He Chose His Pregnant Mistress. I Was the Bratva Princess. novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Alessia's Son

Alessia was on her knees in the courtyard when we got back, with the empty blanket in her hands.

"They took him," she kept saying. "They walked in and took him."

The guard on the door sat against the wall with his chin on his chest.

Lev lifted his eyelid and let it fall.

"Something in his tea," he said. "He'll sleep until noon."

My father was already shouting for cars.

"Papa, no," I said. "If your men go through the Greco docks with rifles, Tomasso has his raid."

"What raid?"

"A Bratva raid on a newborn. That's what he wants the Commission to see."

"Then what do we do? Sit?"

"We go quietly. Bruno."

Bruno, in one shoe and a borrowed coat, had been listening from the steps with a cup of tea in both hands.

"There are four places he'd put a child," he said slowly.

"Three have Sunday guards who'd never hold a baby. The fourth is the boathouse on the Calumet."

He put the cup down.

"He'd choose the boathouse."

"Show me on a map."

He drew it on the back of my hand with a pen.

Lev and I took one car and no one else.

The boathouse stood on stilts at the end of a gravel road, grey and rotten, with a motor launch tied up under it.

Two men stood at the door.

I knew one of them.

He was the gate guard from the night before, the one with the keys.

He saw me get out of the car and went the colour of paper.

"Madam," he said. "I didn't know it was for this. They said the Don's son needed to be moved."

"Is he inside?"

"Upstairs. With a girl from the kitchen. She's feeding him."

"Open the door."

The second man stepped in front of it and put his hand under his jacket.

Lev shot the hand.

It was a single flat crack from sixty feet.

The man spun against the rail with his gun on the planks and a red line across his knuckles.

"Next one's the knee," Lev said. "Sit down."

The man sat.

The gate guard held the door open with both hands, shaking.

I went up a stair that smelled of rope and creosote.

In the loft a young woman from the Greco kitchen sat on a cot with the baby against her shoulder and a bottle in her hand.

She started to cry when she saw me.

"I was told he was Alessia's cousin's," she said. "I didn't know."

"Give him to me."

He was warm and heavy, and he made a small cross noise and went on sucking at the air.

I held him against my chest.

I had not known my hands could be that steady.

Lev drove, and I sat in the back with the boy, because I wasn't going to let go of him.

Neither of us spoke until we were on the lake road.

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