Page 53 of Daddy's Reluctant Queen

“You really want to do this?” I say. “You want a fight with me?”

“No,” she says. “I don’t want to fight you, Titus. What I want is to talk.”

“There is nothing to talk about. You broke into my room?—”

“The door was open?—”

“And then you broke into my desk and started sticking your fucking nose where it doesn’t belong. Those letters are nobody’s business but mine, Sofia.”

“Okay!” she shouts back. “I shouldn’t have gone snooping around in your room. I was wrong for that and I’m sorry.”

I stare at her for a long moment, studying her face, trying to figure out if she’s just saying that to talk her way out of a punishment.

The way she’s standing, however… This isn’t a game of submission. It’s not her accepting the rules of our arrangement. This is something else entirely. If I try to grab her again, she will defend herself. And if I don’t know anything else about her, Iknow she knows her way around a fight. She could give me one hell of a time if she wanted.

“Sorry?” I repeat. “That’s all you have to say? I should throw you out on your ass.”

“You’re not going to do that.”

“Don’t you tell me what I won’t do.”

“Titus, if you throw me out of his house then you’ll have to worry about me telling everyone that you had a child with the fucking D.A. If that’s your big plan, you’d better consider burning these letters.”

I narrow my eyes at her. “You don’t get to blackmail me, Sofia. I’ll have your head blown off before you can breathe a word to anyone.”

“Tough talk from inside your house,” she says with a little smirk. “How easy do you think it would be to catch me once I’m in the wind? The only reason you caught me the last time was because I came to you.”

I clench my jaw angrily. “Sofia, you do not want to fuck with me.”

“I’m not trying to fuck with you, Titus. I just want…” She sighs and shakes her head exasperatedly. “Your son wants a normal life.”

That hurts. I clench my fists to hold back my rage. “Don’t you dare?—”

“He’s a good kid so he accepts the way things are, you know? And why not? It’s all he’s known. But one of these days, he’s going to start asking more questions about his mother and whyhe’s stuck in this house, and you’re going to have to deal with that.”

“How I deal with it has nothing to do with you.”

“Yeah? Well, maybe you should figure out what story you’re going to tell him now, because the questions are already coming.” She crosses her arms defiantly. “You can’t just leave him hanging?—”

“And that’s why you broke in here? So you could tell him that his mother was killed because protecting her would mean that I sided with the Feds in the eyes of my brothers? Is that it?”

She stares at me with those fucking eyes. Big, blue, and as innocent as a child’s. “That’s not the only reason,” she says. “I wanted to know. Titus… oh, Titus.” She sighs and lowers her hands. “I guess, after last night, I wanted to know you better.”

“You could have asked.”

“Would you have told me?”

She’s got me there. I turn away from her, wanting to just walk away from this conversation. She’s not going to let me, though. I walk over to the edge of my bed and sit, patting the space next to me. She hesitates, then comes over and sits down next to me.

“It’s important to you to know about this?”

She nods.

I must be going crazy to even entertain telling her these things. But maybe if I tell her, then she’ll understand why I have to protect Luka.

“I met Angela in a bar,” I tell her. “The night after I did a stretch in prison, I walked into this place and there she was. Sittingon one of those bar stools, half turned toward the door as she talked to the guy she was with. The minute she lifted her head up and our eyes locked, I knew she was coming home with me that night.”

Sofia stays silent, listening to me talk with her hands clasped in her lap. I go on.