Page 99 of Mafia Billionaire's Surprise Baby
Dino sighs. “When I was graduating high school, I went on that senior trip to Pensacola. Remember?”
I barely remember. “Sure.”
“When I was there, I met a girl.”
Oh for the love. “You met a girl? What, Dino? You have some kind of wife that you didn’t tell anyone about?”
Dino shakes his head. “No. The girl is… we aren’t married. We never were. We can’t be together,” he says quietly. “But she…”
Instead of saying it, I watch him grab his wallet. He unfolds a picture and puts it down on the table.
Gia and I lean forward to see what it is. “Holy shit, Dino,” she breathes. “What the hell is this?”
“These are my children,” Dino says. His voice softens as he talks about the two babies in the picture in front of us. “They’re older than Luna by about two years. Maia and Angie.”
The two twin babies on the page grin up at us.
There’s no doubt in my mind that they’re Dino’s kids. They have his same mischievous eyes and his nose.
“This is an old picture,” I say slowly.
He nods. “Yeah. Like I said, they’re a little older than Luna.”
“And you’ve kept this secret for how long?”
Dino sits back. “She told me as soon as she knew.”
I blink. “Dino. That was fucking years ago.”
“I know that, Sal. But what were we going to do? I’m a De Luca. My whole life was already laid out for me, and it was laid out for me in the New York area. Hers… it’s pretty much the same. She was just at Pensacola for a spring break trip. Her father…” he shakes his head.
“If her father knew that the kids were mine, we’d all be fucking dead.”
Carefully, I look up at him. “Dino,” I say quietly. “Who is her father.”
“I’m not going to tell you. I’m sure between you and Gia, you’ll figure it out eventually anyways.”
I snort. “You hid twin girls from us for almost ten years, Dino. I think at this point we’ve earned the right to know.”
Dino shook his head again, firmer this time. “I really can’t tell you, man. He’s too dangerous.”
Gia snaps to attention. “Who in the world is so dangerous that you can’t tell us? We’re the Rossi family, Dino. There’s no one out there more dangerous than we are.”
“You don’t understand, Gia. We’re small potatoes compared to this guy. He’s… he runs an organization so big, it would make your head spin.”
I can see the wheels turning in Gia’s mind. There’s a pretty short list of people whose criminal activities have a greater span that Elio’s so I’m curious as well.
But that’s not the point. “Okay. You have secret twin girls, with someone whose father is going to burn down the world, and our family, if he knew. What makes you think he didn’t find out? And he’s not the one behind the deaths of our parents? Or any of this shit?”
“Because you wouldn’t be dealing with an amateur bomb going off,” Dino says shortly. “You’d be fucking dead. We would all be dead. Every last one of us.”
I narrow my eyes. “So how does this lead us back to Marco?”
Dino sighs. “Last year, about the time that I… that I revealed Luna’s location to the Irish, something happened. A guy at a bar came up to me with a picture of… her. And the girls. He said he knew where they were. He knew who they were. And if I didn’t come forward to testify against the family, he would expose them, and us, to my girl’s father.”
I don’t miss the way he says my girl. “So, what did you do?”
“At first? I hedged. I tried to set off a chain of events that would distract him. He was a cop, after all. Someone who had the power to put us all away.”