Page 16 of Mafia King's Secret Baby

I blink. Marco is staring at me. “Where did you go, sorellina?

I give him a weak smile. “Just preparing myself for what’s coming.”

He nods, his face grave. He offers me his arm.

“Let’s go then. Time to meet your betrothed, and begin the process of destroying him and his people.”

4

ELIO

My only hopeis that Caterina has changed in the last six years.

I keep telling myself that she can’t be as I remember her. She can’t be as beautiful. As clever. As sweet.

Remembering our night together is something I do in my darkest hours when I’m alone and the loneliness claws at my throat, threatening to destroy me from the inside.

Then, and only then, do I allow myself the luxury of remembering her in the moonlight, before everything went to hell.

Sometimes I can convince myself that the whole thing wasn’t real. That I made her up. Because there’s no way any woman could have been so perfect.

Besides, she looked unreal in the moonlight. Her pale skin practically glowed, and the way she fit around me…

Yes, it is easy enough to convince myself she wasn’t real.

However.

They say your body remembers things that your brain does not. This feels true enough for the punch of grief that rocks my middle every time I think about how my parents died.

Apparently, my cock remembers Caterina.

For six years the only way I’ve been able to get hard is the memory of her smooth thighs in the moonlight.

I hate myself for it.

And, for the reminder that I didn’t make her up. She’s been a part of me and my life since that day.

Despite her betrayal.

In the style of our fathers, Marco and I have chosen a restaurant to begin the negotiations. It’s vastly different from the party that Caterina and I had all those years ago.

For one, I didn’t bother to invite the relatives from Italy. This will be over soon enough; no need to have them disrupt their schedules for me.

For another, I’m certainly not celebrating this unholy union. The last time Caterina and I were engaged to be married, my parents died in a fire.

And hers soon after in a car accident.

I never did ask what happened to them. I was so lost in my own grief, the information barely registered.

Now, I wonder if it was Marco who organized both.

That is another betrayal that I’m not ready to face. Marco was my rock when I attended high school, and then college, here in the States.

He helped me through everything, from learning all the right phrasing and slang to ensure I didn’t sound like a book-trained dumbass, to how to navigate at an American school.

Marco had been my closest companion. After we graduated with our business degrees, we sank into the day-to-day work of our families, but I never would have expected him to organize a betrayal like this.

Blood will always win out, I suppose.