Page 23 of Mafia Boss' Surprise Baby

“If this is what I’m comparing to, there’s no other possible answer. It was unreal.”

“Oh, it was very real,” he counters, making me smile.

He traces his fingers over the band aid on my forehead and frowns.

“Don’t worry about it. It’s just a small scratch.”

“I don’t care how small it is. You got hurt when you were with me. I won’t let it happen again.”

13

MICKEY

The two guys that Jeremiah took down in the parking lot were dealing drugs. One of them worked for me until that moment. I won’t have drugs on my bottom line. I don’t care how profitable they are or how people will find a way to score them with or without me. I refuse to allow anyone on my payroll to deal. They better not so much as charge somebody a dollar for some Tylenol because I’ll fire them no questions asked.

I know someone in the organization is dirty. Somebody is using my territory and part of my network to move drugs and sell them on the downlow. It isn’t just the principle of the thing. It’s the risk of impaired judgment for the individual and the overall harm to the community—people driving, working, raising kids while they’re high or when they need a fix. I won’t feed into that cycle. Rory still thinks it’s hilarious that I run a criminal organization, but I insist on random drug testing for all my workers, him included. I run a clean operation and I want everybody’s head on straight.

When Jeremiah reported to me that one of the men had a bunch of pills, I sent Rory in ahead of me. We flushed the pills while the asshole cussed about their street value and what he’s gonna do to get us back for destroying his inventory.

He won’t do much in the way of hands-on revenge anytime soon since we broke his right hand. The hand was for throwing that rock that could’ve done worse than it did. I had a guard take care of it because I knew if I got my hands on him I’d tear him the fuck apart. It’s supposed to be a punishment for stepping out of line and going against our values, not a vent for my fury. And fury possessed me then.

“It takes a real man to keep a cool head like that, sir,” Jeremiah says to me. “I woulda bet that you were gonna beat his ass from here to the Canadian border.”

“Don’t mean I didn’t want to,” I grumble. “But losing my temper is a shitty business practice. Nobody wants to trust a hothead.”

“I sent Vito and Dante to the guy’s apartment to clear out anything he had hidden over there. Drugs, cash, guns. Anything we can use to tie him to the drug ring, any clue about who’s running that shit show.”

“Thanks, man,” I say.

Then I tell my secretary to clear my schedule for a long lunch. I spend a couple hours in the gym to clear my head. I’m not used to feeling powerless. When I saw blood well from the cut on Katie’s forehead, it was like a trap door beneath me dropped open and I plummeted twenty stories down. Fear, powerlessness, then the swell of protectiveness. I want to hold her against my chest, put my arms around her and dare anyone to come near her.

If I had no self-control, if I was the hotheaded punk I’d been ten years ago, I’d have pulled my gun and double tapped that son of a bitch before he knew what hit him. But just because it would’ve been satisfying to kill the guy doesn’t make it a sound business decision. Impulse control is the hardest part of my job. It didn’t used to be much of a problem, but havingKatie Donahue around has rewired my brain from efficient and dispassionate to sometimes homicidal.

I am not a man who fears much less one who panics. Finding myself with a physical need to see her, to be with her and assure myself she is fine is humbling, alarming. I have a business to run. I can’t freak out about this or waste my time and energy worrying aboutRory’s sister.That’s what I have to call her in my mind, not her name. To make myself remember she’s not mine and never will be.

It was madness, a one-time mistake brought on by the incident in the parking lot. Danger, threat, adrenaline—that accounts for it. Being with her last night has nothing to do with anything beyond the fact we were both keyed up after an intense shared experience.

After I inspect progress on a nightclub I’m building on a Zoom call, I follow up with my executives on a couple of things. All my scheduled meetings finish on time and I’m ready to head over to the Pearl. Before I leave my office, I check my messages. I have two from Katie. One is a picture of the cheese dip we had the other night at the bar. The second is,You hungry? Meet u there 6:30?

I scrub my hands over my face and try to focus on the fact that she’s too young, she’s my best friend’s little sister, and she works for me. Not one butthreedisqualifying conditions that make her an impossibility for me.

But I can’t seem to quit fixating on what could’ve happened to her, how it could’ve been a gunshot instead of broken glass, how it could’ve been me holding her half on my knees and begging while she bled out on the concrete. The ache in my chest gets worse. I’m torturing myself now, and I can almost feel the gush of hot, sticky blood pouring out over my fingers as I try and fail to stop the bleeding.

I cough to cover a strangled noise that wants to escape me. I’m alone in my office but I won’t sit here and let myself cry over something that didn’t even happen. The possibility, the danger to her, was too real, and I have an eerie sense that it’ll come back to me in nightmares until the day I die. Maybe that’s why I text her back, and why I’m sitting at the same little table by 6:15.

Katie’s wearing a dark red sweater dress that clings to her in all the right ways and tall boots. Her hair is in a ponytail again, and the small bandage on her forehead is the only sign of what happened to her last night. I stand when she gets to the table and I reach for her hands. I take them in mine and brush my lips against her cheek. I couldn’t just sit back down once she was seated, with no greeting, without even the slightest touch.

Katie’s smile is as bright as her eyes and after we order, I ask her how she slept.

“I think I could sleep about three more days,” she says ruefully. “I went home, showered, went right to bed. I scrolled on my phone for hours because I couldn’t shut my brain off.”

“You were pretty sleepy before I took you home,” I comment.

“That’s different. I was snuggled up with you.” She looks wistful for a second and then takes a drink, looks around ready to change the subject.

“Didyousleep okay?” she asks.

This would be a good time for me to lie, but I don’t want to.

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