Page 123 of Keep Him Like Secrets

And the same ambition that moved me up the ranks in the mafia helped me start to build my own little legit empire.

It had never been about wanting to be in the mob, per se. It had been that becoming a part of the Lombardi family had been the only path off the street, the only way I could grab and hold power and find the safety that came along with a familyandwealth.

And while, no, I could no longer claim I was a mafia capo, I wasn’t exactly entirelyoutof the organization either. Renzo was moving money through Alibi and my other two businesses as well.

I didn’t even take a fee for washing it.

It was my way of saying thank you to Renzo for the chance he took on me. And all the shit he put up with from me over the years when I’d still been working through my past trauma, my anger, and my fear.

Was I still short-tempered and prone to overreacting? Sure. But time and love had softened my sharpest edges so I no longer ripped open anyone who tried to reach out to me.

I was the same woman I’d been before Soren. Just someone who was more comfortable with a softer life.

Which was good since we were bringing a baby into the world.

We hadn’t been planning on it. At least not yet. But I’d started on a new birth control pill and, well, it just hadn’t been as effective as the last one.

Soren pulled the blanket down over me and his hands went to my scalp, rubbing it the way he knew I liked.

“Maybe a nap is a good idea,” I decided with a big yawn.

Soren’s laugh shook beneath me before his lips pressed to my head.

Soren - 14 years

“Uh-oh,” I said, pausing in pulling groceries out of a bag on the kitchen island.

Saff was making her way into the apartment at noon on a Wednesday with our daughter beside her.

“Are you sick?” I asked the little girl who was a copy-paste of her mother, except that we both figured she was going to be taller than her mother within a few more years.

“Suspended,” Saff explained.

It wasn’t every day your eleven-year-old got suspended. But, like I’d said, our little girl was just like her mother.

“Oh, yeah? For what?”

“Well, officially, bullying,” Saff said.

I narrowed my eyes. “And unofficially?”

Because my daughter might have been a lot of things—stubborn, opinionated, strong in her convictions—but she was no bully.

“She made a boy cry.”

“Why?”

“He said girls should be in the kitchen when Milly said she’s going to be a doctor,” our girl said, chin lifting, refusing to be sorry for defending her friend.

“How’d you make him cry?”

“Well, let’s just say she told him that he would never amount to anything in life and would probably live with his mother forever because no girl was ever going to love him,” Saff told me.

“You said I can’t hit someone unless they hit me first,” our girl said. “So, Iused my words.”

With that, she grabbed a bag of chips and practically skipped upstairs. Where she would likely free Dominic from his enclosure, put him in his diaper, then let him sit with her while she read for hours.

“In our defense, we really have hammered home how she needs to use her words,” Saff said, wincing. “How could we know that her words could completely dismantle someone’s identity?” She reached for her own bag of chips, pulling it open. “And, to be fair, she probably wasn’t wrong.”

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