The Don's Hidden Heirs

As the car window rolled up, I slid the ultrasound into the deepest layer of my coat lining. My fingers didn't even tremble.

Eight years ago, Matteo's enemies had ambushed us. To save him, I took the blade meant for his heart.

I spent four months in the ICU. They removed one of my fallopian tubes.

The day I woke up, Matteo held my hand and knelt in front of a floor covered in bloodstained bandages, his eyes bloodshot.

He said, "Elena, we don't need children. The Moretti bloodline is dirty enough. Let it end with me. I just need you."

The entire Palermo underworld believed he was a Don driven mad by love.

They said he'd put the three most valuable smuggling routes at the port in my name. That on the fifteenth of every month, he'd cancel every family meeting without fail to have dinner with me.

Now that I thought about it, those nights he cancelled meetings, he must have been teaching those twins how to disassemble and reassemble a revolver.

"Ma'am, the boss's bodyguard has been watching us from the corner for twenty minutes."

The man driving was Alexei. Once a veteran of the Russian smuggling routes. Three years ago, when Matteo ordered him thrown into the sea, I was the one who quietly used my personal accounts to let him live.

"Let him watch." I pulled the wedding ring off my finger and tossed it into the glove compartment. "Take me back to the estate."

"Are we doing it tonight?"

"No." I watched the black Audi trailing us in the rearview mirror. "Tonight is the fifteenth. The Don needs to go home and have dinner with his wife."

When I got back to the Moretti estate, the long table was already set with decanted red wine.

Matteo had taken off his suit jacket and was standing by the fireplace in a dark gray cashmere sweater, frowning over a ledger.

When he heard my heels on the stone floor, he looked up. His expression was so gentle there wasn't a single flaw in it.

"Where did you go? It's cold out. Your hands are freezing."

He walked over and took my hand the way he always did, pressing a kiss to my forehead.

There was no cheap perfume on the cashmere.

But there was a faint plastic smell. The kind that only comes from freshly unboxed children's building blocks.

"I went to the church in the old quarter."

I pulled my hand back and used the motion to straighten his collar. "I lit a candle for you."

Matteo smiled, his gaze deep and doting.

"God doesn't have jurisdiction over the Moretti family. Elena, as long as you're by my side, no one can touch me."

I looked at that face, so familiar after eight years of waking up to it.

The heart that once raced for him now beat steady and calm.

"Is that so?" I pulled out a chair and sat down, picking up the water glass in front of me. "What if one day I disappeared?"

Matteo's silver steak knife scraped against the porcelain plate with a sharp ring.

He looked up at me. A flicker of the cold ruthlessness typical of the Moretti family's Don passed through his eyes.

Then the warmth covered it again.

"Don't talk nonsense. You're a living person. How could you just disappear?"

"And even if you did, no matter where you went, I would find you."