Page 153 of Auctioned to the Mafia Don
Positive.
The word hangs between us in the low light of Maya’s bedroom, too small for the damage it does. Or the miracle. I do not know which one it is yet.
Maya watches my face as if she expects the answer to decide something for her.
Fear is written all through her now. Not the sharp kind she carries into dangerous rooms. This is quieter. Deeper. The kind that comes from being handed a future before you have had time to decide whether you deserve one.
“A test,” she says again, because I have not spoken. “I took a test.”
I look toward the bathroom.
The drawer is open by an inch.
Then I look back at her.
She is wrapped in the sheet, hair tangled around her shoulders, cheeks flushed from my mouth and my hands and the things we almost managed to forget for a few minutes. Her eyes are bright, but she is not crying. Not yet.
“Say something,” she says.
I sit at the edge of the bed.
My chest feels strange. Tight. Too full. I have been shot before. Stabbed. Broken bones reset without anesthesia because the alternative involved a hospital and questions I could not afford to answer. None of it felt like this.
“Maya.”
Her face changes. “That is not something.”
“I know.”
“Stefano.”
I stand and cross to the bathroom before she can read too much from me. The test sits inside the drawer beneath a folded towel, small and white and absurdly ordinary. I pick it up.
Two lines.
There is no misreading them.
My child.
The thought does not arrive gently.
It takes hold of me by the throat.
I stand there with the test in my hand and see, without wanting to, every version of my father that I have spent most of my life trying to bury. His hands. His voice. The way he looked at me when I was young enough to still believe he might one day be pleased with me.
A son was an heir.
An heir was a weapon.
A child was never simply a child.
My fingers close around the plastic.
No.
Not this.
Not mine.
