Page 102 of Diary of a Mafia Princess

31

NYAH

Dear Diary,

I came downstairs to stop a fight and accidentally secured a front-row seat to a cage match in Scotland.

The knock at my bedroom door was so quiet I knew instantly it wasn’t Lynx. It definitely wasn’t Luca either, because he wouldn’t have knocked at all. My breath skipped, and I ran to it, opening it up quickly, expecting to see Dax on the other side.

Instead, it was his mother.

Her eyes full of worry, her fingers twisting around themselves as she wrung them.

I forgot all about my desire to see her son, as well as my confusing feelings for Luca. “What’s wrong?”

“May I come in?”

I nodded, opening the door the whole way then shutting it behind her once she was inside my room. She perched on the edge of my bed, that I’d already neatly made, not wanting her to have to clean up after me.

“What’s happened?”

She shook her head. “Dax is fighting again.”

I blew out a long breath. “I know.”

All the mother-type worries were there in her eyes, ones that had clearly not gone away just because her son was a grown man. “I never liked him and his brothers fighting, but my husband insisted that they needed to know how. And Dax was good. Even I could see that. He was too good to stop, but I never liked it. I was so happy when he found art, and when he opened the tattoo shop. He didn’t fight for at least two years. Or at least not that I knew of.”

She was right. He hadn’t been fighting when we’d been together. I hadn’t even known he could. He’d never said he had to go to training. Never had any trophies or photos up in his house that would have indicated he’d fought as a kid and through his teens and twenties.

If that had been part of his life, it seemed to me that he’d put it to bed.

Until I’d left.

And now the soft, gentle-hearted artist I’d fallen in love with was walking around in pain and putting his life in danger because of me.

She squeezed my fingers. “I know the two of you dated. Prior to your engagement to Carlos, of course.”

I bit my lip, but there was no point denying it. Everyone knew we had. Even Carlos knew. Though none of them knew the extent of the relationship.

None of them knew how much I loved him. And that I was sure he still loved me.

I just nodded.

“If you ever cared about him, please get him to stop. I’ve seen the way he looks at you. You still have power over him. The sort of fighting he did back then, it was all controlled. Above board. Official martial arts tournaments. The sort of fighting Carlos will want him to do is nothing like that. It’s dark and dirty and vicious. I couldn’t bear it…”

“If he got hurt,” I finished for her.

I wanted to tell her I couldn’t either. That when I’d walked into that warehouse and seen him in that ring, nothing else had mattered. I’d been on autopilot, weaving through the crush of people shouting and cheering them on, when all I could think about was getting to his side.

But I didn’t have as much power over Dax as Virginia thought I did.

Or maybe it was the opposite. That he wanted to be near me so much he was willing to do anything. Even fight for a man like Carlos Guerra, where all he would care about was the next win, not what it cost Dax to get it. I’d seen it in the way Carlos was hounding Luca and Lynx over their hockey team, shouting and threatening them every time they lost.

Virginia’s eyes were full of tears. “He has men here today. They’ve been arriving all morning, and they’re down in the gym.” She grasped my hand. “Please can you go down there? Maybe he’ll see sense if you tell him not to do it?”

I scrunched up my face. “Virginia, I don’t think I—”

She squeezed my hand so tight it hurt. “Please try.” Her gaze met mine. “Mother to mother, I’m asking you to please try. Because I think you know the fear I have right now. Don’t you?”