Page 27 of Diary of a Mafia Princess

For a short time, Nyah had been my entire fucking world. And with her in it, it had felt beautiful. Sweet. Warm. Like a place I actually wanted to be, and not the hellhole it truly was.

She had made everything good.

And then she’d left.

My mom’s fingers froze around mine. “Did you say her name was Nyah?”

I scrubbed a hand over my face; just the sound of her name spoken out loud sent spears of pain through my limbs. “Yeah.”

My mom bit her lip. “What’s her last name?”

I sighed heavily. “Does it matter?” I’d wanted it to be King.

She clearly had other opinions.

My mom squeezed my hand. “It matters.”

“Matish,” I said eventually. “Nyah Matish.”

My mother dropped my hand like it was a cold fish and took a giant step back. “Oh no. No, no, no.”

I studied her as she backed up across the room and sank down onto the bench in the waiting area. Her aged fingers twisted around themselves, bony and a little gnarled from decades of cleaning and cooking and gardening.

Roarke sat next to her and picked up her hand before she twisted them into pretzels. “What’s wrong?”

But she couldn’t even look at her middle son. Her gaze was too firmly stuck on me.

And all I could see was the horror in it.

A sick feeling swamped me. “What?”

She bit her lip. “I don’t know if I should tell you. But of course, now I have to, don’t I?” She clutched her stomach. “I think I met your girl. Nyah.’

I squinted at her, then shook my head. “I don’t think so. She’s gone back to the city, to be with her family—”

“Carlos Guerra is marrying a woman named Nyah Matish,” she blurted out.

I blinked, sure that sentence didn’t make any sense. “What?”

Her mouth formed an unhappy line. “She was delivered to the house yesterday. Luca has come home for the wedding too. It’ll all happen in a few weeks’ time.”

I shook my head, hearing the words in plain English but their meaning suddenly completely foreign. “It can’t be the same woman…”

And yet, pieces started clicking together in my head. I knew Nyah’s family in the city had Mafia connections, though she’d told me they’d moved from New York so I’d just assumed their associations were in that area. And I knew my mother had worked for the Guerra family, at their mansion in Providence, for the entirety of my life. She never talked about it much, at least not in a long time, other than the obligatory, “Oh, work is good. I made a flan this week and pruned a dozen rosebushes.”

She was a housekeeper. What more was there really to say? I remember once, when I was really young, there had been an argument between her and my father over her working there, but I’d never heard another word about it since, so I guessed they’d gotten over whatever reservations he’d had about her working for a well-known Mafia family.

I suspected how well they paid might have had something to do with that argument becoming a non-event. My parents had a very nice house on the edge of Providence. It was definitely no mansion, like the Guerras’ home, but it was a comfortable size to raise three boys in, much nicer than the houses of my friends growing up. We’d never gone without. As an adult, earning adult money, it had occurred to me that my parents, my dad a janitor and my mother a housekeeper, could not afford the house they lived in unless my mother was paid a lot more than a regular housekeeper’s wage.

I hadn’t given it another thought. Until now.

And then something else my mother had said rang in my head like an alarm bell. “What do you mean, ‘she was delivered?’”

She sucked in a wobbly breath. “I don’t know. She was dropped off by a car, with her things. They took her upstairs and put a bodyguard on her door. I haven’t seen her since. Mr. Guerra—the senior one I mean—isn’t home right now and—”

Without even thinking about what I was doing, I picked up my keys and strode for the door.

“Dax,” King warned me.