My Mafia Husband Used Me to Carry His First Love's Baby

I was gone before the door finished opening.

Down the back stairs, through the kitchen, into the dim bar on the ground floor. My legs carried me there on their own. I slid onto a stool and pointed at the first bottle I saw.

"Whiskey. Neat."

The bartender glanced at my wedding ring. Then at my face. He poured.

The first swallow burned all the way down. *Good.* I wanted something to hurt that wasn't my heart.

"Mrs. Kane." Rosa, my nanny, hovered at my elbow. Maddox had hired her the day my first test came back positive. "You shouldn't, the doctor said—"

"One drink, Rosa."

"But Mr. Kane—"

"Mr. Kane isn't here."

"Isn't he?"

The glass vanished from my hand.

Maddox stood behind me. He set the whiskey on the bar like it had personally offended him. Then he turned my stool around and pulled me against his chest.

"Baby." His thumb brushed under my eye. "You're crying."

I hadn't known I was.

He bent and kissed the tear away. Then the other one. His lips were soft. His cologne was the same cedar I'd fallen asleep to for three years.

My stomach rolled.

"Who did this?" he murmured. "Tell me who upset you."

"Nobody. Hormones."

"Hormones don't make my wife run out of my club without saying a word." He pulled back. His eyes swept the room. "Somebody said something to her."

The gun came out of his jacket.

Every conversation died. A woman at the corner table covered her mouth.

"Whoever made Mrs. Kane cry," Maddox said, calm as a weather report, "stand up now. It'll go easier."

Nobody stood.

The barrel drifted across the room. Bartender. Two businessmen. A waitress frozen with a tray.

Then the doorway, where Derek had just walked in, still grinning about something.

The gun stopped on him.

Derek raised both palms. "Whoa. Boss. I just got here."

*Classic*, he'd said. *The look on her face.*

My hand moved before my brain did. I wrapped my fingers over Maddox's on the grip. The metal was warm from his body. My index finger found the trigger guard.

One squeeze.

Maddox's other hand closed over mine. Gentle. Firm.

"Sienna." His voice dropped to that private register he'd used on our wedding day. "Not you. Never you. You're carrying our baby."

*Our.*

I looked down at our stacked hands. I almost laughed.

"Right," I said. "Our baby."

He eased the gun out of my grip and kissed my knuckles. Derek let out a long breath and backed into the hallway.

Then Maddox's gaze fell on the whiskey glass. On Rosa.

"You watched her drink it."

Rosa's face went gray. "Sir, I told her, I tried—"

"Did you take the glass?"

"She's my employer, I couldn't just—"

The shot was so loud my ears rang.

Rosa folded onto the floor. Something warm spattered my ankles. Red dots bloomed across the hem of my cream dress.

Nobody screamed. That was the worst part. The whole bar just stopped breathing.

Maddox tucked the gun away. He took a napkin from the bar and lifted my hand. A single drop of blood had landed on my ring finger. He wiped it off slowly, carefully, the way you'd clean a child.

"There," he said. "All clean."

I stared at Rosa's open eyes.

"She had a daughter," I whispered.

"She had one job." He folded the napkin. "Nobody hurts our baby, Sienna. Nobody. Not even you."

That was when I finally understood him.

The kindness and the killing weren't two different men. They were one thing. A hand on my throat that sometimes felt like a caress.

...

At the villa, he ran my bath himself.

He tested the water with his wrist. Added lavender oil. Sat on the edge of the tub and lifted my left leg into his lap.

"They're so swollen," he said, kneading my calf. "My poor girl. The shots are brutal, huh?"

"Seven rounds of them."

"Last round. I promise." His thumbs pressed into the knot behind my knee. "I've been thinking. Let's do the wedding again."

I blinked. "What?"

"A real one. No screens. No Whitmore. Just us, the right way." He smiled up at me, boyish. "You deserve a day that doesn't end in tears."

The day he'd designed to end in tears.

"Why now?" I asked.

"Because you're finally giving me a family." He kissed my shin. "Say yes again."

Over his shoulder, the mirror had fogged at the edges. In the clear center, I could see myself. My belly, bruised purple-yellow from injections. Dozens of tiny scabs. The surgical scar from the fourth miscarriage, when they'd had to go in and clean me out.

Six times I'd bled. Six times he'd held me and cried.

My hands curled under the water.

"Sienna?"

I unclenched them. "Yes. Let's do it again."

...

He fell asleep at two. I didn't.

I went looking for my charger in his nightstand. My fingers found a phone instead. Black. Unfamiliar.

I tried his birthday. Wrong. Mine. Wrong.

I sat on the closet floor and typed Brielle's birthday. I knew it because I'd baked her a cake every year in college.

The screen opened.

The photo library said 5,214 items.

Brielle laughing. Brielle asleep. Brielle at her own wedding, in the dress I'd helped her pick for mine.

Four hidden folders sat in a neat row.

*Forever. Only. You. Brielle.*

I scrolled for ten minutes looking for a single photo of me. Our wedding portraits. The honeymoon in Santorini.

Nothing. Not one.

I opened the messages. The thread with Brielle went back years. I thumbed upward until the dates read eight years ago.

*Brielle: For my birthday I want something no one else has. Like a real crown jewel.* 😘

*Maddox: Done.*

Two weeks later:

*Maddox: They're holding me. Don't worry. I'll handle it.*

My skin went cold.

I remembered that summer. A man I'd only met twice, a friend of a friend, had called me from a holding cell abroad. A royal sapphire, he'd said. Stolen. He needed collateral fast or he'd disappear into a foreign prison. He'd said he had no one else.

I'd sold my mother's emerald necklace. The only thing she'd left me.

It had been for him. For *this.* For Brielle's birthday wish.

I should have put the phone down.

One more swipe.

Brielle at a pool, in a white bikini, looking back over her right shoulder. And on that shoulder, a crescent-shaped scar.

I froze.

I reached up and touched my own right shoulder. The same raised curve. Same angle.

Mine wasn't a birthmark. Mine was from a piece of shrapnel. Eight years ago, at a field hospital outside the border, a man had been carried in bleeding out. The shelling started while I was holding pressure on his chest. I threw myself over him. I never saw his face clearly. Too much blood.

I crept into my study and pulled my old volunteer file from the bottom drawer. Discharge papers. A Polaroid of me in scrubs outside the tent.

*Mercy Field Hospital, Unit 4.*

Then I went to Maddox's safe. I'd seen him open it a hundred times. Inside, in a silver frame, was the photo he called his "reason for living." The girl who had saved his life when he was nineteen. He never let me touch it.

A blurry figure in scrubs. Her back to the camera. And behind her, a canvas sign.

*Mercy Field Hospital, Unit 4.*

My Polaroid shook in my hand.

Brielle had never left the country before senior year.

So whose scar was she wearing?

Behind me, the bedroom floor creaked.

"Sienna?" Maddox's voice, thick with sleep. "Baby, what are you doing in my safe?"