Page 65 of Beauty and the Daddy

Oh, you're in trouble now, Belle.

So I adapt. Smile wider and pretend harder.

"You're awfully chipper," Declan says one afternoon, leaning against the doorframe to the living room like he invented suspicion.

"Just a beautiful day, is all," I shoot back.

Nights are the worst. Lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, trying not to think about the fact there's a heartbeat inside me that isn't mine.

I roll over, clutch my pillow, whisper to myself:Keep it together. You can do this. Just act normal.

It's a Monday when shit starts feeling real.

I'm rifling through my purse for lip gloss and realize my phone isn't there. No big deal—it's probably on the nightstand. Except it's not. Or on the dresser. Or under the bed.

Nowhere.

Panic detonates in my chest.

I tear through the room like a raccoon in a dumpster, tossing clothes on the chair, upending drawers. Nothing.

And that's when it hits me. I used it just before my shower. I know I had it in this very room.

If it isn't here, that means…

Someone took it.

Someone is watching me.

My stomach twists, and not in the morning-sickness way.

Then, I see it sticking out from under my pillow. I know I didn't leave it there.

My hands shake as I grab the phone, thumb hovering over the screen. If someone's seen my browser history, my appointment confirmations, my frantic Google searches about first trimester symptoms...

The clinic's number is right there in my recent calls. The pregnancy app I downloaded and immediately buried in a folder labeled "Shopping."

I'm not just caught. I'm fucked.

And in Luca's world, being fucked usually means being dead.

13

LUCA

Council meetings are exercises in controlled violence. Five old men who mistake age for authority, spreading across my office like they're granting me audience instead of the other way around.

Every forced smile scrapes my teeth. Every diplomatic nod feels like swallowing glass. They sit there in their thousand-dollar suits, playing puppet master with an empire they couldn't run for a day without bleeding out in the streets.

Don Fiorello's watching me from the corner of his eye. The others are scattered around like crows at a funeral.

My knuckles ache from clenching my fists with impatience. Two hours in, and we're still talking shipments and territory like it's 1950.

Declan sits beside me, sleeves rolled, hands in his pockets like he's too bored to care.

And he thinks he's fit to run my empire. What a colossal joke.

"The Russians are pushing into Brooklyn again," Don Fiorello says. "Your father would have taken care of this by now."