Triplet Babies for the Scottish Mafia Boss by Rosalie Rose

1

Nikolai

“Why here?” Zane studies the house, her expression inscrutable. The swelling around her left eye has gone down, but the jagged slice along her throat is still livid.

“That’s going to leave a scar,” I hear myself say. I internally berate myself—the more I show I still care for her, the more dangerous this situation is going to be. I press my lips together.

“Oh.” Zane touches her neck gingerly. “Yeah.” She’s still wearing the clothes she was wearing in Philly. The collar of her peach-colored blouse is stained pink. “This is Maya’s family house, isn’t it? Where they stayed in the summers when we were kids?”

I grit my teeth. Her words bring back a thousand picture-perfect memories: the three of us on the shores of the lake, splashing in cold water, diving deep looking for pearls we never found. Our fathers, hardened gangsters, divorced from their lives of bloodshed if only for a week or two, drinking chilled vodka and beers on the deck above. In my mind’s eye, I see our mothers bent together by the pool, sipping martinis and sharing secrets.

Now my cousin Maya is AWOL, all three of our mothers are dead, and I’m a black-hearted, blank-faced hitman for my father and his family. Those memories—they’re nothing but a graveyard.

“Yes,” I say in answer to Zane’s puzzled expression. I touch the Glock in my waistband as though for reassurance. “Her father gave it to her for her twenty-fifth birthday.”

Zane looks at me. “Before she disappeared.”

I nod.

“Can I shower?”

I nod again, checking the front door is secured, and lead her down the hall to the main restroom. The house was decorated by Maya’s mother, my Aunt Vanessa. She was a gardener with a taste for natural things, and the house reflects it. All paneled wood and plein air paintings and sprawls of windows.

The groundskeeper has kept alive the hundreds of plants that crowd corners and shelves and hang in baskets from the ceiling. It’s beautiful, and the complete antithesis of the cold marble and chrome of the city I’m used to now. It makes me feel like a bull in a china shop. I feel like I can’t touch anything.

Most of all—her.

“Thanks.” Zane turns to me when we reach the bathroom. “I should probably remember more of this house, right? We spent a lot of time here as kids.” She smiles, and I find myself stunned by the warmth she can manage, despite the situation. It’s so real it makes the rest of this hell feel like a dream. A nightmare. “Nik. Hey. It’s OK. All of this is going to be OK.”

How can she say that? My heart aches with yearning. For this to be happening to someone else. For her to be free. For her father to have chosen a different path—one that didn’t require his only daughter to sell herself for his survival.

“Clean up,” I say gently. “I’ll be out here.”

She nods, still smiling softly, and closes the door.

* * *

The view from the deck is stunning. Rolling hills, and seas of those calendar-famous autumn trees. I breathe it in, tipping back my head to take in the first dusting of stars. There’s still a blaze of leftover sun caught between the hills, touching down on the lake in buttery slices.

My mom adored this place. She said my dad was more like the hungry, magnetic young man she married when they came here. All the ice melted off of him, and he laughed easier and there was never blood on the crisp cuffs of his shirt sleeves.

My mom had a gift for looking through rosy lenses, but I remember that side of my dad too. He played catch with me, Maya, and Zane. He took us fishing on the canoe and let us share beers, giggling illicitly as we broke our first laws.

But after Mom died, that man did too. In a line of work like ours, you’d expect her death to have been from catching a stray or getting kidnapped or beaten with a tire iron or something on a walk by the country club.

But no—it was cancer. Stomach. Burned through her like a line of gunpowder. She was gone within three months of the first biopsy.

What would she think of me now? A killer. Married against my will to a girl she once loved like a daughter.

I pull out a cigarette and light it with shaking hands. All of that—it was years ago. Whatever humanity my mom brought out in my father is gone now. And that’s why I’m here. At this Godforsaken house, in the middle of what was once my only childhood escape. Some immature, bitter part of me blames her. For him. For this. For dying, and leaving me alone to become the monster I am today.

“Hey.”

I’m startled as Zane appears beside me, her hair damp and her skin smelling of sandalwood. She smiles, her eyes shadowed with amusement.

“Did I scare you?” she asks.

