Chapter 25
Bianca
The waiting is killing me. When I decided to come back, I never thought I’d be spending so much time worrying. In my mind, I knew I couldn’t just waltz in here, and snap—like the waving of a magic wand, everything would turn out hearty and hale, smooth-sailing. I’m not an idiot. However, I didn’t consider the other end of the spectrum, where my return means I’m protecting my son, yes, but at what cost to all others?
Last night, my brother and Leo went to see my father. Leo had the information I’d given him in his possession, and there wasn’t much else for me to do now that I’d handed over this trump card I’d held on to for so long. I wonder if it will even help Leo, but he told me to leave the rest to him. I did just that, not realizing how much all the control and even the grip on everything would slip from my hands to his, leaving me bereft and adrift.
As a woman in the typical man’s world that is the Mafia, I know this feeling all too well. I don’t matter much, in the big scheme of things. Look at how I was pandered off to the Abrashis. By taking my life into my own hands and leaving, I had taken the reins. Coming back, I relinquished them. And I hate this feeling. It’s making me antsy, crawling out of my skin like I have a monster trapped inside, one feeding off my impatience and the whole not-knowing permeating my world now.
I haven’t seen Leo since he left last night, and as such, I have no clue what’s going on. Mattia told me and Hana they’re meeting with the syndicate today, my father to announce the bombshell news of my return. That won’t go down well—I’m not going to kid myself it’s going to go any other way. But I’m eager to know what the repercussions will be.
I jump out of my seat in the living room when the front door opens and in stroll my brother and Leo. The thunderous look on their faces tell me all I need to know, and I backtrack one step as one hand comes up to my neck. Is it crazy to imagine a guillotine is going to drop on my throat soon? Is this how Marie Antoinette felt during her last days?
“What happened?” I ask, unable to keep the words to myself.
Mattia scowls as he brushes past me and heads to his study which is located along the hallway behind the kitchen.
“ Papa !” Enzo screams as he notices Leo.
I can’t even let the joy of watching our son launch himself at his father and Leo once again catching him in his arms warm my heart. Trepidation is beating an erratic drumbeat in my ribcage, and my breath is short and shallow.
Leo kisses our boy soundly on the cheeks then hugs him, Enzo’s cheek landing on his shoulder.
“Is everything okay?” I murmur.
Leo gives a soft shake of his head. “Not in front of…”
His gaze cuts to our son, and I nod.
He seems to notice the TV is on in the living room, and he starts toward it.
“What are you watching?” he asks Enzo.
“It’s Peppa Pig . She’s Peppa,” he says, pointing at the screen. “She lives with her mummy, daddy, and her little brother is George. I don’t have a little brother. Do you have a little brother?”
Leo chuckles. “I have three.”
Enzo gasps in awe. “Do you want to watch Peppa Pig with me?”
Leo gently deposits him on the rug in front of the TV. “Not right now, buddy. I can’t. But I promise I will another time.”
Enzo sighs. “Okay.”
The world around him seems to be forgotten as he gets engrossed in his cartoon once again.
Leo ruffles his hair then stands up, going to the hallway leading to Mattia’s study.
I stop him with a hand on his arm. “Leo…”
He exhales loudly. “It’s a mess, as we expected. I need to get on top of this.”
There’s a finality to his words that hits me like an icy shockwave. My hand falls from his sleeve, and he doesn’t turn back once he heads to the study. I hear the door closing behind him, the two men now ensconced in their domain where we women have no place.
I glance up, seeing Hana on the staircase. I don’t know how much she’s seen or heard, but her face is grave. She lifts her shoulders as if asking me how it went. I can only shake my head in reply.
To be a fly on the wall of that study right now. All these years ago, I left because staying here would’ve created a mess and started a war. The war came and went, but my return, it made a mess anyhow, and it seems it’s worse now, a veritable clusterfuck. I’d seen anger on Mattia’s face when he came in, and on Leo’s, it hadn’t been resolution as much as it had been fiery determination.
Knowing Leo, knowing he can kill someone and not need anyone else to do the dirty jobs—I don’t know yet how he got rid of Ardian, but everyone knows he’s behind that death—it’s not something pretty awaiting the syndicate. And those bastards, the old Dons, they’ll fight back, and they don’t hesitate to fight dirty. There’s no honor among them when their pride is piqued.
I groan, my hands coming up to cover my face. “Oh, God. What have I done?”
As my hands lower, I catch sight of Enzo in front of the TV. He’s singing along with Peppa. Usually, the sounds from this cartoon drive me bat-shit crazy, having been listening to them on a loop for years now, but today, it brings a soft balm to my heart. Enzo, he’s all that matters. What I wouldn’t give to keep him like this all his life—carefree, happy, safe. His only concern is if there’ll be broccoli in his food tonight, the issue then being how he’ll work his way out of having to eat anything green.
