Second Chance With My Mafia Lover

It had been raining nonstop since noon. Just this quiet, steady drumming on the windows, that I barely noticed it. I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror. The glass was still fogged up from my shower, so my reflection looked blurry. And in my hand was this little plastic stick. It shouldn’t have felt heavy, but it did. Two lines. I stared at them so long they stopped looking like lines and started looking like a sentence I hadn't finished reading yet. My hand trembled, just slightly, and I set it down on the edge of the sink, then picked it back up again, as if holding it differently might change what it said. Pregnant. For Adonis. I pressed a hand flat against my stomach, half expecting to feel something different already, some proof, though I knew it was too soon for that. All I could feel was my own heartbeat, quick and unsteady, and beneath it, a strange, quiet warmth I hadn't expected. Fear, yes — but something else too, something softer, curling up right alongside it. I shut my eyes, and the memories came up anyway. They always do that when I’m trying to keep it together. I saw us on the pier the night he first told me he loved me. We were sharing one jacket because I forgot mine. The wind kept blowing my hair into his face, and neither of us bothered to fix it. I saw the small café by the harbor where we had sat for hours. We didn’t talk much. We just hung out together and that was enough. Then, the photos — tons of them which had taken during summer. He laughed at himself for sounding so dramatic, and I laughed too. Then I kissed him, because I loved that about him. He could be sentimental and still make fun of himself for it at the same time. I remembered one photo in particular. Us at sunset, my head on his shoulder, his hand raised awkwardly to hold the camera at arm's length. He'd looked at it afterward, really looked at it, like it mattered more than it should have for a simple photograph. I'm going to keep this one close, he had said, tucking it into his jacket pocket like it was something fragile. I hadn't understood it then, not fully. Now, standing here with a plastic stick that had just rewritten my entire future, I understood it perfectly. He had always held onto me tighter because everyday with me in his life mattered. I wrapped the test in a tissue and tucked it into the drawer beneath the sink, behind the spare soap bars, like hiding it there might buy me time to figure out what to do with the truth of it. My reflection watched me the whole time, pale, wide-eyed, achingly young. I didn't feel ready. I wasn't sure anyone ever did. Tonight was the night, though. That thought steadied me more than anything else could have. Tonight, Adonis was going to slip out from beneath his father's suffocating watch — the guards, the cameras, the men who trailed him like shadows with guns tucked under their jackets — and for the first time in the two years we had loved each other in secret, we were going to walk out of that door together and not look back. I was coming with him, I had told him, the words steady even though my hands had not been. Wherever it is, whatever it takes. We'll figure it out together. Forever. He'd looked at me like I'd handed him something he didn't think he was allowed to want. Adonis Moretti, heir to a name that made grown men flinch, and he'd looked at me — plain, ordinary Nadia — like I was the only unguarded thing in his entire life. You're the best thing that's ever happened to me, he had murmured against my hair, his arms tightening around me like he could weld us together if he held on hard enough. I'm going to take care of you. I'm never going to let you down. Not you. Then he kissed me, slow, unhurried, like we had all the time in the world instead of a countdown clock neither of us had asked for. I had believed him completely. I still did. I picked my phone up off the sink, my thumb hovering over his contact photo — the same sunset picture, cropped so it was just his face, laughing at something just out of frame. I wanted to tell him. About the pregnancy, about the two lines that had changed everything before we finally leave together. Would it make him more certain, or would it terrify him the way it terrified me? I decided it could wait until we were in the car. Until we were already gone, already free, already breathing air that didn't belong to his father's empire. I didn't want fear to be the last thing he felt before he ran to me tonight. I wanted him to feel only the future. My thumb hit call. It rang once. That was when the bang came from the living room. It cracked through the apartment like something breaking apart at the seams, loud enough that the phone slipped an inch in my grip. I ended the call before I even decided to, my whole body going rigid, listening. Silence. Then I heard a door being forced open — wood cracking near the frame. Then heavy, slow footsteps. And not just one person, there were a few of them. My heart was beating so hard it hurt. I quietly set my phone down on the counter and moved toward the bathroom door. Every part of me was screaming to run. But there was nowhere to run in a place this small. And whoever was out there had already busted through the front door like it wasn’t even there. I tiptoed down the hallway barefoot. The tile was