CHAPTER 1 Waitress Who Said Yes to a Child’s Joke
Waitress Who Said Yes to a Child’s Joke—Unaware He Was the Mafia Boss’s Son.... Then She Became the One Woman the Mafia King Couldn’t Buy
“Will you marry me, Miss Aurora?”
The question came from the dark corner of the storage room, so sudden and so solemn that Aurora Bennett almost screamed.
She spun around with both hands wrapped around the handle of a dented frying pan, her back pressed against a cold metal shelf stacked with flour sacks and tomato cans. Outside the thin door, her stepmother’s voice cut through the restaurant like a knife.
“You can hide all night if you want, Aurora,” Regina snarled. “Tony’s men are already outside. You think I’m losing fifty thousand dollars because you suddenly grew a backbone?”
Aurora’s fingers tightened on the pan.
Fifty thousand dollars.
That was the price of her body, her breath, her life.
Regina Bennett had gambled away everything she owned, then sold the only thing she had left to bargain with: her dead husband’s daughter.
Aurora had run from Brooklyn to Queens, from Queens to the Bronx, from diners to laundromats to cheap motels where the walls smelled like bleach and fear. But Regina always found her. Regina always had a man with a scarred face, a whispered threat, or a number she should never have known.
And now, in the back of Bellarosa, a small Italian restaurant in Brooklyn where Aurora had been waiting tables for three months under a fake last name, the past had finally kicked the door open.
A rustle came again from behind the flour sacks.
Aurora lifted the pan higher.
A little boy stepped out.
He was six, maybe seven, with glossy black hair, round serious eyes, and superhero pajamas peeking beneath an expensive wool coat that clearly belonged to someone else. He looked too polished for this storage room, too delicate for the nightmare surrounding her.
He blinked at the pan.
“Please don’t hit me,” he whispered. “I’m not one of the bad guys.”
Aurora lowered the pan an inch, breathing hard. “Who are you?”
“My name is Zayn,” he said, puffing out his chest with the dignity of a tiny general. “I’m hiding from my dad.”
“Your dad?”
“He wants to take me to the doctor tomorrow.” Zayn made a face. “Doctors are terrible. They poke you with needles and tell grown-ups things that make them stop smiling.”
Despite the terror squeezing her throat, Aurora felt a painful little smile tug at her mouth.
“Then we’re both hiding,” she whispered. “I’m hiding from bad people too.”
Zayn’s eyes widened. “Like a witch?”
“Something like that.”
Outside, Regina’s fist struck the storage-room door.
“Aurora! Come out before I let Tony’s men drag you out by your hair!”
Aurora flinched.
Zayn looked from the door to her bruised wrist, then back to her face. His childish expression changed. The softness stayed, but something fierce settled beneath it.
“In fairy tales,” he said, “when a princess gets chased by a witch, a knight saves her.”
Aurora laughed once, a broken sound. “I don’t see many knights in Brooklyn.”
Zayn stepped closer, chin lifted.
“Me,” he announced.
Aurora stared at him.
He nodded as if the matter had already been settled. “My dad has lots of money. And lots of men. Everybody is scared of him. So if you marry me, the witch has to go away.”
The sweetness of it hit Aurora so hard she almost cried.
“What did you say?” she asked.
Zayn stood straighter. “Will you marry me, Miss Aurora?” Then, with deep concern for etiquette, he corrected himself. “No. I mean, would you agree to marry me, ma’am?”
For one tiny second, in the middle of the worst hour of her life, Aurora forgot the men outside. She forgot the debt. She forgot the word merchandise. She knelt in front of him and brushed a lock of hair away from his forehead.
“If I marry you,” she whispered, “can you really protect me from the witch?”
“One hundred percent,” he said gravely. “Pinky promise.”
Aurora held out her smallest finger.
Zayn hooked his around it.
“I promise,” Aurora said softly. “I’ll marry you.”
Zayn’s whole face lit up.
Then the storage-room door slammed open.
Aurora threw herself in front of the boy.
But it wasn’t Regina.
It wasn’t Tony’s men.
A tall man in a black suit stepped through the doorway, and the air changed.
He was broad-shouldered, clean-shaven, and coldly handsome, with swept-back dark hair and gray eyes that looked as if they had never once begged the world for mercy. Two men followed behind him, their jackets cut to hide weapons and their expressions empty enough to frighten anyone with sense.
Aurora knew that face.
Every person in New York who watched the news or listened to backroom whispers knew that face.
Kian Moretti.
The most feared mafia boss on the East Coast.
His gaze swept over Aurora, paused briefly on the blood at her lip and the bruises circling her wrist, then shifted to the boy behind her.
“Zayn,” he said, his voice quiet and lethal. “What did I tell you about running off?”
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