Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia Don (Possessive Mafia Kings #30)

Prologue

Ava

The bad decision starts at 2 A.M. with a pair of scissors and a bathroom mirror.

Through the condensation on the glass, I stare back into a reflection that doesn’t feel like my own. I drag my fingers over my skin, pulling at and squeezing the dimensions of my heart-shaped face. I don’t recognize that blurry girl looking back at me.

A year’s worth of grief has left me gutted. My cheeks have hollowed out, leaving cheekbones where I once had soft baby fat. My nervous smile is now no smile at all. The soft, loose curls I used to love are tangled and overgrown like the neglected front yard of an empty house. My expression, a warning sign:

Haunted: Do Not Enter.

The ghost who haunts me is Vincent Mori, and I saw him die.

You expect tragedy in a mafia family, but you never really see it coming. At least, I didn’t. Vinny was a wannabe chef, only twenty-two. He was sweet and silly. He was my lover.

And he died right in front of me on an ordinary Sunday afternoon, his head cracked open by a bullet meant for a more deserving man.

For a split second, my blurry reflection takes on the phantom shape of a misshapen skull, and my stomach heaves. I retch over the sink with nothing in me to vomit up.

What nobody tells you about grief is that it’s like an ocean, and you start right at the bottom. The weight of all that dark water crushes you down into the pitch black. It takes time, so much time, to claw to the surface and reach that first breath of air, and just when you finally get your head above water, exhausted and barely alive, there will always be another wave just behind you ready to wrench you back down into the dark.

The wave can be anything. A familiar song on the radio, the smell of food cooking on a stovetop, a certain make and model of car on the highway. There’s no avoiding it. The waves just keep coming.

I swipe my hand against the wet glass, smearing my impressionist reflection into a more angular blur. My fist tightens around the scissors again. I close my eyes, feeling along by my blind fingertips. I start cutting. Thick clumps of hair gather around my feet like tumbleweed, scissors clumsily sawing through matted knots of neglect.

In the early days of grief, everyone tries to rescue you.

Advice, therapists, pills, wellness checks.

By now, the rescue efforts have stopped and the urgency has cooled. Now, it’s less like saving a life and more like recovering a body.

I cut away the damage, the pain, the numb feelings. The parts of me that died with him fall away, strand by strand.

I don’t know who will be left in the mirror when I’m done, who will face me in the glass, but whoever she is—I know she’s still alive.