freezing under my feet, and I was holding my breath. I could see the kitchen first. The knife block was on the counter. One spot was empty because I’d left that knife out after dinner. I grabbed it without thinking. The handle was slippery in my sweaty hand. I held it down by my leg like they do in movies. But this didn’t feel like a movie at all. It felt like someone dumped ice water into my veins. The living room lights were already on. I hadn't left them on. I stepped into the doorway, knife raised now, shaking, and the room seemed to tilt sideways. Men. Four or five of them. They filled up the whole room — and this place already felt too small for just me and my beat-up furniture. They wore black suits. The kind made to hide guns, not look good. Their faces were blank and cold. You could tell they’d done this before. Walked into people’s homes like it was nothing. Like they never even thought about not getting what they came for. And in front of them, a man who didn't need a gun to look dangerous. He was tall. Had some gray at his temples. Dressed like he came from an office, not the street. He stood there calm, like he had all the time in the world. Totally sure of himself. That’s how I knew he was in charge — every other guy stayed a half step behind him. His eyes locked onto me right away. And his face changed. Got sharp, focused. Like a predator that finally spotted what it’d been hunting for a long time. "Nadia," he said. Just my name. Slow, deliberate, almost gentle, which somehow made it worse. "Nadia. Nadia." He said it three times, like he was testing the shape of it in his mouth, savoring it. I kept the knife raised, my arm trembling with the effort of holding it steady, my back nearly against the wall now though I didn't remember retreating. "Who — " My voice cracked, and I hated myself for it, hated that fear had found my throat before courage could. I swallowed hard and tried again. "Who are you? What are you doing in my house? I'm calling the—" His voice cut through mine before I could finish, not raised, not shouted, just spoken with the absolute assurance of a man who had never once in his life been interrupted and didn't intend to start being interrupted now. "I'm Adonis's father." The words landed like a physical blow. For a moment the room seemed to narrow to just his face, just the eyes that I could suddenly see so much of Adonis in — the shape of them, the intensity — except where Adonis's eyes held warmth, this man's held nothing but calculation. "You're his—" My mind was already stitching the pieces together even as my mouth caught up. "You're his father. Leonard Moretti." Something flickered across his face. Amusement, maybe. Or approval, the way a man might approve of a chess opponent who'd finally understood the board. "So he's told you about me." "He's told me you're a monster," I said, and I didn't know where the steadiness in my voice came from, because inside me I wasn't anything but afraid, afraid of seeing the monster, who made Adonis life a living hell. "You had to do anything to keep him under your control." Leonard's mouth curved, not quite a smile. "Perceptive girl." He took a single step forward, and every man behind him shifted in tandem, a wall of muscle and silence closing in slightly tighter around me. "I know about the two of you. I know about your little plan — the elopement, the running, the fantasy you've built for yourselves that somewhere out there exists a world where my son gets to simply walk away from who he is." He said it almost kindly, which was somehow more frightening than if he'd screamed it. "I can assure you, Nadia. That fantasy ends tonight." My pulse was a drumbeat in my ears. I forced myself to think, to breathe, to hold onto the one thought that mattered more than the fear clawing up my spine: if he's here, that means Adonis isn't. "Adonis isn't here," I said, and this time I said it louder, almost defiant, because it meant he'd gotten away. It meant whatever this was, whatever was about to happen to me, at least Adonis had made it out. "He's already gone. You're too late." Something unreadable passed behind Leonard's eyes — not panic, never panic, a man like him didn't know how to panic — but something adjacent to it, a recalibration. He studied me for a long moment, long enough that I felt the knife in my hand start to feel useless, a child's toy against the men surrounding me. "I'm not here for him," Leonard said finally, and there was something in his tone that made my stomach drop even before I understood the words. He moved closer, unbothered by the blade still raised between us, and with a slow, almost tender motion, he reached out and closed his hand around mine, easing the knife from my fingers like he was disarming a frightened animal rather than a threat. I let it go. I don't know why I let it go. Maybe because some part of me already understood that the knife had never been the thing standing between us and whatever he'd come to do. "I'm here for you." I looked up at him slowly, my whole body going cold in a way that had nothing to do with the rain still lashing the windows behind me. "What?" Leonard's expression settled into something almost patient, almost pitying, the way you'd look at someone who hadn't yet realized the trap they were standing in. "You're going to break up with my son.”