🐺 The Forbidden Bed That Made Her the Mafia Boss’s Fiancée

Chapter 06 - The Garage That Smelled of Smoke

We drove to my mother’s house in a convoy of black vehicles that would have terrified the neighbors if half the street had not already been hiding behind curtains.

Adrian sat beside me in the back seat. He had changed into a black shirt and jacket, every button fastened now, the wolf hidden again. Somehow, that made him more frightening.

I stared at my phone, willing Kate to call back.

She did not.

“Your assistant is alive,” Adrian said.

“You don’t know that.”

“If they wanted you to hear her die, they would have kept the line open.”

I turned on him. “Is that supposed to comfort me?”

“No. It is supposed to keep you thinking.”

I hated that it worked.

My mother’s house looked smaller with armed men surrounding it. The porch light glowed yellow. One of Adrian’s guards stood near the garage, speaking into a radio. My mother opened the door before we reached it.

She was wrapped in an old cardigan, her gray-brown hair loose around her shoulders, my father’s baseball bat in one hand.

“Elena.”

I ran to her.

For one minute, I was not a fake fiancée or bait or the daughter of a man with secrets. I was simply someone’s child, held so tightly I could barely breathe.

Then she looked over my shoulder at Adrian.

The warmth left her face.

“You look like him.”

Adrian stopped at the porch steps.

“My father?”

“Your uncle.”

His expression changed.

Vittoria had remained at the mansion. Nico was under guard. Kate was missing. And now my mother had just handed us another ghost.

“My uncle died in the fire,” Adrian said.

My mother laughed once, bitterly.

“So did half the men who ruined our lives, supposedly.”

Inside, she made coffee no one drank. Her hands trembled until I took the kettle from her. Adrian remained standing because the old sofa sagged too close to the floor and I suspected men like him avoided furniture that might swallow them.

My mother told us what she had never told me.

My father had found a hidden compartment in a delivery truck he repaired for the docks. Inside were tapes, ledgers, and photographs proving that someone in the Moretti family was moving weapons through charity shipments and blaming it on rivals. He brought it to Salvatore Moretti, believing Salvatore was honorable enough to stop it.

“And was he?” I asked.

“Yes,” my mother said. “That was the tragedy.”

They planned to turn everything over quietly.

Then the warehouse burned.

My father came home smelling of smoke with a brass key, a packet of papers, and blood on his sleeve that was not his. Three months later, his brakes failed.

“And you never told me?”

“You were twelve.”

“I became twenty-eight.”

“You also became alive.”

The answer stopped me because I heard the fear beneath it.

My mother took us to the garage.

My father’s truck sat under a tarp, tires soft, body dull with years of dust. When Adrian pulled the cover away, the smell hit me.

Old oil.

Rust.

And faintly, impossibly, smoke.

My mother knelt near the back wall and lifted a loose floorboard with a flathead screwdriver. Beneath it lay a metal cash box.

Adrian unlocked it with the brass key.