He’s an innocent, just like we all were at some point. But he’ll have to grow; I can’t stop that. He is his father’s heir, and one day, he’ll step in those very shoes Leo’s father vacated for him. My son is the next Don of the Pellegrini family, and none of us can escape that.
Leo knows what he’s doing. Asking me to leave it all to him, it means he’s going to take care of us. He’ll handle everything. There’s nothing else I can do but trust him now. After all, that’s what I wanted when I came back, for Leo to acknowledge his son, for him to keep his child safe. Me, I don’t matter in this picture. I never have, not since I saw that second line appear on the pregnancy test I took in this very house.
Resolve flowing through me, I inhale in deep and turn to Hana who has joined me in the kitchen.
“Let’s get started on dinner?” I ask.
The men are here, and they’ll need to be fed. Without another word, we fall into the steps involved in preparing some food. Hana cuts the greens and vegetables for a salad while I clean chicken breasts and baste them with chimichurri sauce before wrapping them in aluminum foil, placing the packets in the oven to cook.
The dryer in the laundry room beeps it’s finished a cycle. Hana fills a basket then nods at the rooms upstairs. Enzo’s cartoon is over, and before another can loop in, I wrangle him upstairs with me. He’s all too happy to settle on a bed with his collection of plastic dinosaurs while I give Hana a hand folding clothes.
“Leo’s got this,” she tells me with a smile.
I nod. We haven’t had much chance to talk lately, and this moment here harkens me back to our time in my apartment in Tokyo.
“How are things between you and Mattia?” I ask.
The smile dies on Hana’s face. I reach out and hug her with one arm.
“Do you want me to talk to him? It wasn’t your fault that he didn’t know I was still alive.”
She sniffles a bit. “It’s not that.”
“Then what is it?” I ask, softly squeezing her hand.
Hana takes a deep breath that somehow gets lodged in her nostrils, making her snort. “I…I don’t think I can have children.”
“What?” I blink at her. “How can you say this?”
She sighs, sounding exasperated. “It’s been four years, B. Four years of having unprotected sex. It had to have happened by now, don’t you think?”
I wince a little inside—I had sex once without protection and I got pregnant. I’m no authority on this topic.
Something inside Hana seems to deflate as she exhales.
“What is it?” I ask again. “You know you can tell me.”
She averts her face. “I don’t think Mattia wants children.”
“Come on, he loves children.”
“I thought so, too. Until I brought up adoption yesterday.”
“He’s against you adopting a child?” I ask, frowning.
“He said he can’t protect a child if it’s not blood,” she huffs.
As much I want to huff, too, I can see the sense behind this. Mattia and I, we grew up Mafia, where sangre is everything. Hana won’t really get it, and that’s not a mark on her. You need to be inside this world to understand it. There’s a code about blood—it’s why I brought Enzo back, so his father would protect him, protect his bloodline. That child is off-limits to all the other families in our world because of it.
But no bloodline means the people involved are fair game. A child not born to a Mafia man is a ward, never a son or daughter. They’re not granted the same level of protection as blood.
“What about IVF?” I ask, trying to bring in a semblance of hope.
“Dead end.”
“Why?”
“I had myself checked in Tokyo. I went to their best clinic, and they told me in no uncertain terms I have very few eggs to even extract for the procedure.”
I’m shaking myself from disbelief. “But you’re not yet thirty.”
She shrugs. “I didn’t win the lottery in that department.”
Silence settles between us, until Hana makes a small squeak that sounds like a sob.
“Mattia won’t have a child who’s not his blood, B, and I can’t see myself letting some doctor fertilize some donor woman’s egg with his sperm so I’ll then carry this baby in my uterus. I want my child with him,” she says, breaking down with those last words.
As I pull her into my arms, my heart goes out to her. I can try to comfort her. I can talk to my brother. But ultimately, what will all of that do? Hana and I, we’re both in predicaments we never thought we’d ever find ourselves into, and this is breaking our hearts.
“I don’t want you to leave,” she mutters as she clenches me tight. “I don’t know what I’ll do when…” She can’t finish, the sentence ending in a hiccup.
When we move out. When Enzo won’t be inside these walls anymore.
“There’s always a solution,” I croon softly to calm her.
But as I’m holding her, I’m pondering my own words. Is that true? Will we, Leo and me, find a solution to our situation? Is another war coming between him and the syndicate now that I’ve returned and it’s known that I was never dead, that Leo and I have a son, that I was never going to marry Ardian Abrashi?
If it didn’t dawn on me before, it does now: in coming to New York from Tokyo, I jumped from the frying pan into the fire. We wouldn’t have been safe there, but neither are we here. I don’t feel safe, and it’s a truth I’ll have to live with now, at least until Leo comes up with a solution for us.
The other alternative, a war? I can’t contemplate it. Not now. Not ever.
Fingers crossed, I pray Leo can get us out of this disaster.