I don’t answer. Instead I place the cigarette between my lips. Before I can take a drag, she plucks it free and tosses it off the rail. It dances down through the tree shadows, vanishing to the forest floor somewhere out of sight. I glare at her, but she only keeps up that smile.

Something—want, or confusion, or warmth—twists inside of me.

She arches a brow. “I don’t have to say, ‘Those will kill you’, do I?”

That something, cinched tight within me, loosens—slightly, inexplicably. Now that her wound is hidden and the dark hides her beaten face, you could almost believe nothing had happened. But so, so much has. “How are you so calm about this?”

Zane leans back on her heels, drumming her fingers on the rail pensively. “I know what I’m doing.”

“How? You haven’t been in this world for years.”

She peers at me, maybe catching the edge of accidental bitterness in my tone. Me, Zane, and Maya were all supposed to follow in our fathers’ footsteps. Or, at least, walk right beside them.

Me and Maya had kept up our end, taking up the family business like loyal hounds—until she disappeared into thin air a few months ago.

But Zane, always the softest of us three and somehow also with the hardest will, chose art school. Galleries and red wine and boyfriends who wrote for liberal papers. She chose friends and happiness; a life her mom would have been proud of. And her dad let her.

No—it was more than that. Her dad paved the way for her. Fought for her, tooth and nail. Something my or Maya’s father would never have done.

I was always jealous. Of her freedom, of her gut. Of her ability to simply turn her back on a business her great-grandfather had got them into, deep. For me, there was never a choice. The mafia was all I would ever know. And the blood on my hands, bought and paid for by my father and his men, is testament.

But more than jealous, I realize now, I was angry. We were so close growing up, the three of us. I didn’t think anything could drive a wedge between us. But freedom did. And somehow, I think I still resent Zane for that.

She’s here now, the voice in the back of my mind reminds me. Even if she didn’t have a choice—she’s here now.

“You’re mad,” Zane says, tilting her head. She’s grown into her big, luminous brown eyes. They shine, impossibly star-bright, behind a fringe of long, wavy blonde bangs. Maddeningly, I find myself wanting to run my fingers through every silken strand. “Aren’t you?”

Why lie? I reach for another cigarette, and this time, she doesn’t stop me. “I haven’t spoken to you in five years. Should I be happy?”

“I wanted another life, Nik. And I had a real chance of escaping this one.”

I take a deep drag. It’s full-dark now, the pair of us bathed in columns of golden light that fall from the many windows at our backs. “Yet here you are.”

“You’re mad about the marriage then.”

I look at her sharply. Her face, once so familiar, is unreadable. My voice emerges gruffer than I mean it to. “Of course I’m fucking mad about the marriage.”

She presses her lips together. “I thought you’d be…”

“What? Honored? Touched? It’s not like you fucking chose me, Zane. I’m your last resort. I’m your only way out. I’m your father’s only way out.”

Her eyes widen. I realize how sharply I’m speaking to her. “I didn’t know what else to do,” she admits quietly.

Of course she didn’t.

Because Zane’s father betrayed mine.

And the only way to bind our families truly, to ensure his lifelong loyalty—was for Zane to marry me.

My eyes find the dull, cruel silver band on my left ring finger. It took a knife to her throat and a gun to her father’s head to prove my father meant every word, that his threats on their lives were anything but hollow. It took a knife to her throat for Zane to consent to this.

She twists the matching band on her own finger, and remains quiet for a long time. I suck down my cigarette, flicking ash into the dark below.

Finally, she says, “I’m sorry. I never meant for it to happen this way.”

This way? I study her soft profile, her velvet lips, the sweet perk of her nose, the hoops that shine down the length of her left ear.

This way?

I attempt to swallow my anger. Zane never intended for us to happen at all. If she had, she wouldn’t have abandoned me and Maya for her shiny new life. She wouldn’t have dated other men for years, posting photos of their love and lives online for everyone to see.

For me to see.

We were always just friends—never meant to be more, no matter how badly I wanted it.

And now I’m married to my estranged best friend. Now she’s married to the son of the man who wants her father dead. Now we are sold to one another, our lives chained together, our futures inescapably tangled.

Now, for better or for worse, she is mine—and I am hers.

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Owned by the Hitman