Page 8 of Leash Me, Daddy

My father had always believed there was a number large enough to turn abandonment into parental concern. He’d sent school payments I refused, paid for apartments I never moved into, hired lawyers I didn’t ask for, and hired security men I spotted before the end of their first full day. Every offer came wrapped in the same quiet assumption: Raffaele Bellandi knew what I needed better than I did.

Maybe that worked for him back in Sicily, but here in New York, it just made him an asshole with access to international banking.

I locked the phone and shoved it into the small drawer beneath the register.

My mother Bianca had kept Raffaele’s identity from me until I was fifteen. She had spent most of my childhood describing my father as one of her greatest mistakes, which turned out to be a more accurate description than I’d anticipated at the time. She had gotten pregnant during the brief period when Raffaele operated in New York, then watched a power struggle pull him back toward Sicily and decided raising me alone was safer than allowing a Bellandi anywhere near our lives.

My grandparents agreed. Paolo and Teresa Caruso believed the mafia was a disease carried through family stories. They raised me in a narrow Brooklyn house filled with tomato sauce, old vinyl records, Catholic guilt, and the belief that bodyguards eventually brought men with guns.

They weren’t wrong.

When I was fifteen, someone started asking about Bianca’s daughter. For nearly two weeks, strange cars had appeared around our house, my mother’s job, and my school. When a man began asking around about Bianca’s daughter, she finally panicked and called Raffaele. His guards arrived the following morning.

By the next night, my mother was dead.

The men who killed her were never caught. Raffaele returned to Sicily before the funeral, claiming his presence would put me in even greater danger. He sent his brother Matteo in his place, along with enough flowers to fill half the church and a promise that I would never want for anything again. Everything after that felt like blood money.

A shadow shifted in the smoked mirror behind the bar, pulling me out of my thoughts in an instant.

Two men sat near the far end of the VIP floor. Oddly enough, they hadn’t looked at the stage once. The taller one wore a dark jacket completely buttoned up despite the heat of the club. He held a glass of mineral water he had barely touched and kept his body angled toward the service stairs. His companion sat with one forearm resting on the table, his gaze moving from the main entrance to the private-room corridor and then up toward the ceiling cameras. They were watching the exits.

What was concerning was that I had seen them before.

The taller man had stood across from my apartment building on Tuesday pretending to smoke a cigarette he never lit. The shorter one had been behind me at the bank two days later, speaking softly into his phone in Armenian while watching my reflection in the glass divider.

I adjusted the velvet strap at my wrist and crossed toward the dancers’ corridor without changing my pace. Looking at them directly would tell them they had been noticed. Leaving early would tell them they had frightened me.

Neither was going to happen.

In the corridor, I found Gavin coming toward me with his phone in one hand and irritation written across his narrow face. He was normally immaculate, but the top button of his shirt had come undone, which meant the discrepancy had annoyed him more than he planned to admit.

“You were right,” he said.

“I know.”

“Someone duplicated my override credentials.”

“I know that too.”