hide or the calculation they tried to disguise as something warmer. She had simply looked at me. Assessed me. Said wrong room with the specific delivery of someone noting a factual error rather than announcing a crisis.

And when I had told her to leave she had said I know and stayed.

I had thought about that a great deal in the past six weeks.

The staying.

I had replicated the night in my memory many times — which was itself unusual. I did not generally revisit things. What was done was done and analysis after the fact was only useful if it changed future action. But that night kept returning to me not as analysis but as something else. As something I wasn’t finished with.

And now.

I looked at the scanned photograph of the ultrasound.

A small gray blur that was somehow already completely and irrevocably real.

I had a child.

The fact of it was larger than I had expected. I had known — from the folder in her hand, from the way she had walked beside me to the coffee shop with her chin up and her eyes forward, from the specific quality of her stillness when she sat across from me — that whatever she needed to tell me was significant. I had prepared myself for several possibilities.

I had not been fully prepared for this one.

Not because the idea of a child was impossible. I was twenty-eight years old. It was not an unreasonable development. But the way it had arrived — the specific combination of a drugged gala and a woman who had stumbled into my room and looked at me without fear and was now sitting in a coffee shop putting a photograph on the table between us — was not a story I had written for myself.

My father was going to have opinions.

Victor Romano had been waiting for grandchildren since I turned twenty-five with the specific impatient certainty of a patriarch who believed legacy was the point of everything. He would be — the word that came to mind was pleased, which was not the word for what my father’s satisfaction looked like. Satisfied. Vindicated. Immediately controlling.

I needed to manage that situation carefully.

I needed to manage Stella Collins.

I pulled up the file Marco had compiled. The footage from the gala. Stella Collins in the green dress directing a server. The compound analysis — designed to lower inhibitions, heighten sensation, ensure that whatever happened between two people in a room together would feel entirely natural and driven by desire rather than chemistry. It was sophisticated. It was deliberate. And it had been deployed at a formal event against the heir to the Romano family.

She had wanted something specific from that night.

She had not gotten it. The expression on her face in the lobby footage at two in the morning — frustration, fury, the specific quality of a plan that had gone sideways — told me exactly how her evening had ended.

She had drugged her own stepsister to try to position herself with me.

And instead Mia had found my suite.

I looked at the ultrasound photograph again.

The irony was not lost on me.

Stella had engineered a situation designed to bring herself into my orbit. What she had actually done was create the circumstances that had put Mia in my room and changed everything.

The question now was what Stella knew and what she was going to do with it.

The answer — based on everything Marco had compiled about her character, her history, and the phone calls she had made in the past twenty-four hours — was that she knew enough and was going to be a serious problem.

I picked up my phone. Called Marco.

He answered on the second ring. It was three in the morning. This was not unusual for us.

“Stella Collins,” I said. “I want eyes on her. Continuous. Every call she makes, every meeting she takes, every message she sends.” I paused. “She’s going to move against Mia. I want to know before she does it, not after.”

“Already in motion,” Marco said. “Since this afternoon.”

“Good,” I said.

“There’s something else,” Marco said. “Stella Collins made two calls this afternoon. One to someone I haven’t identified yet — we’re working on it. The second to Elena Romano.”

I went very still.

“My cousin,” I said.

“Yes,” Marco said. “They spoke for twenty-two minutes.”

I thought about Elena. My father’s niece. Beautiful, ambitious, perpetually calculating, perpetually involved in situations that she had no legitimate business being involved in.

“What did they discuss?” I said.

“We only have metadata,” Marco said. “Not content. But the duration and the timing—”

“Someone told Stella about me specifically before the gala,” I said. “Gave her enough information to target me. Elena was at that event.”

“Yes,” Marco said.

I looked at Miami through my study window.

The city was dark and alive and completely mine.

“Find out everything,” I said. “I want the full picture.”

“You’ll have it,” Marco said.

I hung up.

Looked at the ultrasound photograph.

Mia Collins had walked into my room that night without knowing who I was. Had sat beside me on the edge of a bed and said I know I should go and stayed anyway. Had looked at the most feared man in Miami with those brown eyes and chosen.

She was carrying my child.

She was surrounded by people who were going to try to use that against her.

I picked up the matte black card she had sent in response to mine — her number, her handwriting, precise and clear — and looked at it.

Bring your lawyer, she had said.

Good.

She was already thinking correctly.

I was going to make sure that every resource available to me was deployed to ensure that Mia Collins and my child were protected from whatever Stella and Elena and anyone else in this complicated city was planning.

Not because I owed it to her. Not yet — we were strangers who shared a child and a complicated night and nothing else.

Because she was mine to protect.

She just didn’t know it yet.