Page 3 of Mafia King’s Dangerous Vow

My hand goes to my wrist automatically. To the tiny heart inked there over my pulse.

For eight years, I thought that tattoo was a grave.

“I don’t believe you.” My voice sounds strange to my own ears. Too calm. Too thin. “You’re lying.”

He shrugs, barely perceptible. A businessman dismissing an unproductive conversation.

“I took him,” he says without blinking. “The stillborn baby you held was not yours.”

I don’t move. Because there are lies, and then there is this.

This required doctors. Nurses. Paperwork. A room cleared at the right time. A dead infant placed in my arms while my living son was carried somewhere else. This required planning. Money. Silence.

This required my father standing beside my hospital bed while I broke apart and deciding to let me.

No—worse. Deciding it was useful that I broke apart.

The leather beneath my palms turns slick. My fingers feel numb, disconnected from my body.

“You fucking liar.”

I launch myself at him before I can think better of it, fists hitting his chest, his shoulders, anywhere I can reach.

He catches my wrists easily.

Too easily.

One second I’m fighting him, the next I’m pinned back against the leather seat, breathing hard, all the strength draining out of me at once.

Silence crushes the space between us.

“Is he alive?” I force the question through lips that barely work. “Is my son alive?”

Time suspends. The car hums softly around us. Somewhere outside, a horn blares. The world keeps moving.

Then—

“Yes.”

The single syllable detonates.

My breath leaves me in a tortured sound. I press both hands flat against my thighs to keep from shaking.

My son is alive.

My son is alive.

Eight years of a name I gave a boy I never got to keep, and he is alive. Someone has been raising him, and I have missed everything.

“Where is he?” I gasp. “Where have you been hiding him? Who raised him? Does he know who I am?”

Papa leans across me—unhurried, unbothered—and unlocks the door. The click is obscene.

“Marry Aleksander Sokolov,” he says evenly, as if we’re discussing contract terms instead of my child, “and you’ll find out.”

The door swings open, and cold air knifes into the car.

Sergei stands outside, composed and professional, holding my coat open like this is any other appointment. The church waits ahead—guests walking in as if it is any other wedding. As though my resistance was never a factor in anyone’s planning.