🩹 Her Hidden Bruises Made the Mafia Boss Break Every Rule for Love

Chapter 09 - The Wrong Kind of Blood

Aleandro did not speak for almost a minute.

In that silence, I saw the shape of the impossible settle over him. A brother who might exist. A brother who might be Ryan. A father whose sins had not stayed buried. A woman he barely knew standing at the center of it all with bruises on her arm and his family’s secrets in her hands.

Then he said, “We verify before we believe.”

It was such a practical sentence that I nearly laughed.

“How exactly do you verify a secret baby before sunrise?”

“Blood.”

The word hit wrong.

He heard it and corrected himself. “A test. DNA. I have men who can move quickly.”

I stared at him. “You have men for everything.”

“Yes.”

“Does that ever scare you?”

His answer came after a pause.

“Every day.”

That honesty was becoming inconvenient.

We returned to the safe house because there was nowhere else to go. Teresa made coffee no one drank. Marco took calls near the back door. Aleandro disappeared into the office downstairs with the ledger, leaving me in the kitchen with the blue backpack and Maria’s letter.

The red inhaler lay on the table.

It was expired by more than twenty years.

I picked it up and remembered being six, wheezing in my mother’s lap while my father searched drawers for medicine. I remembered his big hands shaking as he pressed the inhaler to my mouth. I remembered thinking fathers were afraid only when the world was ending.

Maybe his world had been ending long before I knew.

Aleandro returned near three in the morning.

“You should sleep.”

“I’m done being unconscious around you.”

A shadow of amusement crossed his face. “Fair.”

“What did you find in the ledger?”

He sat across from me. Not at the head of the table. Across.

“Names. Payments. My father kept records like a priest keeps sins. Judges, port officials, police captains, doctors. Some dead. Some powerful.”

“Ryan?”

“Not as Ryan Cole.”

I felt my pulse change.

“What name?”

“Raffaele.”

The kitchen seemed to shrink.

“Sofia’s child?”

“Possibly.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It is the only honest one.”

I folded Maria’s letter until the crease hurt my thumb.

“If he is your brother, what happens?”

Aleandro looked at the rain-dark windows.

“In my world, men will use him. Bellamo will claim him. Old loyalists will divide. The police will pretend not to care until bodies fall, then arrive with cameras.”

“And you?”

He looked back at me.

“I will not let him hurt you again.”

“That is not the question.”

“No,” he said quietly. “It is the answer that matters most to me.”

I hated that my heart moved.

Ryan had taught me to distrust tenderness. He used apology like a key and affection like a leash. Aleandro’s attention was different, but different did not mean safe. I had learned that safety could not be borrowed from a man’s strength. It had to grow back inside me, slowly, painfully, on my own terms.

“I don’t want revenge,” I said.

“I did not offer it.”

“You will.”

His eyes lowered to the bruises fading along my forearm.

“I have thought about it.”

“At least you’re honest.”

“I am honest with you more often than is wise.”

The air changed between us. Not softer exactly. More dangerous, but not in the way Ryan had been. This danger had warmth in it.

Teresa entered before either of us could ruin our lives with a look.

“Your doctor is here.”

Dr. Vincent arrived carrying a black medical bag and the weary expression of a man accustomed to being called into questionable circumstances. He checked my blood pressure, my pupils, my bruises, and the cut on my knee from the subway.

“You’re anemic,” he said. “Dehydrated. Underweight. There are older injuries too. A rib, maybe two, healed poorly.”

I watched Aleandro turn away.

The doctor drew blood with my permission and then, after Aleandro gave him a sealed razor Ryan had left at my apartment, prepared samples for comparison.

“How fast?” Aleandro asked.

“Fast for you, illegal for anyone else.”

I almost smiled.

Near dawn, while the city held its breath before morning, Dr. Vincent’s phone buzzed.

He read the message.

Then read it again.

Aleandro stood.

“Well?”

Dr. Vincent looked first at him, then at me.

“The sample from Ryan Cole is not a match to the Raldi line.”

Relief hit so hard I had to grip the table.

Aleandro’s face gave nothing away.

“But,” Dr. Vincent continued, “the test did find a match in the database.”

The room went utterly still.

“Who?” Aleandro asked.

Dr. Vincent swallowed.

“Marco.”

I turned slowly toward the back door, where Marco stood with rain on his coat and shock draining the color from his face.

The word brother changed Aleandro even before we knew whether it was true. He did not soften; he rearranged. I could see it in the way he looked at doorways now, at Marco, at the ledger, as if every familiar object had acquired a second shadow. Men like him were trained to expect betrayal from rivals, not from blood that had been hidden under their own roof.

For me, Ryan becoming part of that bloodline would have been a final insult. It would have made my suffering feel drafted into some dynastic argument I never agreed to join. Yet the possibility also clarified something. Even if Ryan had been born into violence, he had still chosen how to pass it on.

A wound may explain the shape of a man. It does not excuse the hand he raises.

At some point before dawn, Teresa placed a sweater around my shoulders. I had not noticed I was cold. That worried me more than the cold itself. Nurses are terrible patients partly because we recognize symptoms and bargain with them anyway.

I took my pulse at my wrist beneath the table. Too fast. Not dangerous, just human. Across from me, Aleandro saw the gesture and said nothing. No command to rest. No lecture. Only a slight movement of his hand toward the water glass. A reminder, not an order.