Page 89 of Single Mom's Daddies
“You think it’s a bad thing?” I ask.
“No.” She exhales. “I think it’s the best thing. I just don’t understand it.” She finally looks over at me again. This time, she holds my gaze. “I wouldn’t trade her for the world.”
My chest tightens in response. “She is an amazing child, Saffron. All that she’s been through, all the restrictions she’s under, and she still smiles. Still laughs. Proof that you’re a wonderful mother.”
Her eyebrows lift as she takes a breath. She checks Ivy one last time, then asks, “What happened to Mila and Alex’s mother?”
I lower the violin and let the silence stretch for a moment. Then I speak again. “Nadia was killed five years ago.”
Saffron doesn’t move, but I see her shoulders pull in, like she’s bracing herself. Her voice is hushed. “How?”
I keep my voice low. No sense in waking Ivy with this. “There was a war. Bratva and the Costellos. We’d kept a fragile peace for years, but greed eats everything. Lines got crossed.”
My hand tightens around the bow.
“We tried negotiating. Peace talks, neutral ground. Nadia came with us—she believed in talking first. She was smarter than all of us, so we took her advice. And Mike Costello shot her in the head in the first two minutes of the meeting.”
Saffron’s eyes widen slightly.
“Nik shot him in retaliation. In the gut. Bad way to go. Too good for him.”
“Oh God.”
“A federal agent was shot a moment later. Poor bastard shouldn’t have been there, but he’d been working undercover with the Costellos for about a month at the time, and they wrangled him to the meeting…” I close my eyes. “Roman dragged us out before we got ambushed too. We started a campaign the next morning.”
“Campaign?”
I glance at the fire. “We leveled everything they had. We gained territory when all was said and done. But it didn’t bring her back.”
Saffron leans forward slightly, her elbows resting on her knees, eyes still on the fire. The flames dance gold and red over her skin, casting moving shadows along her cheekbones, the edge of her jaw. She looks like she’s trying to decide what to say—whether to speak from anger, or sympathy, or silence.
She chooses silence.
I set the violin down on the stand, the strings humming a final whisper as I release them. “We could’ve kept going. Become exactly what they said we were and wiped them off the map. But Roman called a stop after the last offensive. Said if we didn’t change, we’d become the monsters we swore to keep out of Milwaukee.”
Saffron looks over at me, her expression unreadable. “So you started selling paintings.”
I smile faintly. “More or less. We had been selling them, but not like we are now. It was a small fraction of the business back then, so we leaned into it. Protecting people for a price. Not entirely legal, but predictable.”
Her eyes narrow. “And Svet?”
I nod once. “A Russian recluse. We connected with him thanks to Olenna.”
Saffron breathes slowly. “It works?”
“It’s worked for years. And in a few weeks, we’re heading to Chicago for his biggest exhibit yet. That show alone will fund protection, influence, and mostly clean money for the next five years. If we play it right.”
“Why not just open a security firm and go legit?”
I smile at the thought. “We do that, and that’s practically admitting that we’ve been doing things under the table for years. Not to mention the fact that we’d have to do everything by the book at that point, no underground contacts, no busting kneecaps without paperwork and dealing directly with the police…going fully legit is a risky headache with very little benefit.”
She’s quiet again. I can tell she’s absorbing all of it, measuring whether she can live with the facts she’s just heard. “What about now? You think the Costellos are done? They’re mafia, right?”
I pause.
I look at Ivy, still asleep. One hand curled under her cheek, her breathing steady. Her heart still ticking away inside that tiny rib cage. A fragile engine holding on. She doesn’t need more fear in her life.
Neither does her mother.
